🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mar 16, 6:24 pm, "Michael A. Terrell" <mike.terr...@earthlink.net>
wrote:
> ....
>    The cheap bastard who ran that CATV system was too cheap to spend $8
> each for new 8" floppies.  He put it off for a couple months, till both
> the main disk drive lost the heads when they welded to the worn media,
> but the backup disk in the secondary drive had crashed.  I spent almost
> a week piecing the system configuration back together from almost 100
> bad disks.

Whoa, that beats my 8" floppy disk adventures. Back in the day - on
that
first 6809/00 based thing I had built - I had two such drives,
Bulgarian
clones of some Shugart original, I believe. They failed frequently
enough to teach me that I needed one disk and *two* backups minimum
(after I had the situation you describe, work disk failure and bad
backup). I had learned where around the head to press with fingers
etc. during retries, it was the nightmare you probably know all too
well.

>    I am not surprised that a 6800 family computer is still working.

I retired the real thing not so long ago, 2-3 years ago IIRC (when
I found the month to write the emulator). Not bad for a 6809
oldie I had built in 1988 as an update to my first thing which
predated that by perhaps 3-4 years.

>    Some of the last embedded systems I worked on used the MC68340, and I
> hated the early production with the PGA package.  The SMD version was a
> ot easier to troubleshoot, and modify for special products.  BTW, one of
> those boards is part of the KU band communication systems aboard the
> ISS.

I started with the SMD one, designed it into my first "nukeman" in
1993/4.
But mine did not make it to the ISS, just a few sold units.
Was a nice CPU in its day, still in production, BTW. I have replaced
it with PPC processors some years back (around 2000), though.

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------
Dimiter Popoff               Transgalactic Instruments

http://www.tgi-sci.com
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/didi_tgi/sets/72157600228621276/

Original message: http://groups.google.com/group/sci.electronics.design/msg/5222e84e166ca9ce?dmode=source