🚀 go-pugleaf

    Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 17:54 EDT
    From: cbarry@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry)

I'm CCing Dave Schmidt, our maintenance manager, for his comments too.

    I've had an XL1201 now for about a day and a half. I've had a few
    really nice several hour periods where everything works flawlessly,
    but sometimes the keystrokes take a while to take effect, and other
    times the keyboard seems to just quit entirely.

    The problem is not with the keyboard itself, because I have more than
    one to test with.

It's probably the console, see below.

    It's weird; sometimes when the keyboard seems to stop working, all the
    Local-x things like Local-B, Local-Abort, Local-n Local-C etc. still
    work, other times no.

    The mouse seems to always work, except for a few times when things are
    really bad. When things are really bad the screen flashes rapidly and
    the machine beeps very rapidly and must be rebooted via the power
    switch.

This is usually garbage coming down the serial line from the console.  I
believe there are adjustments which can improve this on the console board
(e.g. a phase-locked loop).  Another possibility is that one side of the
differential driver or receiver has blown, shooting the hell out of your
noice immunity.

    It's as though the keyboard does nothing sometimes, but other times it
    sends keystrokes on its own so messages like "h-s-m-c-sh-Mouse-L"
    appear at the bottom of the screen.

    The keyboard behavior seems to be the same in the FEP to.

    Also, sometimes a message like

      [16:03:52 Warning: An error correction has occurred in physical memory.
		For further information use the Show Memory Error Corrections :Detailed Yes]

    appears in the login screen.

This is an entirely unrelated matter. This means that ECC memory has dropped
a bit and has had it corrected.  If the log shows double bit errors, or if
single bit errors are happening too frequently, your memory needs to be replaced.

    I suspect the problem is with the keyboard IO hardware in the console.

    Is this a common failure mode? Have any of you ever experienced
    something like this before, and are aware of a fix?

    It's an amazing computer. The quality time I've spent with it has been
    really special.

    Thank you,
    Christopher

    [By the way, do any of you know of a keyboard for the PC with the same
    clickiness and feel of the Symbolics keyboard?]