Pontus Pihlgren wrote: Looked like a really fun project to work on. I like the picture of the sleeping bag laid out amidst the stacks of tapes in the "recovery laboratory" (abandoned McDonalds restaurant). There was some mention of the analog tape format but I wish there had been a little more technical write-up of the old equipment and the transfer process and issues they went through.

Hi, Just thought I'd ask if anyone has the service info for the standard IIGS colour monitor (official name seems to be "Applecolor RGB Monitor"), in this case A2M6014X. A bit of background: When I tried to start up my IIGS a few days ago, I was disappointed to get no life out of the monitor (though a spare composite monitor was OK for temporary use). Signs pointed to a fairly easy fix; the power supply seemed OK, it had HV, I could hear it syncing when I turned the IIGS off and on. So, I put it on my workbench, grabbed the schematics (http://apple2.info/downloads), and realised that I couldn't remember much about how this works, but it's analog RGB, so how hard can it be? I wound the screen pot up a little, and was able to see scan on the screen; when I turned the IIGS on, the scan/retrace lines stabilised, so at least sync seems OK. Checking test points, I got a nice clean signal on the input (TP1R, G, B I think), and also at the output of the AN5356 interface (TP2R, G, B). But checking the drive at the tube socket, there was little to no activity, no trace of the almost digital-looking signal I was seeing on the other test points. However, I don't have a good understanding of the voltages I should expect to see at those test points, so the waveform may still not have been right. Any suggestions (or links to service info for this monitor) would be much appreciated! Or would I be better taking this to another list? I'm quite keen to improve my monitor troubleshooting knowledge, with the impending demise of CRT monitors and places to service them. Mike

I don't have it, but I am not sure it'd be any more use to you than the schematics. Very few monitor service manuals (particularly ones for small, relatively simple montiros like this) have any form of fault-finding charts. Most of the time you're expected to work from the schematic [1] . [1] On the few occasions that I have had fault-finding charts for something I've been repairing, I've found them to be misleading and next-to-useless. I find it a lot easier to work from the schematics and figure out what should be going on. OK, so the bits that normally fail seem to e working. Right. This is an RGB input monitor, yes? OK, what is between the IC and the CRT cathodes (I've yet to see a colour monitor where hte video signal is applied to anything other than the cathodes)? Most likely some kind of transistor amplifier. Start there. Since all 3 gelectron uns are affected, look for a common cause. Either a missing power rail, or a blanking signal. Look at the votlage on the transistor pins, do they make sense? Or are the transistors always saturated or cut off? -tony

On Thu, 2009-04-23 at 22:25 +1200, Mike van Bokhoven wrote: You could test the transistor, or even replace it. Gordon

The most basic test is to remembner that a transistor has 2 diode junctions, one between base and emitter, the other between base and collector (no, you _can't_ make a transistor from 2 diodes!). So you can test each of those junctions as a diode using either an analogue ohmmeter, or more likely these days the diode-test range of a DMM. I'll assume you're using the latter. Desolder the transistor form the circuit and connect the meter, on the diode test range, between the base and emitter. Then try it again with the proes the other way round. One way should read about 0.7V (forward biased Si junction), the other should be 'overrange'. Then do the same tests with the meter conencted both ways between the base and collector terminals of the transistor. Again, one way should be 0.7V, the other way 'overrange'. If either junction measures 'overrange' both ways round, it's open. If it reads 0V (or 0.7V) both ways round it's shorted. This will actually find a lot of defective transistors. Most failures end up with one of the junctions open-circuit. If a transistor passed this test, you need more complex equipment to test it. Basically you bpass a small current trhough the base-emitter juction and see how it affects the collector current -- in other words you use the transisorr as am amplifier. Real enthuisats have a thing called a 'curve tracer' which does this automatically and plots one of a range of voltage-current or current-current traces on a CRT. But I find my Tekky 575 (such an instrument) rarely gets used when I'm faultfinding, the defective transsitor can be found with simpler tests. I don;t recognise that sort of number at all. US bipolar transistors tend to have numbers starting 2N, European ones are things like 'BCxxx or BFxxx' and Japanese ones start 2SA..2SD (often the '2S' is omitted, but you still start with a letter). My suggestions is to look at the maximum voltage in this part of the circuit (is it just 12V'? and to pick a small-signal transistor of the right polarity (NPN or PNP). The well-known 2N3904 (NPN) and 2N3906 (PNP) would proalby do. -tony

----- Original Message ----- From: "Warren Wolfe" <lists at databasics.us> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 4:04 PM Subject: The General Approach to Computing - A Ramble You can fix anything sold today if you want to spend a bunch of money for equipment to deal with surface mount chips (BGA type equipment is not cheap). You can get spare parts (or boards to desolder parts from) at a recycler or ebay. Most people do not go that route because it is not economical and they don't have the skills or time to do it anyway. It is also much easier to troubleshoot something that only has a few chips on it, compared to the older stuff. I have an Atari 65XE in parts currently and a Commodore 1750 REU in parts waiting for sockets to redo the RAM. The 65XE was broke when I got it and I want to fix it, it would be easier just to buy a working one but I like to tinker anyway. I don't want to go back to the old days when machines were slow and unreliable, when you had to fix a machine just to be able to use it. There are millions of people driving cars that have no idea how to do anything other then put gas in it and maybe change the oil. Why should computer (another tool like a car) be any different today? Both cars and computers are a mature product now where people and companies specialize in doing support so the user does not have to. Don't expect the masses to want to expend the time and energy into their commodity tools as you do to your hobby. TZ

