Ebay madness

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
Date: Mon Aug 6 13:50:23 2001

>Tony Duell wrote:

> > I'm not above a bit of soldering to repair a system either. But then I'm
> > not going to make it my lifelong ambition to buy/acquire dead machines with
> > a view to repairing them. Life's too short, and besides, I'm a klutz with a
> > soldering iron...
> This is an atitude that I can't seem to agree with... To me, part of the
> computer collecting hobby is repairs/restorations. It wouldn't be so much
> fun if you didn't have to get inside the machines and fix them.

Jerome Fine replies:

Just though I might jump into this discussion.

Tony, I suspect that you find that you find that fixing hardware is so enjoyable
that you may not understand that other people have a similar OCD (obsessive
compulsive disorder) but it is just focused in another direction.

For example, I understand that Dick (Richard Erlacher) enjoys being lowered
into molten iron (feet first one inch an hour).

Sellam Ismail enjoys egging Dick on.

I enjoy finding bugs and making enhancements to the RT-11 operating system and
its layered products.

Others enjoy running video games on the original computer they played with
when they were children. (Eventually I hope to enjoy Super Star Trek by
making enhancements and fixing bugs.)

> And how can life be too short for a hobby? A hobby, surely, is what you
> do because you enjoy it ;-)

Correct. So If I spend 6 months reducing the number of words used in low
memory by the SL: (Single Line Editor) in RT-11, I consider that challenge
acceptable. If you spend 6 months getting an PDP-11/44 to run, you consider
that acceptable. Together these two OCDs actually produce a much better
result, but by themselves, they are really not as useful.

For example, I just spent most of the last week of July finding out why a
PDP-11/73 would not boot. Finally found that the DRV11 (M7941)
was bad and it crashed the system. But I don't have the skills to fix
the board, so I purchased a used one that did work. But at the same
time, I did check that all the software was OK. And previously, I had
upgraded that system from RQDX3/RD53/RX50 to a SCSI based
CQD 220/TM/ST11200N and an Iomega Zip drive.

So while I am able to swap boards (so I can keep the hardware running),
I find that I prefer to spend any extra time on software. I know that you
prefer to tinker with hardware. I really don't think your preference is
any better or worse (although on some occasions I would really enjoy
knowing the details that you do), just different. For example, can you
toss off a one instruction program to test that the interrupt vectors work
on a DRV11? And use hardware ODT on a PDP-11 to test it? You
probably can. But then can you go on to write a complete program that
can exercise all of the functions of a DRV11?

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
Received on Mon Aug 06 2001 - 13:50:23 BST