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| Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread |
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| Vince:
--- Quote from: mansaxel on June 29, 2022, 05:25:14 am --- --- Quote from: Vince on June 28, 2022, 08:46:55 pm --- Plus Floppies are more convenient to carry your files with you and then go to computer, or some body else's in another office, and load your files there. Portability. --- End quote --- Floppies are an electromechanical part that is unreliable. Transfering one 1.4MiB floppy worth of data over 115200 serial is going to take 102 seconds, if my maths is less broken than usual. In 1 minute 42 seconds, the "convenience" of carrying the file via sneakernet (execute copy command, unmount floppy, get to instrument, retrieve disk, move disk, insert disk, mount disk, copy files out of it) is going to be beaten. For trivial things like a file in the 10s of KiB, serial is so much faster it's silly. Besides, RS-232 is soo archaic today (except where it isn't; I use serial console at work every week, at least) that it carries its own aura de cool with it. --- End quote --- I don't understand the hate for floppies, what else did you want scopes to use back then ? USB ? There was no USB. Serial link faster ? That's irrelevant, that implies that by some magic wherever you decide / need to put your scope, somehow there will be a computer right there on the bench next to the scope, and that it will have a serial cable and the S/W to go with it... didn't work like that in real life at my school at least. There were no computers in the class room in physics, so the teacher would grab the scope (only had one, was so expensive), bring it to a particular bench in the class, put stuff on the floppy then grab the floppy back to his office, that might a few meters away, or on another floor or even another building altogether. You need a portable media, and one that's easily usable by the desktop computers of the day. So it was either3.5" floppy or nothing. Simple. Hell even if by some magic there WAS a computer with a serial cable available right next to the scope, then what ? You transfer your file to that PC, then what ? How do you transfer that file to your computer in your office so you can create your report / Word document with it ? You get it from the network ? There was no network back then in my school, to speak of. So used floppies to transfer files from one computer to another. And let's say that OK, there was ONE computer in the class room... class room is very large, scope might requires a 10 or 20 meter serial cable to get to the computer... you don't get silly fast speeds of R232 at that sort of distance, no you just crawl... quite possibly even much slower than a floppy drive would write the file. So take the scope to the computer at the other side of the room ? Silly, no practical. Once you have setup your scope / experiment, it stays there until not needed anymore. But writing the file to a floppy and grabbing that and taking it to any place to any computer.. yes, that, is practical. I don't see, back then, how you could offer the same practically in any other way. Surely all TE manufacturers thought like me that ",5" floppies were the obvious choice, and surely all the customers that paid extra to tick the " FDD " option though that too. |
| Specmaster:
More good news, just soldered the old dodgy display into the Commodore SR4912 and it also is now working perfectly, so maybe the actual problem was in the now unused display location as can be seen in the photo below :-+ So it looks like its a case of winner winner, chicken dinner, A refund of £5 as well and now both of my special function calculators are fully functioning as intended. :-+ :-DD |
| mansaxel:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on June 29, 2022, 09:31:35 am --- --- Quote from: mansaxel on June 29, 2022, 05:25:14 am ---Floppies are an electromechanical part that is unreliable. --- End quote --- My Apple Smalltalk floppies from the 1980s still work. I'm not sure that flash drives won't leak electrons over that time interval. ISTR I've seen statements of "years" rather than "decades", which is enough for me to want to keep multiple copies of backups. --- End quote --- The core concept to keep in mind here is that if you are relying on one single instance of <anything> to safekeep bitstreams regardless of content, you're doing it wrong. Because <anything> will break. At the most inconvenient point in time, at that. Edited to add: I dislike floppies for their lack of speed and them forcing me to be present to execute the sneakernet transport, and that is in addition to GENERAL ERROR READING A: (Who the fuck is General Error and why is he reading my drive? ) |
| mansaxel:
--- Quote from: Vince on June 29, 2022, 11:09:25 am --- I don't see, back then, how you could offer the same practically in any other way. Surely all TE manufacturers thought like me that ",5" floppies were the obvious choice, and surely all the customers that paid extra to tick the " FDD " option though that too. --- End quote --- If I want something impractical, I would sign up to work for a heritage railway. Today, one hangs a serial-to-TCP dongle, driven by the DTR voltage perhaps, on the scope and are done with it. My TDS520 has serial and parallel option, as well as GPIB. That will be useful. Once I get it to run again. |
| Vince:
--- Quote from: mansaxel on June 29, 2022, 11:22:20 am --- --- Quote from: Vince on June 29, 2022, 11:09:25 am --- I don't see, back then, how you could offer the same practically in any other way. Surely all TE manufacturers thought like me that ",5" floppies were the obvious choice, and surely all the customers that paid extra to tick the " FDD " option though that too. --- End quote --- If I want something impractical, I would sign up to work for a heritage railway. Today, one hangs a serial-to-TCP dongle, driven by the DTR voltage perhaps, on the scope and are done with it. My TDS520 has serial and parallel option, as well as GPIB. That will be useful. Once I get it to run again. --- End quote --- Again it's about the relevance of it back in the day, not today... As for practicality well the TDS 520 scope itself could therefore be deemed just as impractical as the floppy, and therefore be replaced as well... I mean who wants to carry around a boat anchor and have it take so much space on the bench, when you can have today a compact and light portable scope ? And what about that scope ? Still waiting for piccies of the boards, have you looked closely to spot signs of corrosion ? |
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