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List:       classiccmp
Subject:    Re: My Epson QX-10 on YouTube
From:       ard () p850ug1 ! demon ! co ! uk (Tony Duell)
Date:       2013-05-31 19:47:26
Message-ID: m1UiVIS-000J4dC () p850ug1
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> I just like fiddling at the card (as well as component) level, I think; it 
> takes a bit of the fun out of it when everything's integrated onto one (or 
> two) PCBs.

I certainly like an expansion bus, and, in fact, one of the things I 
dsilike about anything remotely recent is that either there's no 
expanison bos or if there is it's very difficult to interface to. So, 
yes, I do like I/O slots. But after that, since I never realy work at the 
board level, I don't much care whether there's a large motherboard with 
a few expansion slots on it (like the QX10) or a passive backpale nwit 
hte CPU, memroy, etc, boards plugged in (like an S100 system).

[Epson disk drives]

> 
> Well, I did mean spare complete units - of course if one failed on me I'd 

Why on earth would you even think of repalcing a compelte drive?

> do what I could to repair it, but like you say there are a couple of ASICs 
> on there, and the heads aren't bomb-proof (I remember a bad Wabash disk 
> tearing the head in one of my 380Z systems right off its mounting once)

Ouch!. Wabash disks were pretty awful, but I never had one actually 
damage a drive. When I was at school, at first you had to use floppy 
disks bought fro mthe school and they were Wabash :-(. Ouch!. In the end 
they let us use disks from elsewhere (like the assortment of Inmac Pluss, 
Berbatim, Dysan, etc that I had...) but they were totally clueless, 
saying things like 'If you use single sided disks, do not attempt to 
format the other side (remember the 380Z treats a double sided drive as 2 
separate single-sided ones), you cna damage the drive heads. Nothing 
woudl convince them that both heads touched the disk no batter which side 
was being used.

I don't know if I was particularly unlucky, but I never had a single 
clueful maths, physics (or computing) teacher.  I hope some other schools 
were better...

-tony

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