TeleVideo progress

[Ian S. King]

Hi all,

I've posted looking for help with a TeleVideo TPC-1, and I've heard a lot
of crickets - apparently this isn't a commonly held machine.  :-)  But I've
made progress with it, which I want to share.

When I first got it, the display would light up and ask me to insert a
floppy.  Doing so would promptly douse the display.  I figured, 'power
supply', and recapped the entire thing - after the venture of figuring out
how to open the case!  I found a post in netnews that strongly suggested
TeleVideo had suppressed information about opening the case to protect
their service centers' business....  It's an odd combination of 'push
there, pull there and be bold', but I got it open.

Recapping was a success, and the machine attempts to boot from disk 0 - and
tries, and tries, and....  I figured that drive 0, being the most used,
might have issues, but wasn't looking forward to pulling out the drive cage
and swapping them as a test.  But then I noticed that drive 1's circuit
board was visible, and I rejumpered it to be drive 0 - and success, the
machine booted into CP/M!

Sure, I could just leave it as a single-drive machine, or swap the two and
pray - but this is a restoration.  I've ordered an exact, tested/guaranteed
working replacement from ePay, and I'm going to have everything working to
spec before I snap this thing back together.

Yes, I'm having fun.  :-)

-- 
Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate
The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu>
Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical
Narrative Through a Design Lens

Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org>
Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org>

University of Washington

There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."