Sometimes I am like a computer – I sit here with a blank mind and I have a column to write. But sitting at the left upper corner of my T/S 2068 is a joystick that I bought for $2.00 at the Ft. Wayne HamFest and ComputerFest on November 13th. The joystick is a WICO COMMAND CONTROL which was offered by a table with a lot of Commodore stuff. It works very well and the stick looks like it saw little wear.
They were dealing very well, in fact if you weren’t really wanting to buy you should not make an offer when asked to since they just might accept a ridiculous offer. For instance I say two quite dirty full height 5.25 disk drives with a tag that read $5.00 each. Out of curiosity I lifted them up to see what make and model and they were Tandon TM 100-2A and the seller said they were a bargain. “Very dirty and overpriced,” I said. “Make an offer” and I offered $1.00 for both of them. So my “loot bag” got heavier. Not a total loss since they both worked as is but not without some bell ringing on my Oliger disk system. I wrapped them in newspapers and stored them with other disk drives I have. I wanted to keep the other disk drives clean. One other good buy and at my price was a book. “The Brady Guide To Microcomputer Troubleshooting & Maintenance” by Henry F. Beechhold for $2.00. It gave me lots of clues on how to clean a dirty drive.
My very first buy was a full height single drive case with a Radio Shack disk drive in it. Very compact case and very clean. The case even had an extender for the ribbon cable which meant that I did not have to open the case to plug in the ribbon cable to test the drive. And as I knew it would be, it was a single sided 40 track drive, a TEXAS Peripherals drive. Worked very nicely with no changes to the drive select socket. But it is single sided. I bought the case with the idea of having a pair of half height 40 track drives put in it. A school was selling all their Radio Shack equipment since they have upgraded to a MSDOS clone.
I did buy what was supposed to be 40 track 360K half height drives but turned out to be 720K 80 track drives when I tested them at home. They were marked 360K drives and in another stack was a sign 720K and I wonder if the signs got mixed. He wanted three times as much for the 720K drives. I will have to watch for another chance to buy a 360K drive or two that is half height. What I got is a pair of TEAC 55GFR-553-U drives. I am after a set of drives that is easier to transport to meetings.
The computer column in Popular Electronics (January 1994 issue) was moaning about the fact that the computer industry does not have a full complement of engineers. What they need is a DOCUMENT ENGINEER to write the manuals so that they make sense and are well written. He suggested that a DOCUMENT ENGINEER should have a Masters in English and at least a Masters in computer programming. So that would require a DOCUMENT ENGINEER to have at least a Doctor’s degree. And here I am trying to write a document to explain how to use a rather simple program and I am not a programmer! Here I am trying to swim and I can not even float yet!
If anyone is using SPDOS (RAMEX Millenia K) there is one oddity that will make you think that the computer and SPDOS has locked up. In both the Larken and the Oliger disk systems the interfaces try to LOAD or SAVE 5 or 6 times before reporting an error. But SPDOS makes 50 tries. So if it goes off with a blank screen and the disk drive is running that is what is happening. Amazing what one can learn if you read and reread the manual.
Yesterday, November 24th, I took another look at the full height drive and case I bought at the HamFest and saw that since the cable connector was extended to outside the case that I could easily use the case without the process of making slots in it for the ribbon cable to add a third drive to the 3.5 and 5.25 720K drives in another case. I remembered my prior try with a 3.5 drive and that nothing worked when it was on line so I thought that it was worth a try since this was a different type of 3.5 drive. I had to swap the SSDD drive with a DSDD drive and then add a connector to the ribbon cable on the 720K case. I made the DSDD drive (a TANDON TM 100-2A drive) drive #2 although it is the first on the line of the ones on the cable. Also since the other drives had no place for a terminator resistor I tried it with out one. I had success with the setup. So now I have three drives in two cases to represent a 3.5 720K and 5.25 both 360K and 720K drives. I was even dreaming of a 3 inch drive but I did not see any place to get disks so that is out. But does anyone even use the 3 inch drives?
I have used the Oliger disk interface so much and even when using the Larken interface it does the same disk drive light on the selected drive that it does on the Oliger interface alone. Now what I am writing about is the LED on the front of every drive. On the Larken interface it only comes on when the drive is in use but on the Oliger it is on all the time on whatever drive is the selected drive. Why the comment? Well, I was recently setting up a set of three drives for my traveling computer and it has a pure Larken interface. I was testing them and panicked until I realized that on the Larken the selected drive’s light does not light up till it is in use. I thought that the system was down. I had gotten so used to looking at the drives to see which was selected that I forgot about the way that the Larken handles the drive light. On the Oliger even in the Larken mode the drive light is on all the time.
This week (today is 12 03 1993) I received more information on how Richard Jelen is converting his T/S 2068 into a portable using nicad batteries to power it and a 12 volt TV. I will include the material in the next issue of ZXir QLive Alive! since I will have to type in the hand written material and get the sketches and drawings included. He did cut the current draw using some CMOS chips. One other project Mr. Jelen is involved in is building up a disk interface from bare boards he ordered from John Oliger. See the cassette LOAD AID circuit schematic that is in this issue for some of his earlier work.