FOUND: A Super-Rare Commodore D9090!
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- Опубліковано 27 гру 2024
- Dave undertakes the Christmas challenge of finding, repairing, testing, and demoing a super-rare Commodore D9090!
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Hi Dave! So, I do know somebody that has both the 9060 and the 9090. I could most likely borrow them and do an episode about them. That being said, I'm not sure what I could say about them that you haven't already covered in this video. I will think about it, though.
Please do! I think perhaps one interesting angle could be whether Commodore would have been more viable vs the alternatives had their drives been more affordable, and they'd have been much more affordable if not for the "smart controller" scheme. Commodore's decision to put two 6502s, multiple PIA chips, RAM, and an operating system inside the drive certainly made it expensive.
Plus, you could do a whole section on the I/O channels and commands, on how BASIC commands interoperate with the PRINT# and INPUT# statements. It was unconscionable that they shipped it with no IO commands in BASIC 2.0 at all.
Perhaps a hybrid episode is warranted, where you primarily focus on the "Professional" side of Commodore and talk about BASIC 4.0, the hard drives, all the commands added along with it, their hard drives, daisy wheel printers, and so on. I bet you could get a solid 15 minutes out of that, and it'd be interesting this "audience of one".
Other than printers, I have a nice setup here with a fully expanded 2001, 8050, 4040, 9090, and so on. I'd be happy to share some footage of that as absent the printer it's all "business class" hardware for the day. I've had a 4032 en route from Spain for a month as a Christmas present for a friend, but it hasn't made it yet!
In the pro line you could also talk about the 4016 (FAT 40!) and the 4032 and 8032, along with the SP9000. I have all the Waterloo language books for the SP9000 and could provide some nice B-roll for that, but no SuperPET on hand, unfortuantely!
On top of all of that, heck, you could do an entire episode on Batteries Included. I used the BI-80 card and the BusCard II to get 80 columns and IEEE-488 support on the C64, which kept me going before the Amiga cross-assembler. Back in the day as a game programmer, until I got my 128, I had an 80-column C64 with dual IEEE-488 drives (I think SFD-1001s, if I recall correctly). All enabled by Batteries Included technology of the day.
All that stuff is out of my wheelhouse for my channel, so I'm hoping you can do the heavy lifting :-)
Sorry for the ramble, I don't get much chance to reminisce about the CBM history!
Cheers,
Dave
PS: One of the greatest tragedies is that Ric Weiland at Microsoft took his own life some years back, and he wrote COMMODORE BASIC 2.0 that we know and love. There's a lot of questions I'd like to ask him about BASIC 2.0 that otherwise, only BillG knows the answer to, because Paul Allen has passed as well. But before BASIC 4.0, everything had to be done over IO channels, and it was worse than assembly!
I assume you've seen the source code to CBM BASIC. If not, perhaps we could collaborate on that at some point. I spoke at length to Monte Davidoff who wrote the math portions, and traced their lineage back to the PDP-5... stuff like that!
@@DavesGarage This is going to be epic! The Eight-Bit Guy and Dave's Garage together.
Maybe you could take a poll on what historic programs to run on these beauties...
I can't wait to see what the suggestions are!
This reminds me of my TRS80 BASIC days, 10 this, 20 that, 30 other, 40 go to 10... simplest code...
Money is on the line... :) Love the channel either way!
I have a D9060 and a D9090 and I would love to help if possible (I am from germany).
If anyone thinks it is hard to find a D90x0 you should try to find a (working) 8280! I have only seen one and that was broken (and not for sale). :o(
@@C64-Museum I've never seen the 8280! I have an 8050 and had an 8250, but never the big one!
Outstanding video, Dave! In 1982/83 my first computer job out of high school was working for Tandon Corp. in my home town of Simi Valley, CA. My first year was spent testing Tandon's floppy-disk boards. The IBM PC had recently appeared, and we couldn't get these drives out the door fast enough! The next assignment involved performing final tests on Tandon's hard drives (602s/603s). By the end of 1982 Tandon was migrating to their ½-height 252 drives, which stored an amazing 20-MB.
Finally, in early 1983 I transferred to what Tandon called their "Voyager" division, which was involved in the design and final test of the D9060/D9090 drives for Commodore Computer Corp. Being a youngster, I performed mostly mundane tasks like burning the EPROMS that went into the SASI interface boards, along with running the HDD/interface testing (writing A5A5A5A5... etc.) and other patterns to the disc. Strangely enough, your video highlighted some of the power issues you experienced with your D9090, since I performed a Hi-Pot test on each unit before it was shipped. There seemed to be some reason why we were checking for voltage leakage, and a few of the units did fail the Hi-Pot test. All in all, in the half-year spent at the Voyager facility (one small warehouse-sized building), we probably shipped around 1,000 units or so (don't remember exactly)... not at highly mass-production scale. The entire division employed no more than 15 people, which included the assembly/test workers along with a few hardware design engineers and programmers. As you mentioned, the drives were quite heavy, since they contained along with the drive, the P.S. and controller boards. I believe the main purpose Tandon launched this venture with Commodore was to increase the sales of their hard drives. I don't remember the pricing, but the D9090 sold for maybe $3,000 at the time... so anything less would be a bargain (in 1982 dollars). Of course due to several factors, including the high cost of the D90X0 units, the growth of hard drive subsystems integrated directly into IBM PCs, along with the IBM-PC standard itself dominating the entire PC landscape, the Commodore hard drive subsystems were destined to become a niche product. As with Dave, I grew up being exposed to PCs such as the Vic-20, Commodore-64 and TRS-80, along with Byte magazine. These were what can now be described as the "good-old days" or in Hollywood lore the "glamorous days" of the PC revolution.