Hello, All, I'm glad my first post on this topic started some discussion. I'm less glad that I apparently didn't do a very good job of communicating. Let me clear up a bit, if I may. First, I'm not a Luddite, or troglodyte, or anything similar. I love using the finest, newest devices of all kinds, including computers. And, while I like playing with the old computers, and fixing them, nothing beats screaming speed in a personal computer. Teo Zenios writes: You can fix anything sold today if you want to spend a bunch of money for equipment to deal with surface mount chips (BGA type equipment is not cheap). You can get spare parts (or boards to desolder parts from) at a recycler or ebay. Most people do not go that route because it is not economical and they don't have the skills or time to do it anyway. It is also much easier to troubleshoot something that only has a few chips on it, compared to the older stuff. I have an Atari 65XE in parts currently and a Commodore 1750 REU in parts waiting for sockets to redo the RAM. The 65XE was broke when I got it and I want to fix it, it would be easier just to buy a working one but I like to tinker anyway. My background is as a National Institute of Standards and Technology Calibration Technician. Call me fixed in my ways if you like, but I prefer finding a (small) failed component, getting a replacement for under a dollar, and spending an hour or two troubleshooting and fixing equipment. I no longer have the spare space to keep a few dead copies of all my live equipment. I never cared much for cannibalizing equipment. It seems somehow... sacreligious. Now, if I find the bad component, it's likely to be a $50 chip, compared with a new $60 board replacement. While it gets things working again, it's just not as much fun as it was to find a part that was close to free to replace, and replace that part... a personal taste issue, that. I didn't expect I'd need to explain that mind-set HERE, of all places, though. I don't want to go back to the old days when machines were slow and unreliable, when you had to fix a machine just to be able to use it. Neither do I. On the other hand, I tend to think hardware progress has been TOO fast, and that software, because of the speed of the hardware, is immensely sloppy and inefficient, to a degree I find amazing. Some years back, I was looking at a setup for a Microsoft programming environment. It came on five CDs, IIRC, and I couldn't help thinking of Turbo Pascal for CP/M, wich came on a single floppy, and had an editor, compiler, and debugger in about 56 K of programming space. The efficiency factor difference is stunning. I believe that a bit more time at each 'watermark' of hardware progress would result in tightening of software efficiency to improve product performance, rather than just waiting for the next generation of PC hardware to hide one's poorly-written code. Again, that might just be me... There are millions of people driving cars that have no idea how to do anything other then put gas in it and maybe change the oil. Why should computer (another tool like a car) be any different today? Think about what you're saying... There ARE people who like to futz around with their cars, like I like to futz with my computer. All the people like that I know are not happy about computer control of the engine, as it makes it difficult to the point of near impossibility for an individual to work on their own car, and expect good results. That *IS* like a car, isn't it? There is something to be said for simplicity enough to be within one's skill set to repair with objects at hand. One of my friend's father was stranded in the desert with car trouble, and used a couple of gum foils, a paperclip, and a couple of rubber bands to patch it up until they could get to a service station. How cool is that? Today, unless someone is packing a spare CPU for his model car, one would be coyote bait in the same situation. We have not progressed smoothly -- rather, each area has gone off on its own, totally separate from all other areas. I could get behind a technology base where you could carry a few spare processors, and program them with your cellphone to run your car, or your PC, or your GPS unit, just by loading the correct program into it. But, nothing is even similar, let alone identical today. I can't help but think we took a wrong turn dictated to us by hyper-speed progress. Efficient progress would have dictated that we make the most of a much smaller number of available parts, each with multiple uses. Is that so hard? Somehow, I think not. And the benefits would be amazing. Hardware leaping ahead of software has given us a dictatorial Microsoft, and stifled the development of software better than Windows for many years. Slower hardware development (25% improvement per year, perhaps) would have forced competition on software vendors, to the detriment of Microsoft. It would be interesting to compare the two, but the world doesn't have a "control." Peace, Warren

On Apr 24, 2009, at 3:59 AM, Teo Zenios wrote: Pardon me for jumping in, but...it's not a matter of "simple", it's a matter of efficiency and good design. Warren hits the nail on the head above. This is one of the biggest reasons why I don't, and probably won't ever, delve into the Windows world. Most of the less- clueful programmers work in that world (please don't flame, that's very different from saying that all of them are less clueful) and they tend to be extremely wasteful of resources. I work in the embedded systems world, and now (again, thankfully) in the world of scientific HPC, where every cycle counts. Again, it's not a matter of simplicity of software (you should see some of this stuff!)...it's a matter of taking performance seriously, not being wasteful, and knowing what you're doing. Too true. I like to think of that as an architectural convergence of sorts. We've learned a LOT about processor architecture since the early 1970s, and many of today's architectures have become more similar as a result. Ideas that seemed good at the time but failed in practice have fallen by the wayside, the importance of register count is now understood, etc etc. Of course now we've got lots of people using one of the 1970s throwback architectures with many of its disadvantages and bad decisions still intact, but that's another matter. Yes, the most popular processor architecture of all time, in number of chips shipped: The venerable 8051. The i960 did very well, too. Itanium died without so much as a whimper, but Itanium2 seems to be picking up steam. I gotta say, though...I have a high-end quad- processor Itanium2 machine here, and it's not very fast. My central computer at home, a Sun V480, glorious but two CPU-generations old, even under a heavy load with lots of virtualized systems running on it, is considerably faster at everything I've thrown at it. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

