Speaking the truth over here!

Sadly the computer doesn't support CAT-5, because it would surely need some to get rid of the rats. But at least the rats keep hardware bug from creeping up.

lol rat shit 232

Some old capacitors wouldn't be happy with much time with isopropyl. Polystyrene capacitors will degrade. I have also had cases of it attacking coax cables. The insulation between the center conductor and the shield seemed to soak up the isopropyl and distort.

I this case it's more of a rinse instead of a soak in the IPA though, right? Just enough to help get rid of any residual water and unwanted microbiome...

I agree, However I wouldn't use a high percentage of alcohol, maybe the strongest you can get from the first aid section at the store.

Do you have anything against cleaning it with an ultrasonic cleaner?

@@christo930 It may be too aggressive.

Nicely spotted!

Ken swinging in with the proper expert diagnosis! Gonna have to get you down here to help get this thing and the printer fully up and running one of these days!

I could stare at those gorgeous 7-segments all day.

Those desctop meters are amazing I have a 1970s simpson meter that has a nixie tube display.

it looks as if it would spring right into your face when you apply wrong voltage

@@timothydelaval1089you lucky dog. I have a Simpson multimeter that has early LEDs. Pretty rare I believe. Maybe not.

Much better than propping a clamp meter up with a screwdriver!

I'm not sure DEC would be happy with our new naming scheme, lol.

You never know what you'll get on the Usagi Electric channel. Vacuum Tube computers? Insanely loud printers? The Last of Us? Everything is on the table!

Wow Foghat...I'd forgotten! 👌

Wow, flask back to my college days!

"flash"

RIP Lonesome Dave.

"Slow ride, take it easy!"

would the Envoy work on the centurion(or is it beyond 24x80 ability?) ( your other comment notes the probable failure for the chips - try a card swap between terminals first ?) Presumably CRT in the rat one is power supply related and solvable ?

It's not unusual for the RS driver chips to get blown out. All it takes is some kind of surge on the RS-232 line when it's run a long distance.

@@highpath4776 The ADDS Envoy will work with the Centurion system(s). The ADDS Envoy terminal is a re-packing of the ADDS 520 & ADDS-580 that we used at Warrex (Centurion) in the mid 1970s on the CPU4 system.

@@russellhltn1396 Correct the RS-232 lin driver & recv. IC like the SN75188 & SN75189 ( or 14188 & 14189 ) failed often after lightning storms within miles of the computer system. The long RS-232 cable from the computer to the terminal acts like an antenna when lighting is in the area and blowout the RS-232 I/O ICs on the terminal ( and also the Centurion 4-Port MUX card ).

Good luck finding the Static shift register chips. It was the reason ADDS stopped production of several lines (580/880/980/620) Then the regent series was produced followed by viewpoint. The video memory card is sectioned by 3 groups of 8. abdhp is only need once per section not all lines. Check test key -L clear screen abdhp -K K abdhp -K W abdhp . re: ctrl is control key, space is space bar. The space is important. Any bad shift registers will show as a @ sign. FYI -K was direct line access @ line 1, W line 24

I was silently screaming this at 25:44 when he tried jumpering the pins on the serial port! 😱

Thinking the same thing for the BNC Jack. Otherwise I can't make sense of it. The number of things that video output is not a standard on when it has a built-in display is so annoying. oh and @iroll you're right I hit the timestamp and immediately went AAAAARrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

The rat machine might not be permanently out of the picture. Would it be possible to sub the CRT module from the clean machine into the rat machine? If only to give the rat machine a second chance to show something? In order to better deodorize the rat machine parts, perhaps a dunk of each board for a few hours in some Nature's Miracle or equivalent enzyme/bacterial product from a pet store might be helpful. An emanation of especially pungent ammonia odor is good news here, for it means the waste is breaking down, releasing its nitrogen. (Sometimes a situation has to stink worse before it ceases stinking.)

"We do these things not because they are easy, but because I'm a little dumb." - John F Usagi.

Ah, a day in the life for shango066, too.

Thank you so much!

Ah! I totally didn't think about that, but makes perfect sense!

@@UsagiElectric as mentioned in some other comments I have an Otrona Attache portable computer that is about the same overall size as the ADDS terminal but I think the crt is larger and it has two 5.25" floppy drives. But no built-in acoustic coupler/modem. It could even run from battery using a separate power pack thing. I've never seen the power pack. In the early 80s I did some programming for building energy audit software at a place that was selling it to utility companies after a federal mandate required them. They were marketing it with either Compaq Portables or the more compact Otrona. The "base" Otrona ran cp/m on a z80 but most wound up being sold with a PC compatibility card that ran a slightly modified DOS 2.1 on an 8088 or 8086.