Many people don't realize that in the late 1970s/early 1980s the local area (Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Chatsworth and Woodland Hills) became somewhat of a tech mecca for disk technology. Companies including Tandon, Micropolis, MPI, Pertec, and a dozen others I can't recall sprouted up in the area. This also attracted value-added firms like Packard Bell, which was for a time the world's largest PC manufacturer, although one can argue with the term "value-added." Finally, Seagate Technology's R&D facility was located in Simi Valley for several years, although it wasn't as popular as the President Reagan Library as a tourist destination. Those companies are mostly gone today, but the notion that this little corner of the world hosted its own version of "Silicon Valley" lives on in the annals of computer history, including that of the D9060 and D9090 peripherals. Times change, and Simi Valley is now home to AeroVironment, which is responsible for much or most of the design and construction of the Mars Ingenuity helicopter. In summary, it is a truly amazing tribute to the efforts of Dave and others that the legacy of these still-amazing products continues to this day. Thank you!
Michael/SanPedro, CA,
So much lost history. Makes me sad and nostalgic. Good on people like you to bring it up once in a while. Thanks
I enjoyed this episode. It reminded me of when I was staying at my Grandmother's house here in Scotland during the mid-80s when I found a bunch of Commodore PET BASIC manuals in a cupboard. My Uncle had been getting trained to code on PETs at work and had kept the manuals afterwards, as you do. I had my trusty Acorn Electron with me so I was able to work through all of the examples he'd been taught with a little light translation between BASIC dialects and complete all of the exercises set - interesting that both machines were 6502-based too. I eventually went on to become developer myself and my Uncle worked for the remainder of his career in IT. He sadly passed earlier this year so it was cool to remember this little chapter of my life which I might have otherwise forgotten about. Thanks.
David's MFM emulator is basically magic as far as I'm concerned. It can even read in, decode, and emulate existing disks. We have them in several machines at the VCF museum in NJ.
We're lucky that David helps a bunch at the museum - including setting up the emulators for us! The Xerox Star I gave the demo of a few years ago is using one of his boards.
You should be able to use his board to test all the hard disks you bought, too.
If you can get the original drive to power up you can image it! Who knows what treasures await!
Imagine being so rich and so wholesome that you're version of "throwing down the gauntlet" is to offer to donate 1000$ to a charity of their choice. Dave, you are a treasure and a blessing and I think of you every time I open task manager.
I know folks who spend more a month on gaming. Not gambling, either... tabletop. Board games and RPGs.
@@WilliamHostman sad
@@WilliamHostman how? At least it’s a social activity.
After dropping over $1k on the drive itself and even more money on a bunch of hard drives. That 90s era Microsoft money is putting in work, that's for sure.
I don't think Dave is that rich. I don't think he has to worry about much but I don't know if I'd say "so rich".. and he offered to donate to a 501c which means charity which means tax write off which means 🤔 he's not actually spending money just preferring give that money to a charity in the name of something cool instead of stuffing it into the US govt in the form of taxes....
That's what I call determination! I still remember how I had plans to upgrade to a HDD on my C128 - which of course never happened for obvious reasons.
IMHO probably your best video so far, because it gives so much technical as well as personal insight. Love it!
I find that a dead short is often a dead tantalum capacitor. They die either open or closed. In fact, the way it affected the power supply and even the circuit breaker makes me think that even more. Go poking around and look for one. Then remove it and test to see if 12 volts is then shorted. Actually measure the resistance too, don't just "tone it out". If it's no longer shorted then you found your problem. Tantalum's and Rifa caps love to die and barf out the smoke.
Wonderful. This takes me back to the days of getting a hard drive together for my BBC micro, in the late 80s. I got a faulty power supply and case, (new capacitors needed in the switch mode - it initially started up the drive like an old car - it would spin up about 5 times then stopping, before running). I bought a few second hand SCSI drives, (thus bypassing the need for the dreaded ST506 SCSI board), and an after market BBC SCSI board.. Then I had to dig into the mysteries of low level formatting and changing the sector capacity: all the drives available were set for 512 bytes/block for PCs, Acorn used 256 Bytes/block. Took me weeks. Still have it, and it runs. 80 Megabytes on a BBC Master 128. Sidenote: Acorn really future proofed their ADFS. The block map went out to 4 Gigabytes. I just hope mine never gets full enough to need compacting: doing 80 Meg on a machine with only 64K of user RAM might take a bit longer than a Commodore low level format. . . .
Mike did you need the storage space for a database ?, i would like to hear about your late 80s usage of the BBC128k.
ADFS had some really odd limits though, such as supporting only 77 entry limit on directories.
God, a collaboration between the two Daves would be awsome.
Hey, someone caught it! That's why I used the term "Biggie Eight" as well, since it was starting to sound like a rap battle callout :-)
Dave being a Commodore fan makes me enjoy his channel even more! Would love to hear what the Microsoft team he worked in made of the Amiga when it launched…
What a trip down memory lane, I too was a 17 year old working as a tech in 1984 in what was at the time the largest Commodore dealership in QLD Australia. Like you, I lost track of how many drives I had to align and CBM, VIC and early Sharp CPM based machines I had t repair. Another great video, look forward to many more. Happy New Year from Down Under :)
I have a Commodore hard drive in my attic... sure remember that sound! Guess I need to check which one! I worked for Commodore in the early 80's... still good friends with the guy who wrote the Dos Wedge you mentioned. I met him when I found a bug in that program and wrote him a letter. Later we worked together at Commodore.
