Y Combinator is restoring one of Alan Kay's Xerox Alto machines

curiousmarc3 at gmail.com curiousmarc3 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 7 02:27:35 CDT 2016


> On Sep 5, 2016, at 9:30 AM, Josh Dersch <derschjo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> At the LCM, I used an Apple II to test out the Alto's memory -- the Alto II XM uses 4116 RAM chips.  I swapped in a row at a time and wrote a little BASIC program to test for obvious errors.  This was time-consuming, but eliminated the obviously bad chips, which helped immensely.

Oh, that's so simple and clever! Are these 16k chips? I don't have an Apple II, but I wonder if I could use the same trick and plug them in my HP 85 for which I just managed to burn the service ROM, which has a memory test built in.
Marc


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