I may be in my early 20s but as an engineering student this kind of stuff interests me, and these old retro machines are a really easy way to actually understand what you're looking at unlike modern machines. I keep spending a sizable chunk of my limited student income to keep old hardware alive and I don't see a reason to stop, other students drink their money away I spend it on retro machines
I have always laughed at those that drink their time away while in school. All I could figure is they failed to see that the schooling they were not focusing on was setting them up for the rest of their life. Such a waste but they chose their own future, all I could do was help those who wanted to learn by studying with them. It sounds like you are on the right track.
Lol, my mum broke my big toe with that power supply, she knocked it of the window ledge while dusting in 1988. It’s 2020 and my toe still looks like that of a mutant ogres and still hurts at night sometimes. Commodore literally shaped me.
good memories. we repaired about 150 commodores in the past 4 years. Maybe 5 now. LOL im finally almost to the end. those damn PLA's. I need about 10 more to finish what i have left from this barn find ppl said would never get repaired. BTW. been running the anatchy underground 24/7 on the same C64 for 10 years now. Commodores are rock solid man. with a little love.
I'm pretty impressed with the thermal resilience of modern silicon, particularly desktop CPUs. I've had an e-series AMD Athlon CPU running flat out 24/7 (running BOINC) for well over a decade now and the core temps have risen alarmingly over the past couple of years as the thermal compound deteriorated. Core temps were getting up into the 90s (Centigrade) without the slightest hiccup. Had to run a temp monitor service to avoid runaway temps and auto-shutdown. Eventually decided to remove heatsink and replace the thermal paste and thought I might as well use the opportunity to upgrade the CPU (another e-series Athlon) at the same time. It's now running at 37C flat out. Here's to another decade!! 😎👍
These talks teach you something important. Every factory bodge wire you find on an 80's computer board is responsible for the psychological sufferings of a hardware engineer...
Thanks Bil so much. You are the great one. You have expanded my vocabulary just by me watching this video. I would so love to have a copy of the slides deck presentation so I can review and prepare for the test on Tuesday. I wonder if they're published anywhere? Cheers
Glass usually breaks because of vibration against other objects; the water pressure of the device tends to push and move objects as it washes. But if you place it directly above a heating element and it isn't pyrex, it will break from the difference of temperature.
OK, so one of these days, I will have to fire up my old C128, and 3 floppies, monitor, external ram, to see if it still works. I think I had it on for a few minutes about 3 years ago, and looked fine. It's still original hardware, nothing repaired, but mostly not used for about 3 decades.
The temp/voltage acceleration curves he is showing are part of the accelerated testing methodology. It was thought, back in the 1970's-80's, that the lifetime of the chip could be fairly accurately predicted by this accelerated testing. Then researchers started finding out that the mechanisms that caused failures at these extreme conditions were not always present at the normal operating temperatures. Thus the rule of thumb about a 10C rise in temp halves the lifespan is really a very, very, very poor rule of thumb. Slapping little heatsinks on every ship that feels 'warm' makes one 'feel' good but is nearly worthless.
I agree up to "nearly worthless". Heat dissipation can be tricky in tight place and, at times, counter intuitive. The heat syncs, if properly aligned can help create a positive air flow (yes, a very small flow) that actually helps old C= vent. Conversely, if someone just slaps a bunch of HS onto chips willy-nilly, it can kill what little airflow is possible. but, yes, we have absolutely learned more since the 80s :)
Bill Herd, Bob Widlar, Bob Pease, Steve Wozniak are engineers that are unique to a time. Unfortunately, there are no engineers like them anymore. Mostly because people that think outside of the box are not allowed to survive inside a corporation. There is also the total obliteration of ego inside many corporations nowadays, and many engineers remain nameless because of that. Only the ego of managers and HR is allowed to shine.
Another revelation for me, Medhi forcing obsolescence on engineers answers a long time question mark I had....were the Commodore engineers as good as the Lorraine computer designers....we will never know because of Medhi Ali's forced built in obsolescence into the business plan! Financial suicide for sure, run your company as if you don't have a solution in custom silicon to keep up with the ever decreasing cost/MIP of x86 PC rival to both Amiga A600/1200 and A3000-25/4000-040 levels.
Never reaized how much extreme engineering went into an 8 bit computer, but also, how much of it all was a total kludge all over the place. So many kludges, if you add another one you have to wonder what other forgotten kludge you did elsewhere is going to break from the change. air-war.org
When I watch all these old Commodore soldiers, it majes me wonder how Bill Herd would have reacted to guys in Sinclair or Acorn shirts. Or even Amstrad shirts! Would he be throwing sweets or knives?! I have to say, purely on paper, the Archimedes was a better computer than the A500 (or even the A1200) the Amiga in turn being better being better than the Atari ST (the Falcon was better than the A1200 though) But the Amiga has the biggest and loyalest community ehich automatically makes the Amiga the best computer. The Archimedes and the Falcon were underrated. The Archimedes is still with us in the ARM CPUs that run *EVERYTHING.* Also, I do have a fantasy where David Pleasance bought up Commodore International and also managed to buy up Acorn. To see Dave Haynie work alongside Sophie Wilson or to see Bill Herd's reaction to Hermann Hauser...
Did you hear Bil Herd saying "Ask me now because in 10 years I probably won't be living any more"? I checked his age - he was 60 when he gave that talk. Why? Strange humor or does he have serious health problems?
Dunno for sure, but the man's lead a hard life so my guess is that he knows that and that time is catching up with him. If you don't think about your health you'll pay for it later when you're his age,
Why not just cram all the original IPs into the FPGA and let people keep playing with their retro stuff? I mean, FPGAs that could accommodate VIC, SID, 6502, can be very small and cheap ... I'm just saying, not a real FPGA expert, so there must be a catch that I don't know about. I imagine a small 24-pin FPGA soldered to the DIP converter board, labeled as SID, VICII, etc. Something cheap but fresh and working.
VIC and SID have analog circuits. There are emulators for ARM who try to simulate all the shortcoming of analog to produce sound indistinguishable from new or old SID. VIC to hdmi is somehow frowned upon. I guess those people use CRT without DSPs in them. I mean, you could probably pulse width modulate the FPGA output and create better S-video that is without jail bars. Slippery slope to all circuits on a single FPGA (Mister) to an emulator.
I listened for an hour to the Commodore folk law then he rushed all the interesting technical stuff at then end. I suggest he does that first and ends on funny stuff.