All amplitude modulated signals share the use of a modulated carrier wave whose amplitude is, well, modulated.

Domesticated rats actually make really good pets. They're very intelligent and friendly. I had a pet rat a long time ago, and it was amazing how friendly he was. He loved to climb up on my shoulder and eat sunflower seeds lol. He loved to be held and petted too, and one time he even fell asleep in my hand!

Sounds like an expert!

You're totally right, I don't think a rat could have comfortably fit inside of this thing anyways. I've seen a few proper rats in NYC, and you're right, they're massive!

@@ct92404 Mine like to come sleep with me on the couch, and two of my girls like to sleep in the blankets with me. One was an escape artist and would open the cage door at 4am to come find me and crawl into bed with me. They aren't called pocket puppies for no good reason.

The retro computer forum transformed into a zoology class 😅

Heard about that, it probably really is the best way to clean this stuff.

Yeah, I don't see cleaning the now-parts-machine as a 'shift in gears'. You rather expect twists and turns with projects like these, all the while holding out hope that the 'parts machine' may get a fresh keyboard one day too :)

Can't say I didn't warn you ;P

Yep - Ultrasonic cleaning would do a lot. A lot of people, myself included, use it a lot to clean up contaminated (battery leak, fluid spill) and/or corroded circuit boards. Keep in mind that older electronic parts can be dried out and cracked over time, so that can be a problem. They should be replaced anyway, but thorough inspection and checking is always needed.

I like when he does that. My take for a long time has been, "it's already broken, whats the worst that will happen? It will be broken when i'm done?". Funny enough, things get fixed faster that way because you don't waste time thinking about something 2x longer than you need to because of fear of breaking it.

I doubt he would do that if he seriously expected anything to explode.

Sometimes, you just gotta send it!

It's just Schrödingers cat. Until you try, it's both dead and alive, and only trying it out will show you which is true.

@@2009dudeman That's my personal tech-support guarantee. "It won't be any *more* broken after I have a go at it!"

I doubt you use tap water though. So much (natural) contaminants in that I wouldn't buy from you. But for this videos purpose it was fine.

@@bzuidgeest It's literally just Deionized water, a.k.a. purified water. And we manufacture for some of the biggest companies, including stuff in your computer, so you kinda already do. Also, if you travel by plane then I hope you don't mind :)

All the Warrex / Centurion minicomputer PCBs had the solder flex remove during mfg by a trip to the Sears dishwasher for a wash cycle (without any heat dry cycle). The PCB air dry in a rack for two day the moved to a heated burn-in rack with all DC voltages ( +5, +12,-12 ) for 48 hours for being tech-ed and installed in to a Centurion system. We even ran field repair returns in the Sears dishwashers as needed. Yes the Sears dishwasher was purchased at the local Sears store in the mall.

Came here to say it , but you beat me to it. People who object to washing PCBs have never worked in a large-scale manufacturing environment.

@@kenromaine2387 I have used my dishwasher so often over the years for PCBAs. Sometimes it's just easier than cleaning them by hand.

Of course they are. And it scares me that that wasn't obvious to him...

PCB assembly houses often will use what is essentially a dishwasher, just with no boil cycle, and drip dry, and regular dishwashing powder, to clean new boards after assembly. Big volumes they have a big machine, but small runs just a regular dishwasher is often used.

Why does water kill phones then? IDGI

@@seth8629 Because the phone has a charged battery in it. Take the battery out, and remove water sensitive components (speaker, things that use water soluble glue, etc.) and it can be hosed down. The damage comes from having electricity pass through contaminated water, causing electrolysis and rapid corrosion. No electricity, no electrolysis or rapid corrosion even when using contaminated water that is conductive. In college as an experiment we tried submersion cooling computers to see the effects it had on cooling efficiency. Essentially to see if it could be more cost efficient and environmentally friendly to passively liquid cool computers, instead of using fans or pumps to air/liquid cool them. Turns out, no, the best form of cooling is actually just an air cooler on a big a** radiator. Guess we came to the same conclusion people did a long time ago. But, for our experiment we essentially just took a big plastic storage tub, filled it with various liquids (we used distilled water, vegetable oil, motor oil (used it in our cars afterwards), mineral oil, we even tried a couple types of alcohols courtesy of the chemical engineering department (cleaning or solvent based, not the drinking kind). Distilled water didn't cause an issue as long as we rinsed and dried the boards first, we actually tested the water throughout the test to make sure it was free of contaminates that would make it conductive so we didn't damage the boards. The only things that actually damaged the boards was the solvents, they must have eaten away at several components on the board, and we expected this. Water and the various oils however caused no damage to the board.