At our Commodore office we shared a hard drive in a sort of early network... just piggybacked the IEEE cables and ran a set of remote status lights to each office. When the lights were quiet we figured the other guy wasn't using it. Worked pretty well!
Back in those days I wrote Scopy, which does copy files from disk to disk directly without going through the Pet. And it scrolls both ways! Written in Basic.
Some day I'll catalog my old Commodore gear and probably put it on Ebay.. got some prototype stuff too, like a very early 64. Serial #39, I think?
May I ask, what happened to Commodore? Does it still exist?
Please don't just put it all on eBay before you at least record a tour of everything - even if it's not plugged in and running.
@@pritambissonauth2181 they went bankrupt in 1994
@@loganmacgyver2625rip
so there like rca? making garbage?
@@TylerTMG the name changes lots of hands throughout the years. Some company made a mediocre off the shelf Chinese smartphone with the commodore logo stamped on the back for example
As usual I thoroughly enjoyed this step back into history. I was a proud Amiga 1200 early adopter and while I was never "in to" the PET, C64 scene I was heavily into any kind of digital circuitry. At some point in time I managed to get my hands on an MFM drive that was very sick, and troubleshoot and repair it. I'll never forget applying power and hearing it tach up and scare the pants off of me with all the thrashing around as it exercised the heads with the start-up routine. Hearing you power that one up took me immediately back to that moment of terror!
Your description of troubleshooting techniques pretty much exactly matched my learning experiences as a totally self trained tech!
Thanks much and keep it coming!
Hi DP, I worked for a big Commodore dealer in UK in the 80's as a service tech. I used to repair all the CBM range including VIC20 and C64. The 1541's would always go out of alignment, I think due to the stepper motor pounding the track 0 stop ,generating the ubiquitous knocking noise. Some days I could get 10 drives from a games developer all needing alignment , using a scope and and the cats eye alignment disk would go through them like a dose of salts. Always found the 8250 with Micropolis drives a pile of junk and could drive us nuts trying to align them with consistent results. We used to sell the odd D9090 and a big unreliable winchester hard disk unit to connect to the PET but I cant remember the manufacturer of it. It wasn't Commodore.
This was a trip down memory lane! The nostalgia almost reduced me to tears! I purchased what was reported (in the local newspaper) to be the first Commodore Pet sold by a retailer in Australia in 1979. Neither the retailer or the wholesaler exist anymore. I had purchased the 8k model, which I later managed to trade in for a 32k model a few years later. I'd tried to wire-wrap an Intel 8080 based single board microcomputer using information published in a magazine, but quickly realised that it was beyond my skills! I don't think I ever saw the Commodore Hard -Disk Drive in person, only read about them in US computer magazines. I was already a programmer who had worked on CDC Cyber 76 and Univac 1100 mainframes, as well as PDP 11 mini's by then. It all seems such a long time ago now!! 😃
Well done Dave, such a champion in retro hardware. I too started my life with a TRS-80 (only 4 of them) , then a BBC at school, then finally my own PC a 4k 6809 based PC that was built by a university in NZ.
I feel your pain. As a field service engineer for the UK's largest independent maintenance company with 400 engineers I worked on a product range called Molecular Computers (that meant something else in the 1980's) which ran a multi-user CP/M varient called n/star and had a Z80 CPU board for each user on a mega-bus like a blade server run by an FP or file processor board with anything from 10 megabyte Seagate drives with stepper motors to 8 inch 70 megabyte Priam drives with voice coils like today's drives. With up to 32 users all running WordStar on their own 64K processor board it was state of the art and as fast as a mainframe if you weren't running a massive database. Fun fact, format the C: drive and it would format the D: drive too. 40 staff not working during a hours downtime meant a man-week of lost production and a day's downtime was a disaster, so formatting a drive for 8 hours was kinda expensive. Fun times.
Retro computing is oddly satisfying. It's all about spending too much money on doing something a lot harder than it needs to be.
The D9090 is a really cool piece of hardware, built in the classic Commodore fashion. Lovely!
Love this. It's a great example of the "don't give up" approach to solving a problem... Love your ideas for linking in with the 8-bit guy too. And yes, I do appreciate the sounds of a booting MFM drive. Almost as much as I do hearing the Amiga 500 HDD controller click between tracks when loading....
Drilling out unused PCB pads to prevent user RAM upgrades is the kind of aggressive contempt for tinkerers that would make Steve "Slots were a mistake" Jobs blush.
One day in 2011 by Caltrain and Starbucks... Bit of a rude boy to me.
Well Steve Jobs had the memory chips of the 128K Mac soldered in such that we had to desolder them all to do our own upgrade to a 512K Mac (where it finally had enough memory to be useable), so I think Steve could definitely stand his ground in this department (the Apple upgrade path was to pay a great deal more money and swap in a 512K Mac motherboard)
But it was a one time decision, never repeated.
@@saganandroid4175 Apple Computer, under Steve Jobs management, brought out the 2007 1GB PowerPC MacMini, which could not be expanded beyond that 1GB. Running OSX kernel and OS services used so much memory on that computer that it was similarly as useless as that original 1984 128K Mac. For the original Mac, 512K of memory made all the difference in the world. That would have been the case with this MacMini - 2GB would have made this an entirely viable computer.
The original IBM OEM PC and XT motherboards came in two versions. 256KB and 640Kb. There was a huge price difference, but the only difference was a 29 cent IC to decode two additional address lines, and to solder a jumper aacross tw pads. I used to get bags of free used 256K RAM, so I converted a lot of boards to 640KB.
