Who is Ms. Olive Alive?
I am blessed with a wife that is not extremely jealous. Or else I would be really in trouble. Amongst the mail I receive are the advertisings mailed to various corruptions of ZXir QLive Alive! The latest is the most humorous of the many I have received addressed to “Ms. Olive Alive; Don Lambert; 1301 Kiblinger Pl.; Auburn, IN 47706-3010.” They were offering a spiral pocket personal organizer. One for each month at the price of just over $2.00 a month. I don’t know what I will do with the sample they sent. I sure would hate to take all the excitement out of my life by getting organized.
In talking to a person that had dabbled in the field of T/S computers in the years gone by it suddenly dawned on me why there was such a difference in what each T/S’er knows and has done. Call the T/S computers a T/S jungle and then it becomes easier to understand that each person has entered the T/S jungle by a different trail or had forged a different trial so therefore each and every person has had different observations and experiences. Those that had the fortune to be near others and could share experiences traveled a different trail than those that were all alone.
I bought a TS1000 and had started to learn about computers and computing when all at once I started to work a lot of overtime and then the TV that I was using was loaned out (over my objects to a fellow countryman of my wife’s while he was in a Community College. I was having trouble with my computer and it took me quite a while to find out that the problem was the neighbor’s car since their driveway was just above the basement room that I had the computer in. Every time they started their old car it would cause the TS1000 to go berserk. Between overtime, house upkeep and a rental house I was kept busy until I retired. I really got going with the T/S computers after December of 1987. The trouble was, I had all this stuff I’d bought and not explored. In some cases it still has not been explored!
As I write this (Jan. 25) there is a ZX81 LarKen Disk interface complete with two half height 5.25 disk drives in a case being acclimatized that was delivered from the West Coast. I mailed the check on the 19th and already it is here on the 26th. Is that a record with the U.S. Mail and UPS? I don’t know if the unit was really that cold, so I will give it time to warm up. With outside temperatures in the upper teens I don’t want to have troubles with sluggish mechanisms or moisture.
But on testing the ZX81 there is a problem. For a reason that I do not understand the new (to me) disk drives will not read my disks. And drive 1 will FORMAT. Also, the unit failed after a while but that could be caused by an 7805 regulator running with no heatsink.
I told a person recently that every time I get involved in hardware or programming, I feel like I have taken an extended automobile trip with pieces and parts of out dated road maps, eventually getting there but not by the way I had planned.
Working with the ZX81 and LarKen disk interface, I LOADed a program and the screen went blank. After waiting I switched off the ZX81 and LOADed the program again. On about the third or fourth try I was called away from the computer for a few minutes and I came back to see the program running. Of course the ZX81 can not be doing things and maintain a screen image but if the program had flashed on the screen “wait a couple of minutes” then went blank then it would have been different.
I did not do much with the ZX81 with either the LarKen or the AERCO disk interfaces because I was having so much RAM pack wobble problems. I did receive a TS1000 with 64K memory on board last March but because I had to do some hardware work to get it to function and my eyesight was marginal, I waited to get new glasses. But the lenses I have are the best prescription that I can have, the loss of vision is not caused by eye changes so much as by the start of cataracts developing. So with that I had no excuse to delay, and I started to move the ZX81 board from the original case to a Suntronics keyboard case. I have no TV in my computer room so I needed a monitor circuit.
I tinkered with the 1/2 height drives used on the TS2068 and while they will work just fine with the TS2068 they do not work with other drive I have is on the ribbon cable. Add any other drive (all are full height Tandon drives) and all lights come on and the drive motors run. The only thing that I notice is that with the drives is that the two 1/2 height drives do not require or have sockets for a terminator resistor while all the other drives do. Same thing with or without terminating resistors on any of the Tandon drives. The half height drives are 5.25 TEAC FD 54B-02-U 40 track drives.
Working with the LarKen ZX81 disk interface I discovered that if both of the full height drives do not have terminating resistors they do not work. Sometimes when I learn something I find out it isn’t necessarily so in all cases.
BEHIND THE SCENES
ZXir QLive Alive! publishes articles, comments and such that touch on topics related to the T/S computers. So in that vein I offer the following:
As Paul Harvey said, “..here is the rest of the story!”
In UPDATE MAGAZINE for October 1992 Frank Davis wrote: “We had intended to give you Jim Bretz PAYROLL PROGRAM. This has been delayed till the next issue. The error was mine and the two kittens, who carried off the package (and hid it) that contained the disk with the program. Yes, I had a backup of the disk… but (and here I get to tear out my last remaining hair) it was in the same package. I have found it, but too late to print in this issue.”
Frank has two large dogs and two cats. The two cats are 16 years old Burmese tomcats. I have seen the two dogs but not the two cats. Frank and Carol also have a – A. country estate, B. cabin, C. retreat, D. hideaway, the scene of the ISTUG picnic out yonder where its less noisy than the big ex-circus city of Peru. He was checking the country estate and found a snake that was in the process of “eating” a kitten. After tossing the snake over the fence, he found two more 2.5 week old kittens. Since the mother cat had been killed on the country road he brought the kittens back to the city residence and took care of them. All old stories about tomcats killing kittens aside, the two tomcats provided the “motherly” care such as the mandatory bathing of the kittens and even worrying about where the kittens were if not in sight. And those were the kittens that Frank referred to. That is one of the unexpected incidents that make delays in publication.
Carol added this information, “And to let you know, the kittens are alive and well. The Vet’s wife where we bought the kitten formula now teases us that they know who to call when there are any orphans. Actually, we are fairly experienced – the two tomcats were part of a litter that we raised on bottle feeding 16 years ago when the mother died. A female cat from that litter went with good friends in Colorado and we hear that she’s still doing well.”
Don Lambert, Chairman
TIMEX/Sinclair NorthAmerican
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