I worked in a TV repair shop for a while. They taught me to always wash the high voltage transformer when replacing the usual parts. We used a water with a dish washing soap. Then it was dried with a blow dryer and that was it. Why shouldn't it work? It had to. However, I recovered some phones that were sleeping with fish for a while (battery on). I think the tons of rust and electrolysis products were harder to clean up than just some rat poo. It was really, really surprising the phones started to work. I was almost confident that you can just wash electronics and it would work. But well, there was that one lousy rubber dome keyboard. After washing and drying it became absolutely dead.

@@seth8629 Partially because the phone has a live battery with a charge in it, while the disconnected circuit boards do not, and were given a proper drying before power was applied. Water and powered circuitry do not mix because it causes electrical shorts, since the water is conductive.

I had kitchen in orange, sofa and chairs in orange black and brown and diff pattern same for wallpaper

@@highpath4776 remember the avocado green appliances... or those counter tops? There are just things in life that you can't un-see LOL... Well, the retro look is now coming back... How interesting!

Silent 700 with magnetic bubble memory was an absolute BEAST. I went through a lot of thermal paper.

No, that modem will never do 9600. On a good day it will do 300 baud. The 9600 setting is for bypassing the modem and go directly through the serial port in the middle.

The internal acoustic coupled MODEM only works at 110 BAUD or 300 BAUD. For the other support speeds you have to use the RS-232 connection on the DB-25 connector and set the switches to match the BAUD rate you need.

You shouldve been in a VC with him, he once did a Penis joke with the Long Teletype Carriage for the Bendix

I was thinking the same thing - so the "sudden shift" was more a "finally!" for me.

In the words of the Fresh Prince, "He a little confused, but he got the spirit!"

Hardware flow control can also use RTS (Request To Send) and CTS (Clear To Send). So to have the best chance to get loopback on db-25 rs232 you would want to connect 6, 8, and 20 together, 4 to 5, and 2 to 3.

Depends on the terminal. A lot of them only need 2,3 & 7. They might have a "bias" to keep the other pins happy if nothing is connected to them.

Sorry, foggy memory. Should be RTS (Request to send), CTS (Clear to send) and DCD (Data carrier detect). It has been a while since I last made 3 wire RS232 cables...

@@russellhltn1396True, but it couldn't hurt to properly set the handshaking pins. Having DCD active should also light up the Carrier light on the front panel. Also, that modem switch on the side might just be for turning the audio coupler on an off but it could also flip the data inputs to the coupler or force a fixed baud rate as well. Most audio couplers worked at 75, 110 or 300 baud in the late 70s/early 80s in my experience (ignoring the weird 75/1200 split things that came along later for services like Prestel)

It really is stunning!

Yep, somewhere I still have the first hard disk I ever bought, about $400 for 60 megabytes in 1986. It was so noisy I put it 15 feet away in a closet. Fortunately Macs and SCSI could handle that distance.

Absolutely preposterous, I absolutely ensure that I absolutely never use the word "absolutely" excessively!

Recoating may not be needed. I have had recovered CRTs turn out to work just fine. The outside conductive coating they apply is way more than is needed. The current is extremely low.

@@kensmith5694 Not so much to replace that portion lost but to stop the edge of the remaining aquadag from coming loose over time and the flakes finding their way where they shouldn't.

I think it works as a capacitor in the high voltage cirquit - it might be out of tune@@kensmith5694

lot more technology in cars now, you seem to be paying for heated seats, airbags, most systems are injection turbo with aircon and so on

Agree a nice car for $3K and a 1,400 sq ft house with 3 bedroom, 2 baths & 2 car garage for $25K in Dallas with a years pay still in your pocket in 1975. My starting hourly pay at Warrex / Centurion was about $4 per hour in 1975.

@@kenromaine2387 10k per annum Mortgage on one income at 2.5x annual income

Looks like a standard 5.5" CRT module used in CNC machines and in all kinds of industrial stuff.

@@mrnmrn1 Yeah. A simple plug and play standard module. But still mega cool.

This.

Did they make monitors, or just CRT tubes?

They did a whole lot more! They had/have a division called Ball Aerospace and have been a defense and NASA contractor since their early days. I’m just down the road from their HQ.