All you Tekkies out there...
I just pulled my old Tektronix 4051 out of the garage (no I don't want to
sell it), plugged it in, turned it on and ... and ... and ...
Well all the lights lit, the memory CRT bloomed, and that was that.
Screen wouldn't clear and the machine wouldn't respond to any keystrokes.
It's frozen...
Well it worked fine when I put it in storage and I was wondering if anyone
had any experience getting these to work after years without juice?
I seem to recall that the machine goes through a self-test on power
up: the "busy" and "i/o" lights light and after a few seconds they go out
and a square cursor appears on the screen. Does anyone remember what the
self-test looks for? I'm thinking it may try to trigger the tape to rewind
and wait for the results. I don't know why any electronic part would fail
after years of storage but would seem likely that a tape drive motor might
seize up and stop the machine from completing its test.
It would be an easy matter to free up a motor and a more difficult matter
to diagnose a parts failure. Any ideas before I take the thing apart?
Thanks in advance...
Nick
Nicholas Gessler
gessler_at_ucla.edu
Box 706, 22148 Monte Vista Drive
Topanga, CA 90290-0706
310.455.1630 (home office)
310.825.4728 (UCLA office)
310.825.7428 (UCLA fax)
Special Projects, UCLA Center for Digital Humanities
Founding Co-Director, UCLA Center for Social Complexity (a.k.a. Center for
Computational Social Science)
Founding Co-Director, UCLA Social Interfaces & Networks / Advanced
Programmable Simulations & Environments (SINAPSE)
Instructor, Geography, Computational Geography Track: Simulations,
Cartography, Artificial Culture
In preparation - "Artificial Culture - Experiments in Synthetic Anthropology."
Web Portal:
http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~gessler
Received on Sun Sep 23 2001 - 01:35:44 BST