On the plus side the front panel seems functional (except for one LED). I can at least examine and deposit data.
Well, the old Gifford computer is doing something. I have blinking lights, but she is not loading anything from the drives. I will have to check what is on the EPROMS. In the notes I have it only talks about loading from tape. Also nothing shows up on the terminal screen. On the plus side the front panel seems functional (except for one LED). I can at least examine and deposit data.
0 Comments
My Commodore PC10-III was having trouble booting from the floppy drives. However, it exhibited the following behaviours:
After lots of troubleshooting, it turned out to be a very subtle thing indeed. The use of a 74LS04 chip instead of a 74S04 chip (near the RAM). Once I replaced that back to what was supposed to be used, it booted correctly.
Got my Model III up and running after a keyboard rehabilitation and some cleaning of the disk drives.
At first the the disk drive to keep on spinning after issuing a DOS command like DIR. Eventually the problem seemed to just go away. The keyboard was pretty flaky. I had to more or less clean or re-paint the conductive pads on most of the keys. What a pain. A few weeks ago, I was given this IBM 5170 from a long time friend. At one point he upgraded it to a 386 and added a 3.5 inch drive and a 420 MB drive. I managed to procure an original IBM 5170 AT board but it came without any memory installed. Today the 41256 RAM chips arrived, so I finally got to test it out. Here are some photos.
Pictures of my Apple ][+ that I got given to me in 2000 by a work colleague. This computer was bought in 1981 and the original owner had lots of add-ons for it and several boxes of diskettes. The second Apple drive shown below was one that I picked up recently from Kemner's Surplus in PA before they closed. Originally, it came with a Mitac drive (shown below). When I was a teen, I knew other students that owned (or had access to) Commodore 64's (like myself), Vic-20's, Tandy Model-III's, Timex-Sinclair 1000's, or TI-99's to name a few. However, I didn't meet a single person that owned an Apple ][ until my first year of university in 1987. In fact that was the only one I had seen until I got this one. They were just too expensive for most people. Below are some pictures of the accessories and cards that came with the computer.
Now that us quite the groove on this floppy disk. Fortunately Track 18 was OK, so i was able to recover the majority of files off of it. I guess aging has caused the magnetic material to come loose on this one.
This explains why my other 1541 started having read errors all of a sudden. After opening it up, it was clear that it was indeed the cause. |
AuthorCharles Baetsen holds a Bachelor and a Master's degree in Engineering Physics from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Archives
February 2024
Categories
All
|