I repaired a prototype IBM PC for a retired IBM engineer. He said that he was assigned to select the original power supply, and it was his test bed. They gave it to him when he retired. I met him at a local computer store, when he was trying to find a replacement floppy controller. The owner of the store was screaming at him, "Pull out your %^&%^ wallet and buy a daned computer, and toss that piece of crap in the dumpster on your way out of here! No one has had any parts for that piece of crap, in years!" I told him that I had a couple dozen of the boards, and I would fix it for him. His Christmas mailing list was on 5.25" floppies, that his newer computer couldn't read.
I replaced the board, then I upgraded it to 640KB. I gave him a better video card, with a printer port and cleaned it all up. It looked brand new. The mods freed up all but one of the five slots, and gave him more RAM. When e came to get it he said that he hoped the repair wasn't too expensive. I know that he would have paid a lot more, but I told him that it was $20. He was sobbing with joy as he carried out of my home shop. 😃
Wow, what a trip down memory land and a fantastic Christmas present, and thanks Dave for all you do!
I'd love more Amiga and Commodore stories. Big fan of those systems
Dave. This is great stuff. I wrote pal 8 assembly, grew up on the Vic 20 and 128, so I can really appreciate the Commodore history. What I really appreciate though is the made in Canada talent we have. I knew right away when I saw your Friendly Giant ending that we from the same era. I’m guessing that a lot of viewers didn’t get that one. Great stuff. Great channel.
Wow, fantastic video! As someone who started off back in the day (1979) with an 8K 2001-8 PET with the chiclet keyboard and built-in tape drive, it was around 4 years before I could even afford a disk drive. When I could it was the smallest of the bunch - the 2031 single drive - I used to look at the ads for the D9090 and D9060 drives and drool! That old PET (before it got passed on) had been upgraded from Basic 1 via Basic 2 to Basic 4 (via EPROMs on a hand-built, self-designed, hand-drawn PCB as the PET itself was socketed for the incompatible 6540 ROMs) and to 32K via a hand-assembled 32K board kit. Fun times!
Dave, anything you know about or related to Commodore would be a fresh perspective I'd love to hear more about. THANK YOU for this video!
The Tantalum capacitors are likely the reason there is a dead short on the hard drive board. As for tripping the breaker. I don't think the power supply is tripping the breaker as a result of a ground fault(if connected properly) or overcurrent. It is possible if you have an arc fault breaker that is picking up something funky.
Thanks! Makes sense and seems to be the consensus for the short issue, at least!
@@DavesGarage Is that new power supply a switcher? It replaced a transformer based linear supply and considering the kinds of loads imposed by that old equipment, there's most likely a complex interaction between the load, the switcher and the circuit protectors in the mains - I should know because I blew several switchers AND tripped the circuit breakers in this same scenario. Putting together a new linear supply with the same specs as the blown one resolved all issues.
Maybe a busted flyback diode?
@@DavesGarage
Hey Dave,
Could the failed capacitors be the cause for the other hard drives not working? I wonder if all of the hard drives were unable to maintain proper speed, which was the cause of the formatting failure. The root cause being hardware and inadequate power supplied to the drives motor.
Linear supply has an isolation transformer, so the outputs are isolated from mains, I grant is onto something
Thanks for the story. Very interesting. I was an Atari person, and owned the Atari 400, that I had modified to 48K by using 64K chips. I ended up with some special hardware ROM that allowed to break out of a game and do various things, save to floppy disk and other cool stuff. Those were the days of hacking. Since I’m not a nostalgic person, I sold my Atari stuff long ago. I had no desire to keep it running. Thanks again for the great technical videos you do here. You are a great story teller, and speaker.
Red Seal-certified electrician here. Yes, you're absolutely correct on how a GFI breaker works. It, in effect, monitors current in and current out, and if there is a difference greater than 4-6 mA it will trip the breaker since that means that current is leaking elsewhere. Now, an issue I have heard of in the past is computers dumping both DC voltage and RF frequencies to ground, which can be enough to trip the GFI since those things are bloody sensitive (4mA is nothing; a single LED draws around 20mA). The best solution, naturally, would be to not use a GFI for your computers since it's not going to do anything to protect them. Ideally, you really only need a GFI in a potentially wet location to protect yourself from shock, like outside, near sinks, etc, that is in environments where you probably don't want to use a computer (especially a rare vintage one) lol.
Go ahead and ask if you need clarification but be warned; I can talk your ear off on electrical theory :D
Sitting here with my future son-in-law, a computer science major and a "gainfully employed IT guy" drinking hot cocoa from my brand spanking new "Dave's Garage" mug and watching your latest vintage PET video...he actually seems to know what you're talking about and is genuinely interested! Thank you and Merry Christmas!
Thanks, and Merry Christmas to you guys as well!
Hey Dave, it finally happened. We've come full circle,. I know about CPM DOS and the story behind it. I was a DOS wizard in those days. I really enjoyed taking a look back to appreciate how far we've come. I gave away a Radio Shack MC-10. It was a thrill. I expanded the onboard memory with a 16K memory module. It used a cassette audio recorder to store my programs which had to be loaded each time I wanted to use the computer. I really enjoyed the video. Keep up the good work. L8TR
Truly fun Dave. Thank you for taking us on your journey through MFM drive hell.
