Fancy pants are here: teespring.com/magic-repair-pants?pid=1166&cid=104260 I'm told that for a while (as of 11/21/2020) there is free ship on US orders over $50 using the code: FREEOVER50
G'day Marc - first off, nice job fixing all those interfaces. I hope to see the 9825 doing some work in future videos. Now, the real reason for my post - what is the conversion from 'S M L XL XXL' to waist sizes (like size 32 or 36 or 40 or etc)?
Being a Dummkopf I forgot to read your message past clicking the link and ignored the code. Still looking forward to the pants to help me fix an ancient one-off instrument that even the manufacturer has no recollection of and that has OEM bodge wires galore... As always, I eagerly await all your videos, best Patreon investment on the web in my opinion!
The printing on the fancy pants are done using a process called "dye sublimation". It's a fascinating process, the print is actually applied to a substrate, such as paper, then pressed to the fabric and heated, the design is turned into a gas, which dyes the fabric.
@@anonymousarmadillo6589 printers and computers had more brand recognition and generated more revenue than instruments when the company was split so HP management did things backwards. Instrumentation tried to maintain the culture created by Hewlett and Packard while computing and printing gutted it under Carly Fiorina. It was a sad thing to watch and be a part of.
Brings back memories. I developed a program on this machine to calculate odds and pay-offs for horse races in the ‘70s and 80s. I had to install a serial interface to drive my centronics 580 dm printer, that could print at a staggering 80 cps in caps only. I bought mine as a used unit for a bargain price of $12,500. I never upgraded the memory because at the time, memory cost 1.2 million per megabyte
This is awesome Marc. I designed a test station for measuring and calibrating hearing aid amplifiers in the early 80’s. It was controlled by a fully loaded HP85. All four slots were used. Rom drawer, 16k expansion memory, parallel interface and IEEE interface. I used the parallel interface to create an 8 bit expansion bus within the test stand to control A/D converters and variable gain amplifiers. Your series brings back memories of those glorious years writing HP basic code. Thanks for the memories...
I still have a 1999 HP Test & Measurement catalog that I decided to keep for sentimental reasons when HP's T&M division was spun off as Agilent later in this year. HP's catalogs were always impressive books, reflecting the state-of-the-art in its field. When quickly browsing through the catalog, there were not so many people in the pictures and even less where trousers are visible. In the editorial, there were Bill and Dave shown lounging in their armchairs, but that's pretty much it. Fashion had calmed down at the end of the past millennium, but engineers were still shown wearing shirts and ties. As far as I could spot, there is only person depicted from head to toe, a lady sitting next to the HP TS-5500 cellular phone test platform. The exposure of the picture was optimized for the test equipment, leaving the person a bit dark in the image. She wears a timeless business dress that would go well still today. The fashion craziness of the early 1980s had disappeared from the 1999's catalog, just as the name HP from the T&M field a few months later.
this is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon at work- a few days ago I had never thought about some switches used by the NASA a few decades before I was born... and now I have seen 2 videos about them
The sounds of the HP 9825 printer and cassette reader brings back a lot of memories. I spent a summer in the 1970’s at Carl Zeiss Canada, programming the 9825 to make precise measurements with the Zeiss Coordinatograph. Great computer for its time. I didn’t have the Fancy Pants though.
A brilliant full-circle demonstration of *why* these are so complex. Thank you for producing this entire series. These modules, and the calculator was truly fascinating to see in action as well as to have such a thorough explanation of the internal function, circuits and thought process during repair.
Yes, using LCDs instead of CRTs in the restored control room is a sin. But it would be more acceptable if at least the LCDs were bigger so the rounded edge of the monitor faceplate cover up the corners. It would look like more CRT-like, not as horrible as it is now with these perfectly rectangular displays.
LOL @10:55 "Not bad for a small calculator." - CuriousMarc describing a calculator that's literally many times bigger than the PC I'm watching this video on.
We had those identical push buttons in a utility plant I worked in. I had to pull them apart to change bulbs, and do other repairs from time to time. They had those little rubber condoms on the bulbs to indicate the state of the circuits.