I'd say that Intel's "success" with x86 is similar in nature to that of VHS over Beta.... -- Ian

Warren Wolfe wrote: I tend to agree with this sentiment, I do love having old machines around, but I use the most modern machine I own/can access for daily work. It doesn't mean I don't appreciate the Lisas, Commodores, or old Macs in my collection, nor does it mean I don't use them often. That said, some machines I rarely turn on because I don't want to risk harming them, and in those cases, I find using emulators for them a better choice. i.e. the 5M profile hard drives on my Lisa, or the Xerox Star's floppy and hard drives - after all, the most common components to fail are mechanical ones. But if you're thinking in terms of common things to do, perhaps those don't need a lot of CPU power (i.e. word processing email, and surfing the web - though recently between heavy javascript and flash sites, you do need the CPU power.) If on the other hand, you do something a bit more interesting, like development, and find yourself compiling the same code dozens of times a day, it pays to have a faster machine - that doesn't mean you have to run the evil OS from Redmond, nor does it mean it has to have a CPU from intel, but you can consider in terms of efficiency. MIPS (or perhaps GIPS these days) per watt. While both my Xerox Star and my Macbook can be used to write something in a word processor, and both have a very nice desktop, my Macbook doesn't require its own 20AMP circuit. And if a hard drive dies, a 2.5" SATA drive is fairly cheap and easy to replace. How about the drive in the Star? And should I need to print that document, where do I find a printer for the Star? Doesn't mean I love the Star any less. This is very true, and is one of the costs of modern electronics. The other part is while the high end items are expensive at the start (say before the warranty starts to run out), they can be had for less than half the price in working order a year or two out, once they're used. And perhaps less if they're sold as non working. So it's not too bad in all cases. Where you're able to this, by all means, that's wonderful. And as you note, not everything is easily serviceable this way. It's just the reality of things. When each transistor is microscopic, how would you fix just that one? And when it's part of an SMT chip with hundreds of pins, how would you replace it when it was surface-mount soldered onto a board? Is any electronics factory going to care that we'd want them socketed if it'll cost them $1-$10 more per chip, or are they going to care that the consumer and maker wants them as cheap as possible and the maker wants them to fail the day after the warranty expires? (And the maker wants them to be as proprietary as possible so they can control their market?) Ya, well, you know what they say about common sense. :-) A lot of this boils down to how practical something is. Collecting and repairing historically important computers isn't the same as reviving a somewhat modern but obsolete, by a couple of years, computer. I'm going to care far less about throwing out a 20G IDE drive instead of attempting to repair it (even if I could), versus an old 5MB 5.25" full height MFM drive (which I might be able to.) Perhaps in 10 years the 20G IDE drives will be scarce and have some sort of collectible value to them, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stockpile the dead ones in hopes for that to happen. Sure, someone out there today will see an opportunity, and might stockpile them now when they can be had for cheap. You can be certain that in 10 years we'll be complaining about why they charge $100 for them on ebay and how ebay sucks so much and how these drives shouldn't cost so much when for $100 you could have a 200TB drive... All while secretly kicking ourselves for not keeping more of those around. :-D But such is the life of a collector. Not at all. You be certain a lot of this stuff is grossly inefficient. The current "in" trend is to use things like garbage collection instead of doing your own memory management, and it's also to use dynamic languages which are really easy and fun to work in, but are extremely difficult to compile (i.e. ruby - and I'm not knocking them by saying this). So if you think of a popular application that's likely to be used by hundreds of thousands of people, the trade off is that it costs the programmer less time to spit out a piece of code, but what they don't look at is how hundreds of thousands of people now have an application that runs several orders of magnitude slower than it could, and requires several dozens of times more memory. Why? Because the industry loves having replaceable programmers, kids who have passed some introductory course in Java and churn out whatever the spec requires. This isn't to say that there aren't really good programmers out there anymore than can code low to the machine, (you'll find those writing device drivers for example), and perhaps those will get paid maybe 2x-3x more than the replaceable Java kids that corporations love so much, but IMHO, what they produce is worth several thousand times more, yet, they'll never get paid several thousand times more. That said, Java, and most other languages have a plethora of libraries available to them, so they don't have to reinvent the wheel (quicksort, linked lists, dynamic arrays, etc.) so for the EXPERIENCED programmer, it can be a highly efficient and powerful tool. But that's the trouble, most places are set up with very few experienced programmers and hordes of code monkeys. So that's how you wind up with say things like Office Suites that take up a whole DVD and have billions of unused features full of bugs that few people need. As long as the rest of the corporate world continues to use the bloated inefficient tools, they remain the standard and everyone wants a document in that format. It's a self-sustaining ecosystem. So far no one's complained that I've used OpenOffice to edit spreadsheets (even at work) or text documents as long as I export them in that non-native format they seem to think is the best thing since sliced bread. Infact, they never even notice it unless I happen to trip on some bug, and even then do they rarely care. IMHO: if you remove all the ugly inconsistencies in the Java language, fix up the syntax a bit more, get rid of the garbage collector and have a really good optimizing recompiler that spits out native code, you might be able to write very efficient code that would run very nicely on all platforms. Just my $0.02. "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed" -- William Gibson. Somehow he managed to say all that in 11 words instead of two paragraphs. :-) Damn, I wish there were more writers like him out there. A lot of this is that the tools are kept hidden. The dealers have access the stuff the public doesn't, and even non-dealer mechs. This is on purpose to lock people into their market, and perhaps its expensive, not just because of the lock-in but perhaps because it'll incite the car owner to trade in their old car for a newer one, and thus feed the system more money. The fix would be to create an open source car manufacturer, where everything is accessible and well documented. But good luck with that. Still the latest Ubuntu was out just last week, and I gotta say, it's quite impressive. Maybe there's hope for this idea too. Maybe Mr. Shuttleworth can buy a bankrupt car factory and start it up. :-D But you need to remember that Microsoft is what drives Intel and other hardware manufacturers to improve so quickly. By producing bloatware, they generate a market for Intel to create and sell faster chips. If Microsoft goes away, Moore's law will slow down significantly. (Perhaps something else will replace MSFT's role in this, but the idea stands.) As for smaller sets of parts that do lots of things, sure, that's wonderful for the maker, but would they sell them that way? However, this depression we're in now (and yes, that's what it really is) has perhaps woken MSFT up that they can optimize a bit - or so people who I know that have played with Windows 7 have told me. (Disclosure: I've not played with either Vista nor Windows 7, so this is 2nd hand info.). We're also seeing a lot of interest (but not surprisingly, few sales) in "Net Books". (Let's see do I plunk down $300 to buy a tiny tiny notebook computer that can't do very much other than surf the web and has little storage, or do I buy a used/refurb full sized notebook for the same price that I can do everything I'd need?) Now that cell phones have killed off PDA's, perhaps the netbooks are for people who find cell phones not as useful, and wish for something bigger, but don't really want a full sized notebook? Even so, I see something like 30 posts a day on NewtonTalk, so the PDA might be dead in the eyes of industry, but not the need for one.

