So, let me tell you a story about how I ‘fixed’ my first computer. This was the Ancient Days and that first machine was a Northstar Horizon, based on the S-100 bus and the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. You could take the lid off of the machine and see the circuit boards. Here’s a description from the Wikipedia article:
The computer consists of a thick aluminium chassis separated into left and right compartments with a plywood cover which sat on the top and draped over the left and right sides. (It is one of only a handful of computers to be sold in a wooden cabinet. Later versions featured an all-metal case which met safety standards.[5]) The rear section of the compartment on the right held a linear power supply, including a large transformer and power capacitors, comprising much of the bulk and weight of the system. The empty section in front of the power supply normally housed one or two floppy disk drives, placed on their side so the slots were vertical. The compartment on the left held the S-100 motherboard, rotated so the slots ran left-right. Although a few logic circuits were on the motherboard, primarily for I/O functions, both the processor and the memory resided in separate daughterboards.
The manual that came with the computer had circuit diagrams for the boards.
Now, I knew little or nothing about such things. But my good friend, Rich Fritzon, he lived and breathed computers. He knew a thing or two. So, once I got the machine I turned it over to Rich and he wrote some software for it. The most important piece was a WYSWYG text editor that took advantage of the special associative memory board from Syd Lamb’s company, the name of which escapes me.
Anyhow, I had this beast with me when I spent the summer of 1981 on a NASA project. One day the display went all wonky; the images just didn’t make sense. Well, I knew that the CPU board had a synch (synchronization) chip and, well, those wonky images looked like something that would happen if signals weren’t properly synchronized. I mean, I didn’t actually KNOW anything, I was just guessing based on bits and scraps of things I’d heard and read. Based on this guess I removed the motherboard, located the sync chip in the corresponding diagram, removed the synch chip and reseated it, and then put the board back into the machine. When I turned it on, voilà! problem solved. The display was back.
That’s the first and last time I ever fixed one of my machines. That sort of thing would be utterly impossible with today’s machines.
So, let me tell you a story about how I ‘fixed’ my first computer. This was the Ancient Days and that first machine was a Northstar Horizon, based on the S-100 bus and the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. You could take the lid off of the machine and see the circuit boards. Here’s a description from the Wikipedia article:
The manual that came with the computer had circuit diagrams for the boards.
Now, I knew little or nothing about such things. But my good friend, Rich Fritzon, he lived and breathed computers. He knew a thing or two. So, once I got the machine I turned it over to Rich and he wrote some software for it. The most important piece was a WYSWYG text editor that took advantage of the special associative memory board from Syd Lamb’s company, the name of which escapes me.
Anyhow, I had this beast with me when I spent the summer of 1981 on a NASA project. One day the display went all wonky; the images just didn’t make sense. Well, I knew that the CPU board had a synch (synchronization) chip and, well, those wonky images looked like something that would happen if signals weren’t properly synchronized. I mean, I didn’t actually KNOW anything, I was just guessing based on bits and scraps of things I’d heard and read. Based on this guess I removed the motherboard, located the sync chip in the corresponding diagram, removed the synch chip and reseated it, and then put the board back into the machine. When I turned it on, voilà! problem solved. The display was back.
That’s the first and last time I ever fixed one of my machines. That sort of thing would be utterly impossible with today’s machines.