Restoring Vintage Computers
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Restoring Vintage Computers
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Restoring Vintage Computers
#2should have [video] in the title.
Re: Restoring Vintage Computers
#3This guy is amazing. Of course being a million millionaire help but his skills and experience are something I just dream about.
Watch the series where they repair an Alto computer, the disk packs and bring it up. Also repairing IBM 029 keypunch.
Amazing. And his colleagues are just as amazing.
Re: Restoring Vintage Computers
#4I'd love to find an old TI DS-990/10 system. Used one in 1979 for a few years. Good times, implementing Kernighan and Plauger's code from Software Tools in Pascal.
Re: Restoring Vintage Computers
#5This guy is amazing. Of course being a million millionaire help but his skills and experience are something I just dream about. Watch the series where they repair an Alto computer, the disk packs and bring it up. Also repairing IBM 029 keypunch. Amazing. And his colleagues are just as amazing.
His Apollo Guidance Computer restoration videos are equally amazing. They actually got the AGC to run. Incredible.
Re: Restoring Vintage Computers
#6should have [video] in the title.
Why? It's not a link to a video.
Re: Restoring Vintage Computers
#7This guy is amazing. Of course being a million millionaire help but his skills and experience are something I just dream about. Watch the series where they repair an Alto computer, the disk packs and bring it up. Also repairing IBM 029 keypunch. Amazing. And his colleagues are just as amazing.
Testify! His "elevator music" explanation tangents alone are worth the price of admission. The Apollo ranging stuff was fascinating.
Re: Restoring Vintage Computers
#8I have a couple of machines lurking in my collection which worked fine the last time I turned them on, but that was 15 years ago now... I really should do the research on how to make sure I don't accidentally damage them by powering them on if there's a dried up capacitor lurking in the power supply or something. (One of them is acutually genuinely semi-rare: the ICL 3300 was produced as a prototype but was cancelled before it went into production. The PERQ 1 is older and arguably cooler, but more common.)
Re: Restoring Vintage Computers
#9I have a couple of machines lurking in my collection which worked fine the last time I turned them on, but that was 15 years ago now... I really should do the research on how to make sure I don't accidentally damage them by powering them on if there's a dried up capacitor lurking in the power supply or something. (One of them is acutually genuinely semi-rare: the ICL 3300 was produced as a prototype but was cancelled…
This happened to my BBC micro, but after I'd cleared away the explosion and bought a replacement cap kit on ebay it worked fine.
Re: Restoring Vintage Computers
#10Seeing his list of restored devices, including an HP2645, recalled to me how we hacked the original HP2640A glass teletypes to turn them into little desktop computers. 2640s came with a set of self-tests that you could run from an HP3000 minicomputer. Didn't take us kids long to figure out that the role of the HP3000 was to download a string of bytes representing 8008 code, that the terminal ran to test itself. They had 1K byte and 4k byte memory cards in the terminal. So we reverse engineered the 8008s interface to the screen and keyboard IO system, and were soon building little screen games. This was 2 years before the Apple II debuted, and when the only "home" computers you could get were big boxes like the Altair 8800. We basically had stumbled across the PC, but weren't smart or ambitious enough to do anything besides play dumb screen games with it.