On 24 Apr 2009 at 19:46, Tony Duell wrote: It's even more frustrating when you're looking at some CPLD or PAL that's gone south. You don't have the original part to reverse- engineer, the manufacturer is unlikely to furnish a replacement or even the programming for the part. Usually, this means that your widget is junk. In particular, the widget may not have been made by the outfit whose name appears on it--and they may have no idea who the manufacturer was or even if they are still in business. --Chuck

On Apr 25, 2009, at 2:30 PM, Tony Duell wrote: What about registered PALs? There are a great many of those around. Figuring out the transfer function of a black box of *sequential* logic isn't so trivial. :-( -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

A pal-cracker would be very useful here...I do pal reverse engineering by analysing the inputs and outputs of the device, and trying to devise a similar circuit (did it in many MSX "lost" products, for example the 2.0/2+ transformation kits from DDX, and now I'm trying to crack the GALs in the Sunrise IDE). Funny work, for an unemployed guy like me

Eric J Korpela wrote: The fundamental problem is since the mid 80's you have rarely been able to buy complete information to duplicate (or in some cases even program) the hardware you are buying. Once entire computers became a field replaceable unit, manufacturers had no need to release the information any more. All it did was give the competition an easy way to reverse engineer it. Unfortunately, that's how people like me learned how computers worked; by reading the field service manuals. You don't think at that level any more, and the ability to put together a gigahertz computer is done with a screwdriver, a couple of cables, and some screws. On the other hand, now that people have a handful of common platforms, much more sophisticated software is being written.

Is this aimed at me :-). All I'll say is that I wish I could find someone to pay me to do that... Well, given that a CGA card is technically a graphics card, I suspect it'll be a very long time.. Offical schematics and programing info exist for that card. The most complicated chip on it (in terms od understanding it, not transistor count) is a 6845. Making one from scratch using whatever logic family or FPGA you favour would not be all that hard. -tony

I am not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but I often do try to point out the 'bleeding obvious' -- or at least what's obvious to me -- on the grounds that not everybody here is a hardware expert. I know the feeling. I always try to help with low-level hardware problems, but it gets really difficult if I've not worked on the device in question, if I don't have the service manual, etc. Thank you. I'd better keep on posting, then... I try to ensure that I don't depend on anything I can't fix. Period. Which is probably why I have things like service manuals and ROM listings for my pocket calculator. [...] FWIW, there is still one club that's a bit like that. It's HPCC (Handheld and Portable Computer Club). _Officially_ it's to exchange information on HP calcualtors. But all sorts of things get discussed at the meetings, things (old and new) get taken apart, machines (not just HP) get repaired, or at least repairs suggested, programs get written, pulled apart,... And so on. Actually, I quite enjoy fixing things. Not so much the 'fix' as finding out waht to fix. I like logical puzzles anyway, and tracking down an obscure fault is a logical puzzle. Or at least it is if you do it the traditional way of making measuremnets, thinking aout them, and only then actually changing anything. I am not sure that's very difficult :-) This is, of cours,e the main reason that I still run classic computers for somewhat serious work. There is a great feeling in knowing just what has failed and being able to fix it. -tony