When I was in school in the early 80s we had Commodore 4032s in our lab. At the time they were networked, had 5.25" floppy disk rives and had network printers. Absolutely amazing. They were so fascinating that even today (I'm 52 years old now) I am still working in IT as a security consultant. Great machine that certainly changed my life.
Back in the early 1980"s, before working at MS, I wrote books on programming the C64 and C128 aimed at smart teens. Funniest hardware memory was getting the floppy drives to work by just tightening up the drive band by feel. Love this episode. Thx always for your excellence, Dave.
And books like that got me started at age 5.
@@forbiddenera You were a smart teen by the age of 5 - wow.
BASIC Computer Games is one of the ones I remember
I was too poor for a C64... had to settle for a Vic20, still spent lots of hours typing in programs... I found I could type them in faster than trying to load them from tape. A disk would have been quite the luxury. =D
@@MikelNaUsaCom i had a c64/128 but by then it wasn't worth much I wish my mom never got rid of it though
Thanks for making this video Dave. I've got tears of joy for your commitment to fixing the drive! Loved the Commodore era. And Batteries Included!! my favourite store in the 80's!! I also had their c64 expansion boards. I dimly remember when I got their 80 column card, I opened it up and rejigged it to move the video ram address space to a more acceptable area to meet my needs.
Hi Dave, I did the same surgical add of 16k bytes on my Commodore CBM3008 with holes in the motherboard - just piggy back a second set of ram on top of the original set of eight chips, bending their Enable pin upward and wiring it with wrap to the Enable trace of the destroyed 2nd bank - I really enjoyed your post !
Watching to the end, I was amazed that the description of this remote, intricate, Turing complete, and magical world was all so familiar. Yes, I still have some MFM drives on a shelf, along with some giant 10MB SCSI’s - they haven’t spun for decades. The magic of your story peaked when I heard the drive starting up! No wonder computers were so much fun then. Like starting an engine on a DC3.
> Like starting an engine on a DC3
My first HD was 10 MB Seagate hooked up to a PC clone back in 1983-4 time period. Cost around $3k. And that old prop airplane sound is EXACTLY what it sounded like spinning up.
I love how your videos are like one big uninterrupted series of infodump. It's so packed and informative! Would be dope if you could somehow put timestamps in, so people like me can watch at exactly the point we need when working on some project like this Commodore drive and needing to look up a small piece of info. :D
But you don't understand the chaos theory Dave. Now that you made a video about it, the 15 dormant basement dwelling D9090s will soon find it way on Ebay for huge amounts and the 8bit guy will be able to grab one
Dave I loved this video, really enjoyed the story and it took me back to my early days dealing with mfm drives remembering putting the bad sectors with dos 3 debug.
I remember thinking 10mb was so huge, that they could not be that much data in the world how wrong was I.
I used to make money while at school by doing tech support for local firms, mostly dos and xenix with one company using a pair of 80col pets linked to xenix. Later I got into netware 2.2 and supposed about 8 netware servers before I could drive. My mum would have to give me a lift to the companies or if they were desperate enough sometimes someone from the company would pick me up after school.
Great video, Dave! I worked on and tested these drives in 1983 at Tandon, and thought they were lost to history. It's surprising that the D9060/9090 ecosystem is alive and well in 2022! Thank you.
Yeah, I really enjoyed this episode. You mentioned a lot of stuff i didn't realize I knew and had forgotten.
Hi Dave, being a tad bit older than you (1964) I had as my first computer a VIC20 and C64 was second. I used to work in a computer shop while studying Physics at University (back then few people here knew about computers, and I got first rudiments on the University VAX) and I remember the PET and those HD units, only "rich" customers could afford those.
My first HD was an AMPEX 5 megabytes unit I got as add-on to the Olivetti M24 (my third computer and first IBM compatible). I fondly remember playing both Dam Busters and B.C. on the C64... and even more fondly the Hyper Cache for the Amiga (I still have a perfectly working A500 in the basement and I should equip it with an SD card adaptor and do some retro game play).
I also used to "play" with 6502 assembly code and I still remember the joy of a program to display on screen a 3D function and then print it on the Seikosha printer; it used to take 30/40 minutes in MS basic and only 4-5 in assembler. The tedious work of mapping the function in the 8x8 character map of the VIC20, and then on the 6x9 printer matrix!.
I think we all (electronic fans) have those releases we were in awe of.
While I had a PET and C64 I was still quite young, my active years were more around the Amiga which I later sold for a living till it died.
My big item was packing everything I could into my Amiga 500 (bought it for Shadow of the Beast (very unforgiving game when mistakes are made)), then on to my 1200 where I had 12mb ram (2chip, 10 fast) and a hard drive.
The thing I always wanted was the Amiga 4000 with Video Toaster. Never was able to get one (although now I could probably swing it).
I was young an silly and even had an Intel Outside sticker. Ironically after years contracting with Microsoft (late 90s) (where I heard of you but had not knowingly met you) I actually work for Intel. My how things change.
I enjoy your stories and adventures as it reminds me of some of my adventures, never did manage to survive college but boy have I embraced working in tech land.
Also appreciate your sharing your views on those on the spectrum S someone not diagnosed until my 30s it was an eye opening experience.
It was interesting to hear your comments on documentation. Back in my days as a software tester, if I was given some software (could be a simple driver or a full blown package) without documentation it very quickly got sent back marked "inoperable". Although I might be able to figure out how to make it work chances are that the end user will not and to them that means inoperable.
I find this to be a problem with so many open source packages, no-one wants to write the documentation and users end up having to hunt for hints and clues from random websites many of which are talking about completely different aspects of the software or are simply wrong.
