Hard drive problems

[RetroTechGuy]

other than as a hobby, I don't know why anyone would bother...

I think you sum up my feelings about here quite nicely

I am a generic stick in the mud and hate throwing away anything that works but stuff here I would have junked years ago except it died already like the cheap commercial stuff often does.

Thing is no one is using steam powered automobiles / cars that I know of

mike

I bet that the old XT would have powered up -- built like a tank... But I just don't have room for that old junk any more. I still have some old machine in the 7-900 MHz range, but have purged all the pre-PII stuff (or still working on it, as the case may be)...

I have hung onto the old Amiga 500 laying around...

[starhawk]

For the CF adapter, I'm using an old ISA-8 proto PCB that the Internet has never heard of. Found it in my local Radio Shack and brought it home (I'm lucky to live in a small town with an old franchise R/S store!).

I'm in the US -- North Carolina, more specifically...

[Flash]

New computers use far less power to make the same computation and do it far faster as well. Used to be, I'd boot up my computer and futz around for a while, then shut it off to save on the air conditioning bill. Now, I leave the damn thing on 24/7 with lots of tabs open in the browser. Ah, well, at least I have solar panels on my roof.

[RetroTechGuy]

New computers use far less power to make the same computation and do it far faster as well. Used to be, I'd boot up my computer and futz around for a while, then shut it off to save on the air conditioning bill. Now, I leave the damn thing on 24/7 with lots of tabs open in the browser. Ah, well, at least I have solar panels on my roof.

Puppy is so freakin' fast to boot and to shut down, that I'm more inclined to shut the machine off if I'm not planning to use it in the next couple hours...

[mikeb]

Avoid pentium 4s and related machines in other words if power is a concern... I find the P3 much ligher in power use as it happens though me atoms are soooo frugal with the stuff a mains power glitch does not even touch them.

How did we get onto power? What a tangled forum thread we weave...

mike

[starhawk]

New computers use far less power to make the same computation and do it far faster as well. Used to be, I'd boot up my computer and futz around for a while, then shut it off to save on the air conditioning bill. Now, I leave the damn thing on 24/7 with lots of tabs open in the browser. Ah, well, at least I have solar panels on my roof.

Yes, but sometimes it's truly amazing what you can do with so few resources... Example 1 ... Example 2

Note: the first site there isn't loading for me at time of writing... it's an original IBM PC (IIRC, might be an XT) serving up the page there. The 2nd site explains how a guy achieved "demoscene" style video playback on an original PC, the second time around -- and did far, far better.

No, they're not for your daily driver computational tasks -- but it's fun to see just how far you can push that old stuff.

...and there's nothing that will teach you about the fundamentals of computing, more than building your own 80s style 'home micro'...

[RetroTechGuy]

New computers use far less power to make the same computation and do it far faster as well. Used to be, I'd boot up my computer and futz around for a while, then shut it off to save on the air conditioning bill. Now, I leave the damn thing on 24/7 with lots of tabs open in the browser. Ah, well, at least I have solar panels on my roof.

Yes, but sometimes it's truly amazing what you can do with so few resources... Example 1 ... Example 2

Note: the first site there isn't loading for me at time of writing...

Looks like it's probably gone... The main page is on the Wayback. No sub pages or code...

That is basically the same machine I threw away last week... The original XT ran at 4 MHz, the "turbos" were a lot faster...

I crunched a lot of data on that beastie...

Ya queue up a load of data in a batch file, launch it and go eat supper -- come back after a couple beers for "desert"...

Code: Select all

It's running on a 10 MHz 8088-powered PC from 1987! 

https://web.archive.org/web/20130905192 ... et.org:81/

Yeah, this Epson was just like mine...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvYjvTtvdDw

And I had a 486 jammed into one of these cases:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luUPvzx-XWU

[starhawk]

Hm, a pity about mr rubbermallet. Oh well.

Speaking of old computers

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/16 ... in-new-coo

That's pretty cool.