Be careful using that facility. A lot of such meters just inject a constant small current into the base and measure the collector current. SOme of the older analogue meters simply connected a resistor from collector to base to inject the base current and measured the 'resistance' from collector to emitter. My point is that this will be totally fooled by a leaky transistor. -tony

Excelelnt... Now I don haev the Apple ][ schematics to hand... What's the problem with these machines? It's highly likely they can be repaired. -tony

If the machine IC's are socketed, pull them one of a time and reinsert. This simple procedure does wonders :o)

It brings to my mind the Exato II Pro (search for it on the web) from CCE (Brazil). It was a beautiful apple clone, with one of the best keyboards I've ever used (similar or better than the GREAT IBM model "M"). It has a row of 10 or 12, I'm not that sure, programable function keys on the top of the keyboard. A real gem outside. But used one of the WORST IC sockets ever made. It is so bad, but SO BAD, that I know of no one that operates well today. And even one I had when they were new had the same problems. The leaf-type sockets oxidised (wow, how do I spell it?) so fast that CCE had to stop producing it and recall many of the computers made. I have two here, maybe someday I'll change all the sockets and have a great machine for playing. Interesting that most brazilian ][+ clones are equal in cabinet and even in schematic. All brazilian apple ][+ boards (except Micro Engenho, MaXXi and Laser 128 //c) are carbon copies one of another :o) Even the ones with lower case are equal, but with a small board on the place of the character ROM :oD

Hmmm...lets see, I'll try to remember all DIFFERENT clones (not copycats of the ][+): - MicroEngenho (mfg: Spectrum): An Apple //e (if I'm not mistaken) made in a PC-XT-Like cabinet. Very rare, boards completely different of the original Apple. - MaXXi (mfg: Polymax): I've never seen one in person. The cabinet is completely different from anything I've ever seen. Polymax made digital telex equipment, seems to have an excess of cabinets and made the MaXXi. As far as I know, the rarest brazilian Apple-like - Exato, Exato Pr?, Exato //e (CCE). All share the same cabinet, very beautiful and excellent keyboard. Exato doesn't have the function keys on top, Exato pr? has. Exato //e I don't remember well, I think only the internal mainboard is changed. Famous for the bad sockets it uses. - Apple Laser //c: A clone made by Milmar (which made the excellent Craft ][+ copycat clone) which is a bad mix of the laser 128 and apple //c. It has the WORST keyboard I've ever seen, an external power supply almost the size of the computer and is just a simple ][+. A bad joke. Of course, no internal drive - (interesting, but not apple ][+)Mac 512 (mfg: Unitron): A reengineered copy of the Mac 512, with a different logic board and dedicated ICs made by National Instruments. Very bad quality cabinet, no-auto-eject drives (used chinon mechanic drives). BTW, I have one. The rarest of all :) - TK3000 (mfg: Microdigital): a true reengineered //e. Different cabinet, different (programable) keyboard with numerical keypad (and even better than the exato keyboard), already being an "enhanced" model from scratch. A huge sales success in Brazil - TK3000 Compact (mfg: Microdigital): a "thing". A very small TK3000 with same keyboard but small board (with lots of impossible-to-be-found-if-broken dedicated ICs) and some expansions (memory, maybe CPM, printer, floppy) onboard. A bit rare. - TK2000/2000II (mfg: Microdigital): Clone of the "MPF" Microprofesseur, which is an apple clone more-or-less compatible with a little bit different ROM. The cabinet is a copy of the Atari 1200XL :o) Very, but VERY strange beast. The drive interface was made into the box of a brazilian atari cartridge (!!!!!!!!!!) and it connected on the side of the computer. Most of them, were. It was very easy to clone a ][+. Just copy the board, the power supply, the cabinet and the ROMs. There are photos that can be found on the web if you are curious :o) Greetings from Brazil Alexandre

I think the best thing to do with a machine like that is to remove all the old sockets (cut them up and desolder a pin at a time), clean out the PCB holes and replace them with turned pin (machined pin, whatever you call them) sockets. Yes, they're expensive, but I've yet to have problems with them. I use nothing else here... -tony

I think I might be luckier than that. As far as I can tell, the character ROM in the Apple ][ is ASCIIish, but for some reason the lower case ASCII positions contained upper case characters. This seems really strange to me; why would Apple have done that? I can't think of any advantages. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Anyway, it appears that the clones tended to have true lower-case characters in these positions. Looking at the board, it seems identical to the II+ board I have - same ICs in the same positions, even the printed text is the same and in the same locations. So, hopefully a II+ schematic will be of some use, though I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few differences. I'll just have to believe the machine rather than the schematic. I found several mistakes on the AppleColor monitor diagrams, though perhaps those were for a very slightly different model. Aha, very good point. Paying attention to that would be worthwhile. General question - would the entire RAM space be set to zeros at restart, or would unused memory be left full of garbage? Lots of work and time required... I could consider it though. It's probably not justified for this clone, but if I can get the original II+ working, that'll be a machine that means a lot to me, so I could consider it. I recall hearing recommendations for the turned-pin style sockets. Good idea! I seem to recall that you can run one of these machines with only 16k; perhaps first I should pull all the memory but the required 16k, and go on from there. I'll have to find out whether I'm right, and if I am, which set of 4116s (which is what it uses) is the correct 16k. Cheers, Mike.

