Curious though - surely you can get a far more capable hobby-grade multimeter these days for around that money and then you can use it for all sorts of diagnosis outside of power rail monitoring!
August West wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news2.kororaa.com:
So many have said so. But I really enjoyed VME/B. Sure as hell preferred it to anything I have used since.
Jules wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@remove.this.yahoo.co.uk:
But if you just connect your 20 (or 24) pin plug to it and it checks all the wires at once, then it would make sense. Not saying that is how it works but I can't be sure quite how it is to be used.
But it's the only operating system I've come across where the customer had to pay a lot extra for the privilege of having access to the operating system API (aka system calls)...
True, it is hard to tell. Personally though I think I'd rather have a tool that required me to check pins individually but was useful for many other things, that one that did a single job only. Unless I was a PC repair shop, I suppose - then it'd make sense!
Or your first line IT repair team were made of people you didn't trust to remember all the functions of the 24 pins and get the pin in the right hole, and supply the right signals to power the supply to start with.
There are many reasons why you might want to remove 10 minutes of effort per supply for the cost of a small self contained zero knowlage tester.
Of course, if you only have one supply then testing with the meter might be a better way to go.
We still have some hardware, even though we've now moved to a new building. Don't know if any of the wiring etc is still lurking in the Computing Service buildings.
This is our database of artifacts including Ring stuff:
Aha - I knew there was still quite a bit of hardware at the uni, no idea about the wiring.
Any chance the database web interface can be tweaked to allow casual browsing? At the moment you appear to have to know what you're looking for (fair enough) rather than being able to see what's in the collection (which would also be handy)
A search with the default field data just yields no results.
Watch that you don't 'lose' stuff in the database too: where a fairly mundane machine may have a particulary rare / valuable / interesting board or add-on fitted, you need people skilled enough to recognise this and make sure it's recorded in some form of notes field.
I'm still trying to figure out the best way of coping with this for Bletchley's system; it's all too easy to lose information about a system if everything's pigeon-holed into database fields. It's easy to lose relationships between separate components too (e.g. "this display belongs with this machine and not some other that may look identical")
Incidentally (possibly of interest to cam people), Jim Austin has half of the uni's IBM 3084 mainframe - see
cheers
Jules
Just searching for 'a' or 'the' or similar brings up lots of hits.
I don't know who is in charge of the database, or doing the curation. It was lucky that it was done, since David Wheeler who provided most of the comments died unexpectedly 18 months ago. We've lost Roger Needham too. Maurice Wilkes is still around, but he's 93.
Freeform hypertext? The site you cite seems to do fairly well with a few basic fields (date, manufacturer, etc) and then description. These days put anything in text and Google will find it.
Interesting. Shame he doesn't seem to have any discs :(
Theo
You might have been able to write the translator in GEORGE macros, but it would have run rather slowly.
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