Another thoroughly enjoyable, educational and nostalgic story time. Thanks Dave!
Glad you enjoyed it
Love the video. I grew up with the Vic20 and my mate had the 64. We would spend hours on the games over weekends. It's what started me on electronics and programming
Dave you are an awsome UA-camr and a fantastic person. Just the way you go about recording your videos, sharing such history and knowledge. Taking us for a walk through your life and your dreams. Thanks so much for being such a humble and genuine bloke. :)
Sorry if somone has already posted this but, I believe GFCI outlets/breakers work on the principle of balanced currents between line and neutral by using a pair of coils. This is intended to trip when the in flowing current is not countered by an equal amount of out flowing current such as would be caused by a short to earth ground. However, phase imbalance due to the load, such a stuck motor jumping to locked rotor current acting like a large inductor, can also cause the imbalance. Normally, this only happens under high loads and the breaker can ride-out lower amplitude imbalances. It's all about amplitude and time.
When I could still see some as a child in the 80s, there were two computer games I could play, and both on the Commodore. Sammy Lightfoot, and Frogger. I still have joyous memories of those games, and of painstakingly reading off the screen as I Learned to program in basic. Those old C64s and C128s and all their appurtenances will forever hold a place deep in my heart. Well done sir, such dedication.
Hi Dave, I have been enjoying your channel and jokes, for a while now. I was a high school teacher who introduce computers into the high in 1980. When Ohio computers could not be supplied, we got 6 Apple ][ sand 6 Microbee's a machine made in New South Wales Australia. Our school in Brisbane had 1200 students at the time. When the sales rep delivered the Apples, he set one up in the staffroom. We watched Dancing Bob and spent more time than I like to admit looking for the off switch after the rep had left. My first computer I owned was a Vic 20 with cassette drive.
Dave! You’re awesome! Thanks for sharing your knowledge and your journey! Merry Christmas
This was my first Dave's Garage ... You had great screen presence, and passed on some great information, thanks! You also probably scared me away from trying to get my D9090 or D9060 working :) (I got them, used, unknown condition, about 20 years ao.)
Great to hear your Commodore stories; I didn't even realize you were Canadian. You must've driven right by my house in Thunder Bay on your cross-country trip to Ottawa, to take my dream job programming C64 games while I stayed in high school like a chump :) I eventually did make a bit of money doing C64 game programming but it took until the '90s and '00s, strangely. That's fantastic you were part of that early Canadian game dev scene; it's very poorly documented so I think many of us would love to hear more of your stories from that time with as many details as possible.
Loved it Dave.
Brought me right back to my C64/128 days (and the crazy bus speed issues and drive controllers being full CPU machines (or equivalent depending on model)) .
UGH ... and MFM drives (other than the startup sounds) were always so 'sketch' even when new in perfect conditions.
Can't forget CBM using GCR vs MFM
Those Hakko desoldering guns are so fun!
I used to dread desoldering. Recalling burnt fingers and through holes that won't give up the goods.
The 301 obliterates solder. I started desoldering stuff for fun!
Another fascinating video, but I did not expect BC's Quest for Tires to pop up. I think that was one of the very first C64 games I had as a kid and in my mind it was like being able to control a literal cartoon show. It probably set me down a lifelong path of fascination with computers and their potential.
Enjoyed this a lot. Reminds me of the 4032 PET up in the loft alongside the C64 and Amiga,
I was drinking a mug of tea during this video from a very old early 1980s Commodore mug. White with blue writing and probably about 40 years old !
I bought extra ram for this PET as it had slots available.
Just love the old 40x25 green screen !
My commodores all used cassettes.
Dave as an amature EE moonlighting as an electrician, a programmer, and a plumber, I think I have a lead on your GFCI quandry. The problem may not have actually been in the drive itself, the difference could have been dependent the design/manufacture of the drive, the drive *might* not have been bad, /and/ the problem with the mainboard could have been related.
Alright so, you've got DC ground, but you've also got a 3-prong cord on that drive, and the frame is thus connected to AC ground.
If you get some leakage in the power supply section of any other device attached to your computer, most often it'll have no noticeable effect. The "ground" wires inside various cables might be at 3-4 volts AC but since all of the actual signals have the same offset imposed on them, everything still relatively works.
Including your hard drive.
Now, if that hard drive happens to have the DC ground attached to its frame, and it is bolted to the drive case frame... well now you've got a completed circuit to ground. Something else on your computer leaks some AC to the DC ground, which makes its way through the drive cable and logic, to the frame of the drive, to AC ground -- not AC neutral where the GFCI would expect it. Since hot and neutral currents don't match, GFCI trips. Remove the drive and you break that circuit.
Whatever leakage happened somewhere (I'm thinking bypass capacitors in power supplies) also MAY have put enough current through the wrong place to have damaged the board.
I've really enjoyed watching your videos, and this was no exception! I also watch the 8-Bit guy a lot, so I'm hoping that he'll see and respond to this video! Thank you so much, and keep them coming!!!
I hope so too!
@@DavesGarage I want to see how Atari cpu is made and intel cpu like how does it work and arcade cpu
@@DavesGarage If possible, english subtitles would be great, for those of us who are not native (your accent is quite hard to understand for the french I am).
@@MAO-sz3wr i get english subtitles. However they are automatically generated.
Incredible rundown of the Commodore deathship D9090. I remember them. I'm trying to find a SuperPet, but, alas, I feel I will be searching eBay for decades. I need to give up ancient systems (IMSAI 8080, Altair 8800s, Apple ][+ w/CPM-80, yada). But their so much FUN! LOL Keep up the great videos. Have a FANTASTIC intro-to-2022.