Pete Turnbull wrote: Yes - my II+ has the shift mod fitted, though I don't know if it has the updated character ROM (I've never seen it run). Your explanation sounds about right to me. Though it still seems strange, adding lower-case support can't have been that hard or expensive? It must have made sense to Apple at the time I guess! The clones had it built-in, no modifications required. The one I have working does lower case in the regular way you'd expect, and both clones have a shift lock key. I remember using a word processor on the II+ I had in the mid 80s; that had the shift mod, but no lower case ROM. The software indicated upper case characters by showing that character in inverse video.Quite clunky, but it worked fine; I was quite happy with the results by the time they made their way out of the printer. It's surprising that it worked as well as it did I guess. Having said that, I was very pleased to upgrade to a IIe. Cheers, Mike.

In article <49F5F151.2050401 at dunnington.plus.com>, Pete Turnbull <pete at dunnington.plus.com> writes: This reverse video business sounds vaguely familiar. The only word processor commercial software I am familiar with for Apple ][ was PFS:Write. The software was really slow, even for an Apple ][. When I saw an excerpt of the code published in "Programmers at Work", I understood why. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

One of my friends wrote I think the best editor for the Apple II, PIE, Programma Interactive Editor, something like that. Fast and extremely responsive, but a bit of a learning curve for all the keystroke commands.

This applies to a lot of things, not just application programs. IMHO RPN calcualtors are easy to use (although you have to spend a little time learning how to use them), in that once you've learnt how to use one, you don't, for example, have to worry about priority rules, operations are simply done in the order you press them Far too often, things that are 'easy to use' (really meaning 'easy to learn') make simple jobs trivial, but difficult jobs next-to-impossible. Since I don't generally have problems doing simple jobs, you can tell which sort of product I prefer... -tony

Fred Cisin wrote: I was shocked at how many people believed that the value of a word processing program was inversely proportional to the time it took a brain-damaged chimpanzee (or novice user, whichever is more convenient) to crank out a thank you note for the first time. That was it, end of story. I would always ask questions, and almost always just got a blank stare in reply: Don't you want a program that lets you improve your efficiency? Will you always be a total noob, or do you expect to understand your computer one day? How fast are good typists who use this program? Are there "speed keys" for any of these functions? Warren

