I need to get back to cleaning/restoring my TRS-80 equipment. Cleaned up the external drive boxes for the Model I but the capacitors on the power supplies in two out of three of them look like unexploded ordinance so that's the next thing that needs soldering iron love. The Model IV is still in its plastic bag cocoon, need to crack that and clean it up.
Been distracted by my latest toy, a Tandy Model 100. (It was an impulse buy at the last Ham flea market.) It's an interesting piece of nostalgia; I've never owned one before, but I distinctly remember playing with one in a Radio Shack when they first came out... thirty years ago. It's handy as a vintage thing you can just stuff in a bookcase and pull out when you want it, and it has the best laptop keyboard ever so it's sort of addictive to poke at. It's also amusing to set it next to an iPad or Android tablet and ponder just what's happened over those thirty years. When it comes to hardware projects associated with it I'm vaguely considering getting a Bluetooth->RS-232 module for it so I can do data transfer without wiring up. (I also need to put together a "proper" data transfer cable. The one I'm using now is cobbled together from three different switch console/terminal/null modem adapters. A single piece would be nice, and I don't think the hardware handshaking is *quite* right as-is.)
I might be getting another IIgs to replace the one with the bad keyboard controller. In theory at least I probably owe it to the broken one to make a token attempt to fully diagnose it/rule out it's something fixable. Not too optimistic but you never know. Eventually I want to drag out the mini logic analyzer and puzzle some more over the spurious video RAM corruption issue I've seen on a couple of my Commodore PET motherboards. It's... mysterious, and will undoubtedly be super-fun to track down. Perhaps poking at the IIgs might be a good warmup. (The difference of course is the PET is actually repairable once the problem's nailed down.)
Been distracted by my latest toy, a Tandy Model 100. (It was an impulse buy at the last Ham flea market.) It's an interesting piece of nostalgia; I've never owned one before, but I distinctly remember playing with one in a Radio Shack when they first came out... thirty years ago. It's handy as a vintage thing you can just stuff in a bookcase and pull out when you want it, and it has the best laptop keyboard ever so it's sort of addictive to poke at. It's also amusing to set it next to an iPad or Android tablet and ponder just what's happened over those thirty years. When it comes to hardware projects associated with it I'm vaguely considering getting a Bluetooth->RS-232 module for it so I can do data transfer without wiring up. (I also need to put together a "proper" data transfer cable. The one I'm using now is cobbled together from three different switch console/terminal/null modem adapters. A single piece would be nice, and I don't think the hardware handshaking is *quite* right as-is.)
I might be getting another IIgs to replace the one with the bad keyboard controller. In theory at least I probably owe it to the broken one to make a token attempt to fully diagnose it/rule out it's something fixable. Not too optimistic but you never know. Eventually I want to drag out the mini logic analyzer and puzzle some more over the spurious video RAM corruption issue I've seen on a couple of my Commodore PET motherboards. It's... mysterious, and will undoubtedly be super-fun to track down. Perhaps poking at the IIgs might be a good warmup. (The difference of course is the PET is actually repairable once the problem's nailed down.)