A classic repair Marc. You have a great basement, cool toys to play with and, most importantly, an understanding wife & Family.....you’re a very lucky guy !
I am amazingly impressed by this series of videos. You could have thrown you hands up multiple times but you kept going and fixed them all. Way to go Marc!
If you want real vintage fancy pants you'll have to use a thick, heavy knit polyester fabric for that true 1970's look and feel. Add in a butterfly collar and you will be repairing in style.
Thank you for this amazing series. Not only is it fascinating as an engineer watching you get these lovely pieces of history working again, you always add such interesting details of how they work at the lowest level. You are one of my favourite channels by far!
I wish one could still buy a modern variant of these Apollo era switches for modern homebrew projects. With LEDs for lights builtin or tiny screens and optionally a modern bus to digitally query the status of the switch avoiding an extera per-switch cable!
I have used a HP desktop calculator design in the mid-1960. It had a CRT, a magnetic card reader and HP-IB output. This calculator had no IC!!! Only diodes and transistors! The memory used magnetic core, the ROM was composed of a PCB the size of the machine full of diode! Registers was composed of a small PCB with transistors.
That is the HP 9100! The quintessential scientific calculator that started it all. The 98xx series is a descendant of that. Not having a 9100 is one of the remaining big holes in my collection.
Well, this is an absolutely delightful finale Mr. Fancypants! It must have given a nice feeling you were able to repair all of these modules, I hope. I found it very entertaining and learned something from every episode. I really love the way you put these videos together, the music choices are excellent. Thank you Marc!
Those lighted switches were real nice. The only problem was they were great at peeling your fingernails back if you reached for one quickly and didn't hit it square in the middle. They took enough force to push that if you weren't looking at your hand, it wasn't necessarily obvious if you were pushing on the button front or the metal of the console. If you were half and half, when the switch finally clicked and dropped an eighth of an inch, you fingernail was on the console face and got peeled back a bit. Just a bit annoying.
"You could get a nice beautiful cable, made by HP, but I made my own"... Yeah, so do many of us. Nothing like getting a piece of HP gear for a good price only to discover that you'll pay through the nose for the official accessories. Fortunately, HP stuff is pretty well documented, and it's usually easy to make your own.
I hope HP didn't ever try to obscure or restrict info for their stuff. I mean, what's the point? If you sell to engineers, you can bet your bottom dollar they'll just reverse engineer it and make their own accessories to suit their needs.
@@anomaly95 Pretty much. But they also take into account that said engineers will often design their own interfaces to go between the test gear and the product being developed. Such as designing a header into the mainboard of that product to interface with the logic analyzer so you don't need to bother with all those damn test leads. I designed the PCB for my own isolation network board (resistors and capacitors, with values taken from the HP technical manuals), so the logic analyzer wouldn't interfere with what I was measuring. This comes included with the "official" breakout cable assembly that you'd get from HP to plug into the pod. But good luck finding them cheap. It was easier and cheaper to do it myself. Works with both my HP 16510 logic analyzer card, and the Agilent 54622D mixed-mode oscilloscope I have. Because all the documentation was readily available, designing the interface was easy.
Great video. At first glance that seems a bit complicated, but when I think about what it would take to do the same thing on a modern computer, the old way is much more simple and elegant. One line of code to configure a timer I/O.
Imagine the uses of a matrix of the switches in a project box. Terminals in the back to expose all the connections. A 4x5 or so. The uses would be endless.
Excellent repair series Marc, brilliant persistence - I really must get myself some of those fancy pants so I can repair some of my trickier projects!!!
I truly enjoyed this series - particularly the repairathon :) Amazing stuff! At 6:45, if I understood correctly (big IF), I think the program would be faster but still correct if line 4 read: if N[I] = 1; jmp 9. This would skip over the for J loop for the multiples that contain previously discovered prime factors. This was a great series! Keep up the great work.