I'm replying to two messages at once here. :-) Fred Cisin wrote: Warren Wolfe wrote: If you're talking about the original Mac, this is true. But keep in mind that Jef was off the Mac project before it changed directions. Jef's design for the Mac would have made it another text oriented system with an 8 bit, or 16 bit CPU. While it's true that Jef convinced Steve Jobs to go to Xerox PARC, the original designs for both the Mac and the Lisa (which Jef wasn't working on) did not include the GUI. Steve got kicked out of the Lisa team and he took over Jef's team, pushing Jef out - that's how the Mac became the Mac. See folklore.org for those bits of history. The apps that shipped with the original Mac weren't meant to be high end power user apps. They were something to work with until profession apps hit the market. For most users they got the job done. Otherwise, Apple wouldn't have tried to get Lotus and Microsoft to port their wares to the Mac, and supposing that the original Mac wasn't the one released in 1984, but instead the Mac SE or the Mac Plus was, if Apple had built fully functional replacements for Microsoft Word and Lotus 123, then that would have slowed down the software market for the Mac as it would have pissed off the big software houses. That would have limited the original Mac far more. Whenever you have a new machine to market, your biggest problem is the lack of software and convincing existing app makers to port to your platform. To answer the question of why you'd want easy to use software, that push really does come from the corporate world. My favorite example for this is Java, I don't want to get too far off topic, but corporations love java because training houses can churn out java "programmers" (more like code monkeys) quickly in six months or so, and they're cheap and replaceable. They don't understand that some programmers are worth 10-100x more than others and that they should hire those with real skills instead of those who just passed a course (or they do, and just don't care). But the same can be said of other types of employees that were wanted back in the mid-late 80's - those that could work word processors, since computers were expensive (as compared to say typewriters). :-) (The above isn't intend to knock Java as a language, or claim that there are no high end Java coders, just that it's very easy to learn & churn, like Visual BASIC before it.) Jef's actual idea of what the Mac should be was realized into the Canon Cat (and previously, the Swift board for the Apple II). My own experience with the Cat has been that it isn't easy to learn, at least, not if you're used to previous word processors that have cursor keys. The leap keys aren't intuitive and aren't easy to use initially, but once you get used to them, and get past the learning curve, they are quite speedy. So that's the opposite of both your observations. Personally, I found the lack of cursor keys, especially up/down cursor keys extremely frustrating. So, no, this wasn't necessarily easy for noobs to learn either. As for doing difficult jobs that the ROM didn't provide features for, guess what? The Cat was fully programmable. Learn Forth and you can make it do just about anything the hardware allowed for. The same was true of the Mac - if you had a Lisa and the Workshop to reprogram your Mac with (Ok, later, Mac development packages were released) :-) Or if you really needed that feature, and aren't a programmer, you went out and bought Microsoft Word or whatever had the feature. As for speed keys and advanced features, well Duh! They're right there on the keyboard, plain for all to see, you don't even have to open the manual to look at them. Certainly a lot easier to access and learn than the obscure keys in Word Perfect. Gee, what does shift/control-F5 do again? What about Alt-F5? What about F5? Oh right... it's not there on the keyboard, I'll have to spend time with a manual if I want to do anything advanced. I don't see what the Jef bashing in the two above messages is about, really. If you guys are bashing the Mac, then Jef had little to do with the Mac - the design constrains on the Mac came from two things: cost of parts such as RAM, and design decisions (which came from management.) As the target audience was word processing, the Cat had a good word processor that handled almost everything someone would want from a word processor at the time, including a built in spell checker. It also had terminal software, so you could send your documents between Cats over phone lines. So it met a lot of the needs of the users of that era. And if you needed to do math, the editor could be used in that way. Not quite as a spreadsheet, but passable for lite needs. All the software was built in, you turned it on and it came up where you left off (if you left your work floppy in the drive), and no hassles with first loading a disk operating system, then loading an application. You powered it on and it just worked - exactly where you left off when you had shut it off. It wasn't a hobbyist's machine, it wasn't expandable, but it was programmable. And it was something you could run your business with in that day and age. Certainly was a lot nicer and far less expensive than some of the bigger word processing systems such as the Wangs. An interesting tidbit: - as I understand it, the Cat originally was designed to support proportional fonts, and the Cat's display, like the Mac's, is a bitmapped display. But Canon for whatever reason (either lack of fonts in their printers, or concern about the speed of printing graphics) asked IA to use monospaced fonts in the Cat. So the parent company did have a lot of influence as to the design of the Cat, but over all, for an appliance, the Cat did a good job for what it was intended to. The original Mac would have been a wonderful machine, provided it had a lot more RAM, and provided it was at least sold with an external floppy drive. IMHO, the first truly usable Mac was the Plus (at least the models that had hard drives). The 512KE came close. And yes, I still think the Mac should have had the Lisa's operating system rather than the other way around, but that just wasn't possible with the cost of hardware at the time. (As slow as the Lisa was, it was light years ahead of the first Mac in terms of capabilities. The Mac Plus with a hard drive was equivalent to what the Lisa had in terms of hardware resources. You really do need at least 1M of memory + a hard drive for that kind of machine.) But, even with severely limited resources, you could still get a usable GUI system and do useful work. GEOS on the C64, hooked up to a decent printer could come close. Nowhere as easy to use as a Cat in terms of just turn it on and go, but perfectly fine for home word processing and the like. I remember doing my homework with this setup and driving the teachers nuts because everyone else handed hand written loose leaf homework. :-)

Richard wrote: Mea Culpa, it's actually spelled "Swyft" :-) http://www.digibarn.com/collections/parts/swyft-card/index.html

---------------------------------------- Hi I could ask Charlie Springer about that but to my knowledge, it was just the board with the pal, ROM and LM311. I've always wondered what the LM311 did? Could you trace out the board and make a schematic? Dwight _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live?: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_BR_life_in_synch_052009

Hi It was just that little board. It took over the Apple IIe and even had its own disk format. 16K bytes is a lot of Forth code. Dwight ---------------------------------------- _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail? goes with you. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Mobile?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutoria…

---------------------------------------- Hi I just looked through the manual. It seems that it was stand alone for most every thing. It did have a ProDos program that one could run to transfer text files to ProDos. This was on one side of the Demo disk. One could completely run from the card. One could also call to BASIC and run code the ( with a few caveats ). When that card was running, it ran in the same 12K space as BASIC. Dwight _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail? has ever-growing storage! Don?t worry about storage limits. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Storage?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutori…

I have a 32K EPROM that contains SELF TEST, Diagnostics, Editor / Assembler, BASIC, FORTH, CHIP-8 and BIOS / BOOTSTRAP for ElfOS disk operation system for the 1802. Comes from the Spare Time Gizmos guys ( no relation ). Best regards, Steven

Just an observation on how much you can cram into a small memory space if you try. I'll retract my tangent back from whence it came. / Steven ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard" <legalize at xmission.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 2:53 PM Subject: Re: Apple II swift board (was: More broken Apples...) Assembler, system

Dear friends, Anyone has a clue of how to extract a 8049 program? This is for a Kenwood TS-430 radio. It uses a 8049 for entire rig control, but got one fried. It would help a lot if I could extract a program Thanks Alexandre

Do you have an 8749 programmer? IIRC the 8048 series don't have any security features, and the mask-ROM versions can be read out like the EPROM versions. Certainly I've got what look to be useful images that way. -tony

dwight elvey wrote: I could see where this is a problem. The mixed modes are useful in certain fields... like semi-graphical adventure games... Think Zork but with a display of where you are as well as a text entry field. Which I suppose is what they were used for. Switching between text mode and graphic modes has gone the way of the dodo. Mostly because of graphics accelerator cards. But text modes do tend to be a lot faster. Yup. I tend to agree with that sentiment. I've come to hate mice and love the little nipple pointer things on keyboards from using IBM thinkpads for so long. Never liked trackpads, didn't really like mice, I do like trackballs though - they give a lot more feedback than trackpads. The whole lifting your hand off the keyboard to move the mouse (or trackball) and then back to type thing is annoying.

