Talking to myself again...
On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, Doug Spence wrote:
> I'm hoping that they'll let me take it home in pieces. I might go in to
> buy it, and grab the motherboard and leave the rest of the hulk for later.
> Later in the week I'll go back for the drives, etc. It can all be
> disassembled with a single screwdriver, so I hope they let me do something
> like that.
Actually, because of the grounding wires which are connected with
straight-blade screws, I'd need two screwdrivers to disassemble the
machine. :)
I went back on Tuesday to have a look, and I decided not to buy the
machine. After some pleading I was finally allowed to have a look under
the hood, and the machine has empty sockets in exactly the same places as
the one I brought home, so either those sockets are supposed to be empty,
or these AES machines had a common failure mode and parts were donated to
keep something else alive.
When powered up, the machine at the Salvation Army store exhibited the
same behaviour as mine, too. Nothing on the screen, but the floppy drives
would spin for about 40 seconds and stop.
I wasn't able to check to see if the drive heads tried seeking. Mine
don't.
The only difference between the SA machine and the one I brough home is
that the SA machine's keyboard connector isn't cracked, the SA machine is
even dustier and grimier than mine, and the SA machine has only 128K
instead of 192K on the motherboard.
I think the video hardware must be kaput, _or_ it's not supposed to put
anything on the screen until it boots up. In which case, maybe the disk
drive is hosed because it doesn't seek. I have a drive in a Kaypro that's
like that.
I managed to swap the main video chip into the AES from an old display
card for the IBM-PC (an HD46505SP form a Monograph Visionary card from
Interface Technologies Inc.). No difference, except that this one seemed
to run a little cooler.
At least all of the parts in the AES 7100 seem to be common. No custom
hardware to worry about.
I just found out from my brother that one of his high school teachers used
to work at AES Data Inc. as a programmer! So maybe I can locate him and
find out more. If I'm lucky, he'll still have some disks, or know where I
can find some.
--
Doug Spence
ds_spenc_at_alcor.concordia.ca
http://alcor.concordia.ca/~ds_spenc/
Received on Sat Mar 20 1999 - 20:56:55 GMT