Being based in the UK, I was(and still am) active in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum world - a rival to the C64 at the time. Great to hear the steps you've gone through to get this drive up and running. Your perseverance is honourable!!
'Rival' is a bit generous I would say. 'Contemporary' would be a better description.
Ok, that PET Circle of Life analogy is the first thing that made me chuckle for weeks
Dave, I recently found your channel after your Primo Cache video. Now I'm wondering where your channel has been all of my life. I started with the Ataris, but had a ton of fun with Amigas before finally switching over to PCs in college. Funny enough I did some of my original programing assignments on our last amiga 2500 (with upgrades). I did both some assembly coding as well as PC emulation. Your historical videos are my favorite and a great reminder of my early days with computers :) Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
I used to have a D9060! It was a loaner that I got for a few months as a kid when I was working on porting WordPro 3 PLUS to the VIC-20, I think. It was a long time ago. I remember starting that thing up ... it sounded like a jet engine taking off, like in your video. It also seemed like an infinite amount of storage at the time as well. I remember disassembling the ROMS on an 8050 and figuring out what all the POST codes were as well. Good times!
GFCI work by measuring amperage difference between hot and neutral (simple version, just imagine having a magnetic coil fed from the hot and neutral side pulling on a central magnetic relay switch, if it touches either side it trips). The assumption being if hot and neutral aren't balanced the 'missing' current is going through your soggy sneaker. But what if the current isn't missing.. it is just 'delayed'.. by something that is altering the phase of the current as it passes through. Certain circuits are notorious for this (motors being one), so are certain types of power supplies. So you aren't tripping because of over-current, you are tripping because your return current is 'delayed'
I've heard people mention current "delays" before, but it doesn't make any sense. Have you heard of Kirchoff's current law? If the current is flowing one way it _needs_ to be headed somewhere.
@@eDoc2020 Inductive or capacitive loads can cause phase differences between voltage and current. Inductors resist changes in current and capacitors resist changes in voltage. It's sort of like a reservoir containing water. Long term the water entering the reservoir must equal the water leaving the reservoir, but in the short term the reservoir may be filling or emptying resulting in a difference in the two current flows. Hope this helps explain things.
Dave, you are a rock star. I think we're probably about the same age and I started on similar equipment, though I don't think I took it as far or as seriously at the time as you did. I recall single-digit-MB capacity HDDs from back in the day, that seemed huge. I think the ones I saw were attached to C64s rather than PETs, so perhaps a bit later than this bad boy. I also started out my computing life on a school PET, then VIC-20 and C64. So cool. This video is so nostalgic!
You are just awesome. I have no idea what you are talking about most if the time but I'm just fascinated. Your knowledge and tenacity are inspirational and a bit scary too. Liked and subscribed!!
I have a CBM4016 which i brought new sometime in the 80's, i added the extra ram to make it 32K not long after. after a lot of years sitting under the stairs in the house, about 20 i turned it on a it did not work. A video ran fault which was fixed with some "new" chips. :-) Plus the floppy drive let out the magic smoke when the mains filter cap let go.
I did a few videos on fixing the ram and cleaning it up and changing the mains filter on the floppy. Still seems to read 40year old disks that had been storred in the loft for the last 40years.
Great to see you got it running in the end.
Why am I just now seeing this! Awesome episode. I love and hate the sound of stepper motor hard drives! Had a 20MB MiniScribe on a Commodore 64 BBS in the 90s. Upgraded to the 105MB Quantum, but missed being able to tell if the BBS had crashed if I didn’t hear the drive kick off for midnight maintenance. If you ever get a terminal program running in the PET to do Telnet, you should connect to the BBS, I have never had a PET caller..
Wow, you found a NOS one! Man, NOS things are such gems! I wonder how in the world there are some things that are so old but just never got used for all those years, even decades!
I used to work in a clean room changing platters and heads on those early hard drives. Seagate st251 and miniscribe 3650 and more. We had to write the zero track on the first platter for the stepper motor to reset to track 0.
Love your videos and love the gauntlets thrown at the 8bit guy. Keep it up and... merry Christmas!
Love your series of YT's. I grew up in Montréal, hacked 4k / 64k Dram in the 80's, wirewrapping, and lots of other tech. Flew through a large graphics company, now retired in WA. Would love to connect.
GFCI's can trip if there is a current in the milliamp range between ground and live. Or current over around 15A. TeslaM3 also doesn't like GFCI's, and trip them.
Old HDs snck. Thanks to exfat I don't have to use those. :)
I still use copper braid to desolder chips :)
as someone that wasn't around during the days of this retro tech I find all of this fascinating
I love hearing about your early career! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! OMG, the DecRomancer! lol Necromancer more like it! Thank you for the laughs and memories lol :)
This is fantastic! I can totally relate to the perseverance needed to work through serially-dependent problems with technology. I wish I was ambitious like you. I'm almost 39 and don't have a lot to show. Seeing your property, shop, life, etc, makes me really re-think what the hell I've been doing. Take Care!
Thanks Dave, discovered your channel recently. I love the walks down memory lane 🙂
Hello Dave,
Would you please provide some background on that short video sequence showing the old computer systems? The sequence started at timecode 5:28! Is it actual footage from the era of your visit to the computer surplus store -or- more recent?
Thanks.
One of my first jobs was repairing Commodore 64 computers and your description of how you diagnosed them was same as what we used. Although a much older version of the desoldering station.
