Those using our beloved computers are slowly dwindling away. There are a few that have gotten into the fold but not nearly as many as in the past, But a lot of us are diehards that enjoy the learning, the using of our decidedly limited computers. I. for one, do not want to get a major upgrade into a computer that has all those fancy attachments and bookshelf after bookshelf of manuals to use the software. Who needs all that complexity? Not I.
I noted that Bob in the last issue addressed the subject of disk speed checker. Well, I guess I will have to get it out again and give it yet another try. It is such a short program in BASIC but! then if you do not know programming then you are lost. I did get it to work with the Oliger/LarKen marriage but it will not work with the pure LarKen system. According to the Late Bill Pedersen it has something to do with the OUT command.
I went to the Dayton ComputerFest but it was not user friendly to anyone except the MSDOS and the MAC and only then to the faster machines. The single biggest items were the CD-ROMs. I saw very few disk drives that would work on the T/S 2068 and of those few they were in the “I don’t know if they will work” category. I did buy a few. And I will have to admit I still have not tested them. There were few venders with used disks and one was offering used 3.5 disks (720K) at a very low price. I bought a tray of them for $8.00 (later an actual count was 144) so I am set for that size for quite a while. In fact I am not yet using that size.
Since we were shuffled of to one side we (T/SNUG) did got a table and SMUG got two tables and that was the entire extent of the T/Sers at the ComputerFest and we were not in our usual spot since that was the food venders eating area (and the only place to smoke) and it was full of heavy smoke. I saw a lot of my old friends but not like in earlier years.
Will I go to Dayton again? I do not know, right now I am not sure. I might go for one day, that is drive down Friday and FEST and return late Saturday. It will depend on who might be there next year. Is it worth the gas, motel, meals and the time? Only time will tells.
But enough of the sob story. Look at the positive and what lays ahead Jack Dohany is still programming and maybe more new and wonderful things will come from him. And there are others that might have something to contribute. There are still those that have just discovered that there is a T/S group and are amazed.
At our house we went through a sort of emergency. It could possibly have lead to a tragedy. Our furnace was workings so far as I could tell, am O. K. But when I went from central air to using heat the furnace blower suddenly was stuck on while the power was applied to the furnace. In fiddling with the controls I managed to loose the pilot light and I could not got it to relight. I finally went two houses away where a man – that worked for the company that installed the furnaces in this area (and they still are building houses in the area) lived and asked him to check what I was doing wrong. In the process he observed that a circuit board on the furnace had apparently went bad but he got the furnace to relight. However, he discovered that the heat exchanger had holes in it and had to be replaced. He did seal the holes temporarily so that we could have heat while we waited for parts or a new furnace. An estimate of parts gave a figure that was quite high a sizable fraction of the cost of a new furnace and then the furnace still could develop another problem. So we put in a new furnace. NOTE! we did not have any noticeable health problems from carbon monoxide but then the furnace was only ran a few times a day. So on October 31st the new one was installed. Our furnace did cost more money than a normal furnace since it is an inverted furnace, that is, it is manufactured for a house with a slab floor. The air enters the top of the furnace and proceeds downward to be heated and exits into and under the poured concrete flooring through the air ducts there. The furnace, of course, makes noise more so than the old one but it works and is safe.
I took a break from this and copied a cartridge to disks, Flight Simulator. I haven’t looked to see if this was on cassette but I presume that it was. I wanted to send it to Bob Swoger and he uses the LarKen LKDOS so how did I SAVE it to disks I used the NMI push button save. But with the LarKen there is dock board so that is out. What I did was pull the LarKen dock board – turned off power of course – and with only the Oliger working on my Oliger/LarKen disk system I had the cartridge installed and powered up and there it was on the screen. I then pressed the Oliger NMI SAVE and the disk drive sang a sang and I pressed a number key and there it was on disk. I then powered down and pulled the cartridge and replaced the LarKen dock board and I then powered up and LOADed from disk and then I turned off the Oliger and used the NMI push-button to SAVE to a LarKen disk and after that I changed the name to the LarKen normal naming from the NMI-S1.CM to fltsim.Bl so there it is. I had tried to break the program after SAVEing but it wipes out.
I have a bunch of cassettes for the T/S 2068 that I will try to get onto disk. To do so I will have to do the DIRectories an paper so that I can compare the programs with other similar programs. If they in fact are the I will only SAVE one to disk. With the Oliger SAFE disks the directory also gives the number of bytes in a program, So if the programs from different sources have the same number of bytes I can assume that they are the same. That is a long term project for me to do.
I had wrote to Nuts and Volts magazine with a question about what size wire to use for the power cable between the power supply and the disk drives with a 5 foot runs I got all kinds of answers and most are in line with what I finally figured from wire tables and the resistance of wire, It looks like #16 gauge wire should be adequate. So I guess that project has no excuse to not go forward. Currently I am using a pair of 67.5 watt power supplies (IBM) to operate four full height disk drive. I have four half height drivers to use some day, I will reserve them for when these drives die or I get more ambition to make a new drive case.
And as soon as I get the interface and the docs from Frank Davis I will be trying to use portable disk drives on my Z88. The drives are TANDY and are obsolete and I asked the local Radio Shack store to play telephone tag to locate me a pair. One came from California and the other from Washington state. I bought the Z88 from Frank at the ComputerFest and have only tested it to see if it worked. When the drive interface arrives I will give it a road test of some sort. The drives use 4 AA batteries for power and have a capacity of 200K. What am I going to use it on? I don’t know at the moment. Since I have a parallel printer cable for the Z88 I can print out without UPLOADing to the T/S 2068. Of course I should get a serial port built so that I can upload it to the T/S 2068.
With regards to the plea for help from Fred Henn on the Amdek disk drive case and drives. I so happen to have the Amdek manual which is about the drive case and power supply plus the disk drives themselves. I have no use for it so if I was supplied the postage (it weighs almost a pound and half) I could mail it to Fred Henn. If Fred’s address was in the newsletter I would have wrote him direct.
And now with the colder weather here, yesterday the sun shone and the snow came down, but not at the same time. So now that outside walking is out of the question, I have started using the treadmill. Trouble is I cannot really know how far I have gone since I have to take the machine’s word for it, 30 minutes and it said I went 1.75 miles. It is boring even I watch/listen to CNN. I will have to get into it with 30 minutes every day or at least several times a week.. This is called body maintenance and regardless it is boring.
I will go to the Allen County HamFest this coming Saturday (November 18th) to see what there is for me in the computer line. I have only one item to look for and that is a 6 VDC power supply to use for the portable disk drive for the Z88. BUT! I will be looking since I do not know what I will see or find.
I was given an Apple IIC computer that does not work. It just produces a herring bone pattern on the monitor and I was told by someone else that is an indication that the video circuit is bad. However, the green screen monitor will work with the T/S 2068. I opened up the computer and the disk drive does not look like a standard drive. So maybe that is out for use on the T/S 2068.
I will now turn this over to the rest of the gang. 0/0