Ray Arachelian wrote: I've come to hate mice and love the little nipple pointer things on keyboards from using IBM thinkpads for so long. It's a guy thing.... Warren

On 3 May 2009 at 14:24, Fred Cisin wrote: Or, as one person put it--WYLIWYL - "What you learn is what you like". --Chuck

Chuck Guzis wrote: The one I prefer is WYSIWTF. I found that one hilarious. Peace... Sridhar

Warren Wolfe wrote: I can't think of a single, modern word-processor that _requires_ the user to do the above for common actions. Word, Open Office, "Pages" many...) that make using the mouse/menus unnecessary -- but that option is still there for the user who a) is new to the software or b) hasn't yet learned what the keyboard shortcut for "insert table at cursor after frobbing" is. (Or perhaps more importantly -- that the "insert table at cursor after frobbing" option even exists -- having a well-designed UI makes features more discoverable.) At the risk of making this topic even MORE off topic than it already is, I'm curious what specific software you feel falls into the bucket of "hard to use but easy to learn." (Incidentally, where I used to work I knew several touch-typists who swore by WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Evidently they didn't find it "clumsy" at all. Then again, I found it an incredible pain to use...) Josh

On Sun, May 03, 2009 at 08:01:44PM -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote: I loved working with both, WP 5.1 and WordStar. I moved to Unix totally and started using Joe, which I loved until I started learning Vim (a hell to learn, maybe, but easy and fast once you understand its way of functioning and change your mind). Together with TeX for processing documents (articles, books, letters, posters, slides) and R for statistics, mathematics and graphics, is a beast. I doubt I will ever switch to a different editor. Cheers, ?ngel

[re: lack of lower case on Apple IIs] Here is a tangential story. Early Wang 2200's didn't support lower case to the CRT. However there was a mechanism for specifying lower case so that things sent to a printer could be mixed case. Strings enclosed in single quotes were converted to lower case. For example: 10 PRINT "THIS IS UPPER CASE" 20 PRINT 'THIS IS LOWER CASE' 30 PRINT "M";'Y NAME IS ';"J";'IM' RUN (and this would appear when sent to a printer) THIS IS UPPER CASE this is lower case My name is Jim

Richard wrote: Already done - twice now! It took under five minutes. I was talking about replacing the sockets; that would take a fair amount of time, I'd want to be very careful not to damage the board. Mike.

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Alexandre Souza < alexandre-listas at e-secure.com.br> wrote: You missed the TK90X which appears to be an enhanced 48K Spectrum with a built-in joystick port. I've not dared to power mine up yet! http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Microdigital/tk90x.php -- -- adrian/witchy Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest home computer collection? www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk

On 27/04/2009 17:43, "Alexandre Souza" <alexandre-listas at e-secure.com.br> wrote: Ah, ok :) That's what I get for speed-reading while at work! I can see it from where I'm sat now, I might give it a go tonight, didn't originally because the PSU in the box is 110v (I'm in the UK) and the person in Brazil I got it from didn't test it either! Cheers, -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection?

Right. My question was really 'There isn't a PAL or NTSC decoder in the monitor, is there?' That's about what I'd expect on a colour CRT video amplifier. FWIW, I'd expect about 80V on the power rail for a monochrome one. Right. I assume the cathodes are connected to this supply through load resistors. And that they also connect to the collectors of NPN transsitors. Now, the higher the votlage on the cathode, the greate the effective -ve voltage on the control grid (g1), and thus the more the CRT is cut off. With the cathodes at 200V, the CRT is going to be pretty much cut right off, hence the total lack of illumination on the screen. So that makes sense. Does the emitter of the second transistor connect to the collector of the first? That's quite a normal circuit, and yes the second transistor is bart of the blanking circuit (when it's turned off, the cathodes go up to the +200V rail, and the CRT is cut off). OK. I asusme that 12V supply is present and correct (I've learnt to check just about everything when looking for a fault...) Right. Could well be the case. What you say sounds logical, and it roughly matches what I'd expect to find.. You might be right, you might be wrong. Why not test the transistor. Desolder it, and at least make sure the e-b and c- junctiuons test as diodes. This doesn't prove it has any gain, but it'll find open or shorted transsitors. I can't beleive that transistor is very critical, you could probably replace it with just about any small-signal transistor of the right polarity (NPN .vs. PNP) -tony

Randy Dawson wrote: I'm waking up an old thread here, but this sounds like related and good news: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/110442/WORLD-EXCLUSIVE-NASA-finds-missi… Not sure how reliable that is, but I hope it is :) /P

Dan Roganti wrote: A very enjoyable film, I would add. Although the generator issue in the film is a fabrication, Parkes did indeed battle extreme winds to catch the signal and hold it. Jim