Visual 200 Terminal Refurb - Part 1 

🤔 since when do windex bottles make vacuum cleaner noises

Usagi gets a lot more done and is a lot more organized, unlikely to be a good match.

​@@bzuidgeest bah humbug

Sadly, most terminal keyboards from this era are.

"Why is there smoke coming out of your capacitors, Keyboard?"

"Uh... oh! That isn’t smoke. It’s steam! Steam from the hotkeys we’re testing. Mmmm, hotkeys!"

You'd love Joe's Classic Video Games.

@@Vamptonius Thank you for the tip, just watched one video, will definitely watch some more.

Indeed. Having renovated two Keytronics keyboards, the key caps can be removed using a very small crow's foot wrench/spanner to push them out of the chassis of the keyboard. A good soak in warm soapy water means the keys are perfectly clean.

I found my manual for it yesterday, turns out there were three versions of the keyboard! If it was noticeably different, it's probably the non-function key version I would guess. I don't know what the practical differences would be, but it's odd it was configurable like that.

@@TechTangentsMy keyboard is mounted in a wooden board. I have to get it from storage and check if it is working.

Not shorts, static discharge. And yes it's definitely a thing. Use a vacuum cleaner in a dry environment (e.g., Arizona!) and then touch a door knob.

It's difficult to get across on video because of the shutter rate of the camera not syncing easily with the video artifacting, but the characters are rendering fine, the horizontal lines are shifting and offsetting the pixels. You can be sure of this with the inverted video where you can see the "white" edge of the image isn't stable and looks jagged.

Some of those larger caps are extremely hard to get modern equivalents for, even when you can get the right values they're often in different footprints than the original so you have to do shenanigans with leads to get them to fit in the spots on the PCB. Shelby has one or two whole videos just on reforming capacitors if you are curious and want more information

I use distilled water. If i find anything that isn't going to go away i soak that stain in in IPA or window cleaner and try again. I also limit the time in the bath to an shortest possible. Aluminium is no friend of ultra sonic cleaners, especially. Adding a bit of dish soap might help with oil or grease films, but i wouldn't try it unless all hope is lost. Limiting the the number of chemicals you introduce is a good choice, b/c you never now what components react to what solvents, etc.

Texelec has them

I tend to think those caps must be dry?

Can get expensive very quickly when replacing caps of unusual values or form factors.

Also modern equivalents a) may not behave exactly the same regards timing etc. and b) may be inferior quality

@TheErador ya gotta disagree. There are quality manufacturers out there and I spend a lot of time going through new ones 1 at a time checking for a very specific value to make sure I'm putting one in that's spec. Panasonic, Sprague and a few others are good quality parts. Also they are so much more compact that any "weird" size can be achieved by pairing up 2 or if needed 3 (3 almost never happens). My only concern is leakage and the dielectric being dried out causing damage. Reforming doesn't rehydrate nor repair tears in the foil. If it works for someone and they choose that route that's up to them I'm just saying from experience I have seen caps do weird things. Check out good static and tank once under a load etc.... it's just my opinion to never reform. Seen too much to not have this opinion.

@@troybarnes66 Just replace.

You can reuse the cleaning solution a few times i believe, did you factor that in?

@@TheErador I did. I think you need about 10L for up to mATX size boards, so maybe 7L of liquid total, 2L of cleaning solution and the rest deionised water.

Won't they be dried out?

@@blackterminalIf they are, they won't form. A dried out cap is a dead cap, there's no saving that. But i find it rare that the seals break in electrolytic caps, and the electrolyte leaks out.

Ever head picofarads called “puffs”? Saying the letters U F is a valid thing that people do to refer to microfarads. And furthermore there are valid reasons to reform electrolytic caps, saying otherwise is pure ignorance

No? They’re standard ASCII characters, the CRT is not displaying them correctly

@@lunathir look again

@@philstephes I already looked. It is very much not Japanese text. The lines on the display are being skewed to a point where it's almost unrecognizable. One of the shots shows something that should be a black rectangle but it very much isn't showing correctly.

Saying "UF" is Not unusual and makes the understanding easier. Imagine saying "microfarad" hundred times a day. Reforming capacitors is usually enough as long as the device isn't running very frequently.

Good luck to you internet tough guy. I hope you find what you’re looking for.

@@amstacy09 Me too, and it sure looks like it isn’t on this 1 a month channel.

The VT220s were terminals from Digital Equipment Corporation released in 1983. The Visual 200 predates them by 3 years. According to the manual, they were released in March 1980.

Ah ok, that makes more sense since most of the terminals emulated in Linux are DEC models. I probably should have looked at the manpage for GeTTY first.

U don't have to that far lol tbh keyboards that ppl have snacked near are worse than this

calm down man

@@inserttanjiromeme5496 I'm calm, I'm just utterly surprised about how scared people, especially many vintage collectors are of a bit of dust. Of this but of dust is off-putting, then you shouldn't step outside.

@@bzuidgeest Whole different context. You're comparing apples to full metal jackets. You ok bro?

@@bzuidgeestdo you not know what hyperbole is?