For those who do not like to click on links:

A guy who goes to big expensive auctions managed to get ahold of the original case molds for a particular variant of the Commodore 64, specifically the Commodore 64c. (I actually had one of those, but I was feeling really really stupid one day and I sold it. I'm still kicking myself for that, four or five years later.) The case looks a lot like the one for the Commodore 128 -- for a reason! The C128 was out, but people were still buying C64s and it'd been out a long time and Commodore was looking for a way to freshen things up and not have it cost body parts -- so they simplified the guts and threw an almost-C128 case on it, and that was the C64c.

That fellow who has the molds is now producing new cases with those molds, for that computer. Currently he's doing a limited 500-of-each-color run in one's choice of red, white, or blue. us$35 gets you one case and some screws to hold it together. Well worth it IMO if you have a C64c and still use it and want to support others who are the same way. I'd buy one myself (probably in red) if I still had my C64c...

[mikeb]

intel cpus were always the weird power guzzlers. (and backwards addresses lol) .. worked for a company that made bus testers... you could plug in a dummy cpu which ran tests to find faults with the pcb and peripheral components. 8086/8088 were already having heat problems and the 186 was a sick 'power and way they handled the bus' joke.
The motorola version for 68000 was on the other hand an elegant breeze to work with and their later chips.

Funny the Z80 was actually a decent branch of the intels from ziglog but unfortunately died with them...made the intels look even more primative. Funny it like vhs...how the crappiest hardware/system ended up being the dominant one but thats business vs technical for you. Plus getting the IBM PC connection must have played a major part in its popularity...worked for Microsoft after all...bit like sleeping your way to the top hollywood style ) At least they made a decent job of them in the end which will happen if you throw enough money and time at a project.

Am I right in believing modern intel chips...well perhaps early last decade at least had the same 8088/8086 instruction sets (or 8088?) and simply had an interpretor layer to use those codes and make it appear to have a larger instruction set.

It was also funny how intel quoted the crystal clock speed rather than the actual cpu speed which always made their parts sound 4 times faster than they really were.

I liked the commodores too...had a plus 4 and a 128 and the 6502 variants were a dream to program for.

Curse these nostalgia threads.

mike

[starhawk]

6502 stuff is awesome

As for Zilog -- the Z80 is actually still being made. Zilog licensed their design basically to whomever, and although that meant they wound up making fewer than half the Z80s produced (meaning more than half were from second sources!) they wound up with an amazingly popular CPU. My TI-83+ runs a Z80 CPU @ 6MHz.

Of course the 6502 was far better -- a 1MHz 6502, I'm told, can run circles around a 4MHz Z80...

[mikeb]

Of course the 6502 was far better -- a 1MHz 6502, I'm told, can run circles around a 4MHz Z80...

yep...check my post about the speed figures.

I believe they did it again with the pentium 4...went to quoting 8 times the cpu speed though the instruction set grew so the lie was only about 60% rather than a full 100% ...bullshite sells hardware eh

The 128 had something called a 8502 or similar so I guess there were making further developments.... machine effectively had 3 cpu in one... 6502 for c64 emulation, the 8502 (I think) as main 128 cpu and a cp/m processor..... I cannot remember if it was 3 chips or one that functioned as all three. Double sided high density 5 1/4 floppys too... .

mike

[starhawk]

C64 was a 6510 -- basically a 6502 with a six-line (well, eight line, but two were internal) GPIO port.

There was a 6510T, used in some Commo disk drives, which had all eight GPIO lines (the entire port) brought out...

The C64c got the 8500, which was a cheaper process (HMOS vs NMOS) to make the chip dies.

The 8502 is basically an 8500 that can run at either 1MHz or 2Mhz, and gives you seven GPIOs (+1 internal) as well.

[mikeb]

The 8502 is basically an 8500 that can run at either 1MHz or 2Mhz, and gives you seven GPIOs (+1 internal) as wel

or 4MHz to 8MHz if your company is called Intel

Thanks for the info... tis many years and other stuff since I had it.

I suppose large numbers can sound impressive...a bit like CB radios selling power was based on how heavy the box was...with customers working on such basis its easy to sell mutton dressed as lamb...just add a brick or a zero

mike