First projects in the new workshop

 PRIORITY WORK TO FREE UP SPACE

I have many many boxes of punched cards that I had to bring to Florida until I can read them all and archive the contents. Once the data is preserved, I will sell, give away or throw away almost all of them. Similarly I have many dozens of 14" single platter disk cartridges most of which can be released once I read and archive the contents. Therefore, the archiving efforts are high priority for the coming months.

GET CARD READERS INTO SHAPE FOR ARCHIVING

I own two Documation card readers, one reads at 600 cards per minute and the other reads at 1000 cpm. These can be driven by a USB based interface designed by Brian Knittel which produces PC files that can be shared and archived. He wrote a driver program and related utilities that control the interface over USB. 

The card readers have a 38 pin connector on the back which transports control and data signals. The design by Brian requires the purchase of the male version of the connector and implements the interface as an external box that sits beside the card reader. I built one like this for my first reader, the M600, but I find the need to drag around the external box to be limiting.

I bought a second reader, a faster M1000, and designed a version of Brian's interface that would sit inside the Documation reader and give the reader a USB connector to replace the original bulky 38 pin one. The interface was built and installed but the M1000 wasn't working properly due to some defects in the reader. 

I began to debug the M1000 with the aim of getting it fully operational using the built in USB connection.  I also connected the external box to the M600 as I would like to have that working as a backup or second system. The USB link to the external interface box was failing, thus something is wrong with my interface which also needs to be diagnosed and repaired.

The M1000 won't pick cards at all using its PCBs, but when I swapped in the cards from the working M600 it worked better. This suggests to me that there are defects on the M1000 cards, but that the solenoid and picker circuits themselves work fine. 

CHECK OUT P390 SERVER DAMAGE DURING PACKING

I was attempting to pad the P390 server with inflating foam within a box for the move, which involved triggering the foam packs and nestling the unit, repeated several times to get all the sides protected. After blowing up one pack, I tried to rotate the cardboard box and server inside to place the next foam pack, however the weight of the heavy server overcame my grip. It crashed on its side. 

This bent the sheet metal, twisted the PCI cards at an angle and made me fear that the motherboard, PCI cards and other parts of the server might be ruined. 

Today I stripped out the PCI cards and disk drives, then powered up the server to see whether it would work at all. It did appear to work properly, other than complaining about configuration changes (as the cards were removed). Obviously it didn't find a boot device either. 

None of the PCI cards appear damaged, nor does the motherboard, but I fear there may be microcracks I don't see. Secondarily I have to hope that the RAID drives don't have damage (head-disk interference or crash) from the impact of the fall. 

I will add in the cards and disk drives, then see if it will boot up into OS/2 successfully. The last and most important test is whether the P390E card starts up and the mainframe software boots successfully.

WHIP UP TAUNTEK IC TESTER 

I had purchased the PCB and design for the Tauntek IC Tester, a device that will provide a sophisticated  of tests on various 7400 series (and other SSI/MSI from the same era) chips, looking at leakage, shorts, opens, unusual current or voltage levels all in addition to the obvious logical function verification. I had to order all the components separately and they hadn't arrived before I began the move. This week the last few showed up, so I took a couple of hours to mount and solder the parts on the board to complete this kit. It will be helpful in investigating ICs on systems I am restoring such as the Telex 9 track tape drives.