I got my $50 HP LaserJet 6L in the mail today, and here it is. Let's have a closer look... oh.. wait a minute... oh no. Yea, not good. Let's talk about it, and some fun I had with it, and my NEW PLAN, in a 🧵 here
So, yes, the plastics on this printer were brittle, and it unfortunately wasn't shipped well. As soon as I saw the box, and the size of the box, I thought we might be in trouble. And, yes, we were. Just look at all of those glorious plastic pieces.
Here's even more breakage. The front "bar" that connects the two sides together. And this internal mechanism too. Yea, this thing is cooked.
I think it's time to consolidate a few more retro PCs 😅. Going to start with my Tandy 1000 TX which already has a new owner! I did a little bit of consolidation into my 1000 SX in preps for sending it packing. Let's talk about it briefly in a 🧵 here!
My 1000 SX had an XTIDE card in it, but the 1000 TX had a Silicon Valley ADP50 "hard card" with a 540 MB HDD. I decided to move that over to the 1000 SX. It takes up a fair amount of space, fortunately my 8 bit ISA network card is tiny 😂
This leaves us with a multi I/O card (the 1000 SX doesn't have an onboard serial port), 286xpress processor upgrade, ADP50 "hard card", 8 bit Ethernet card, and 8 bit SCSI card for the Bernoulli box. Sadly, no space for the ISA2USB adapter, so it comes out.
I got some 20MB Bernoulli disks in the mail today. Some of them are Tandy branded! Let's check them out and see how many will actually work... time for a 🧵
For the first disk, I decided to try one of the "older logo" Iomega disks. And... well... good old General Error decided to visit. This means that the disk has too many bad sectors to recover... and, yes, each disk does have reserved sectors, I covered that in a past post!
Which past post was that, RetroTechChris? I thought you'd never ask. If you are curious about how reserved tracks work on a Bernoulli disk, here you go!
I have a few things to test! A CD-ROM drive and an ATI All In Wonder Pro video card. Let's explore these in a 🧵 there!
First, the CD-ROM drive. It's a Universal Buslink Corporation drive, never heard of it! Unfortunately, it powers on, the light lights up, and, well, that's about it.
I thought I would do a teardown on it. Wow, this is a VERY cheaply assembled drive. Guess I am not surprised by that. And that MT1516E chip? It gets HOT!!! Well, these drives are a dime a dozen, so gonna call it.
Let's test out this recent acquisition of mine, a Xircom Credit Card Modem 56T (PCMCIA). I'm not optimistic, more on that in a minute. Time for a 🧵
First, some context. I picked this up at L&Y Electronics last week since I was excited to see a PCMCIA card that actually had a dongle that hadn't been lost! I paid $10 for it, despite what you see:
As I noted in the first post, I'm not optimistic. The connector is pretty shot. Furthermore, while it might not make a difference, this connector is designed for the "phone line" connection as opposed to the "modem" connection. See this "complete" example for reference.
I've been meaning to make it back to the ReStore to pick up an item or two. And I wasn't disappointed! Looking forward to setting up some home automation, and checking out this ATI All in Wonder card. What else did I find? Time for a 🧵
The Altec Lansing subwoofer was still there, but we know the story on that from before, so I left it. I don't have compatible speakers.