@@CuriousMarc ironically they are actually the height of fashion atm, revival of the 90s 70s revival. Case in point us.boohoo.com/tall-check-flares/TZZ93412.html www.prettylittlething.com/stone-check-ribbed-flared-trousers.html www.rustyzipper.com/shop.cfm?viewpartnum=366366&backtorow=8&jumpshow=0&SIZE=&ERA=ALL&TYPE=Pants%20%2D%20Flares&SEARCH=&GENDER=Mens
I would also love to see them in cotton rather than poly, cos the last thing vintage repair needs is static lol. And yeah definitely a better cut lol. Im tempted to get some, had some lovely check boot leg pants in the 90s lmao
Hi ! @ 0:16 - the TI "Integrated Circuits Catalog". Looked familiar so I walked over to my bookshelf. TI "The TTL Databook for Design Engineers". Fifth European Edition 1982. Was a great aid on understanding PC/XT/AT and expansion card inards from the mid-80s onwards in the time before Internet. Got it at one point when the next edition appeared from a company I worked for part-time. Also a great help when building add-ons for my Z80-gear still in the 2010s. :-)
I wonder if the HP catalog "magic pants" guy was is either a HP employee or some actor. Might be interesting to see if he is still alive and willing to give an interview.
In the Army in the late '60s we had those same switches in the search Radar consoles. The designations on the switch buttons were classified and had to be locked in the safe. I have a whole story about that but it's that military intelligence is an oxymoron! ☹️😱
"The designations on the switch buttons were classified and had to be locked in the safe." That makes sense from a security standpoint. You can get a good idea of how a piece of equipment works (or even operation procedures) just by looking at the control panel or switch legends. These switches could be custom ordered from MSC with engraved legends with black paint infill. I would bet NASA also didn't do this due to security concerns during the Apollo era.
In the very end of the late 70's I had fancy pants like the HP guy that I wore in the electrical engineering office while a trainee. By the 1980 what was I thinking.
A loooong time ago, some photographers came to our service dept. To take some pictures of us for a leaflet. I wore my "repair red shoes" at the time. Unfortunately, the picture on the leaflet was in black and white. I like to think it is because of my red shoes, as othe pictures were in color. 😁
For me, it's not even the fact they used LCD screens, but just looking at those pictures makes me think that they did not intend to put much effort into it.
Shame that the merchandise manufacturer does not offer the pants as "Boot Cut" like in the HP picture, but I guess those are just not in fashion at the moment... My dad just dug out his old HP 97 programmable calculator from the attic. The battery was dead (but you can buy modern replacements from ebay), and unfortunately the printer won't advance the paper anymore, because the roller is not sticky enough anymore (not sure if we will be able to fix that - do you perhaps have on of those in your collection and can make a video about it, Marc?). But the calculator itself fired right up and worked, and it also has those beautiful Bubble LED Displays. That thing uses a weird circuit where you cannot use it with the wall adapter if there is no working battery in it, as it uses the battery to pull down the voltage for some reason.
Rubber rollers and capstans are the bane of vintage electronics. Look up the HP tape episodes, you can probably repair them like an HP tape capstan by coating them with plasti-dip on it.
So the programmable timers are separate and distinct from the TI clock interface circuitry? It seemed quite a bit of an over-engineered solution to require a microcontroller as an interface to a wrist watch just so the computer can have the time. Seeing now that it can do a lot more, it all starts to make more sense. Does it do any other tricks?
I wonder why it needs a separate built-in register for a "timer" (times 4 in this case). In modern times, I just declare a variable to hold the start time, and the clock needs nothing more than to provide the current time when called. Is 4 integers really a significant amount of memory? Or do these timers have more features than the elapsed time? Is this the _same_ value that counts down (or offers the reset-to value) in the interrupt mode?
The magic pants are real! They took me from neolithic mouth-breather to post human repair guru in only a day! The secret lies in the special manufacturing process, wherein the pants are suffused with magic smoke and disco music as part of a special ritual.
It actually was, in combination with a film camera and filters that would take pictures of the screens since they could not do it real time, and used a high resolution but monochrome display. I actually own two of the high def displays that were used for the film!
@@CuriousMarc the 9845C was an amazing machine. I remember imagining what the future of computer graphics would be like when I programmed a 9845C that controlled a robot and presses for a PC board lamination process at HP, I couldn’t begin to imagine in the 1980s how far and fast computer graphics would evolve.