I wore out a half dozen of the Radio Shack desoldering irons and used a lot of solder wick with additional Kester 1544 RMA liquid flux.
Thank you for such great videos! I enjoy them a lot, i have a big fascination with 70s computers. I emulate the d9090 (along with mainframes on sinh and apple in applewin) in winvice and it works flawlessly! I remember seeing it on an old byte magazine of the late 70s in the early 80s in my hometown public library, thanks to an forced early retirement due to medical reasons (after an sucesful 30+ years IT career) I've been for the last year relearning basic, assembly and c game programming on retro computers (mostly on the c128 and on dosbox) and I been having a blast !!!
Happy Holidays Dave! Another amazing video! I look forward to the next one.
PLEASE more Commodore material, love it :)
13:00 GFI stands for Ground Fault Interrupt.
Which means it will interrupt the circuit if it detects a ground fault.
Also, GFI's can go bad. By design, when they go bad, they default to interrupt, not pass. This is a safety feature, and should not be tampered with. Ever. (more for your viewers than for you)
I'm sure the issue will resolve if you directly ground the grounds, and replace the modern switching PSU for the correct one.
I'm also sure that if you hook a modern PSU up to a scope, as well as an old one and compare the waveforms side-by-side, it will be obvious why the modern switched PSU will never work.
That was a very cool video. I had completely forgotten about CBM hard drives. Thanks for the recomendation on the MFM emulator. I will tuck that bit of knowlege away for a later day.
Man i vaguely remember playing the game Wasteland on C64. It stayed with me, which sparked my love for the Fallout series. Great video. Take care
This was fun, your tenacity is commendable... Luv the old PET stuff! Com'on 8-bit Guy...
FANTASTIC! I still have a working C=128 + 1571 + aftermarket power supply+Hayes 1200baud modem + Epson dot matrix printer with DIP switch font control.
Hi Dave, great video. I had a 32k pet 2001 and later the dual floppy drive. I also had a subscription to Cursor magazine which sent a cassette tape every month. It included the game you seemed to be showing, Aliens, similar to space invaders. Boy that brings back memories. Btw, bought it for $1300 plus the dual floppy for another $1300. Sold the whole rig years later for $250.
Thanks for the great trip down memory lane. Like you, TRS80 first computer used and C64 first computer owned (At age 13). Installed hundreds of MFM and RLL drives in my day working in a computer store at age 16. Ah, the good 'ol days. :)
Electrician here, in the US from what I understand you have arc fault breakers. What is probably happening is that the inrush current of the hdd spinning up looks a lot like that of an electrical arc, I have no first had experience with them as we do not have them mandated in Aus but from being around tech forums a lot over the years computer powersupplies will often cause older arc fault breakers to trip.
You could probably work around this issue by either upgrading your breakers or using a double converting UPS.
Dave you crack me up with the "keep throwing money at the drives" dialog. 😂
I threw a bunch of money at my C-64 setup back in the 80's, dont know how I ever got that past the wife. I installed a JiffyDOS update chip on the motherboard and bought an external chassis, can't remember the vendor now, that had a I think like 20 or 40 megabyte scsi drive in it. Running a BBS I had a crapload of upload/download storage. 😉
Thanks for the video Dave! Merry Christmas!
Oh did I love the sound of that drive spinning up! Those were the days.
Great comment, Julie! Nothing was more thrilling than observing an HDD spinning-up - the sound and vibration as the platters revved-up, along with the flashing L.E.D. indicator light. You really had the feeling that you were interacting with an amazing machine coming to life.. Today's SSD drives by comparison have no vibe - eerily quiet, almost mistaken for an inanimate object.
@@michaelmeichtry316 I think that we forget what a noisy environment computing was back then, with harddrives spinning up, modems chirping away as they connected and the background clatter of dit matrix printers, then later golfball and daisy wheel printers.
Modern office, so quiet!
@@Jules_Diplopia Yes, Julie - a loud cacophony of all kinds of sounds! Especially in our junior college computer room, which featured several tables hosting Epson dot-matrix printers. Sometimes I had to go out into a hallway to escape the deafening screeching noise made by those machines. In contrast, the sounds hard drives made were soothing to the ears. However, in defense of printers, now there exists as you similarly mentioned laser and ink jet printers, which are almost unnoticeably quiet.
I also worked as a repair tech in my youth... for the college bookstore. Lots of printers to fix. That was after the Navy and six years of working on ship's propulsion systems. I remember being one of two people on my last ship that even owned a PC. Everything then was done on paper. paper records for everything. Paper.
Ooh, I too bought a meanwell power supply to power my ADAM. It was fun trying to add RJ-12 ports to the enclosure to get two new ADAMNET ports and wire up the 9-Pin cable to the host. I have a NOS linear supply but no enclosure and it ran so hot I could cook with it. No wonder why these used to melt back in the day.
Thank you for this adventure, I like many of you viewer started in the pet/apple II days and have had similar journeys. I had forgotten about entering the tr/sec failure into the controller
One of the most interesting Videos I saw this week. Thank you very much!
I aligned sooo many of those 1541 drives. Loved the service kit and disks that came for the techs, never happen today for a consumer grade part. Made sure the drive never came back by drilling and slot spring pinning the cog onto the stepper motor shaft. It was usually the copy protection test on the C64 disks that threw the drive out (clackety clack clack clack).
Dude this is amazing and made my day. What a not giving up attitude. I would love to find one of the HDs for my SuperPet.
4:25 I like that the Amiga is turned on (and the C64 is as well) but it's the C64 screen on the monitor not the Amiga Workbench (1.2/1.3)