Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[nfmax]

Thats so sad, we owe a lot to him, he is the reason why we have pocket sized calculators today, and he kick-started the computer programming craze that has led us to the modern day games we enjoy now.

Err, no and no. He was beaten to the first pocket calculator by more than 2 years. The home computing craze was already well underway when he jumped on the bandwagon. What he was a very good self publicist and good at producing a product that was as cheaply made as possible and just functional enough to keep him out of court.

...please allow 28 days for delivery 

[bd139]

Enough time for him to go bankrupt! 

Edit: also reminds me of the 80s joke. What’s 1 inch long and comes in 28 days? Sinclair’s Penis.

[Neper]

One is left wondering if Timex have ever been paid for all the mainboards they made for him.

[tggzzz]

Paging AVGresponding on that one 


Dang. Sinclair died:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/16/home-computing-pioneer-sir-clive-sinclair-dies-aged-81

That was an interesting read, I didn't remember seeing him on Late Night Poker. He's left quite a technological legacy, one way or another.[/color][/size][/b]

I remember going to hear him speak somewhere strange, like Arundel, maybe, while at university - I think @tggzzz was there as well?

Definitely not me. If I had ever gone to see him I would have made sure I was carrying a six-pack of eggs.

[tggzzz]

Paging AVGresponding on that one 


Dang. Sinclair died:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/16/home-computing-pioneer-sir-clive-sinclair-dies-aged-81

Thats so sad, we owe a lot to him, he is the reason why we have pocket sized calculators today, and he kick-started the computer programming craze that has led us to the modern day games we enjoy now. Many of those programmers cut their teeth on ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum computers. It might also be argued that perhaps if it were not for his pocket TV, we might not have the smartphones with their ability to play video now.

HP's calculators pre-dated Sinclairs, and were shirt pocket sized because Bill made that a requirement. HP's calculators were also more accurate than a slide rule.

There were many other computers around before the ZX*, and many of them were more influential in the long run.

The thing about all Sinclair's stuff was that it was cheap - usually too cheap. Exception: the C5, which might have been useful if Sinclair's ego didn't decree that it was a road vehicle.

[bd139]

I’ve actually driven a C5. It was horrible.

[Robert763]

Thats so sad, we owe a lot to him, he is the reason why we have pocket sized calculators today, and he kick-started the computer programming craze that has led us to the modern day games we enjoy now.

Err, no and no. He was beaten to the first pocket calculator by more than 2 years. The home computing craze was already well underway when he jumped on the bandwagon. What he was a very good self publicist and good at producing a product that was as cheaply made as possible and just functional enough to keep him out of court.

...please allow 28 days for delivery 

Oh yeah, we can thank him for the law stopping people taking your money before the goods were ready to ship.
My first "computer" was a Science of Cambridge MK14. Put me of his products for life.

[Specmaster]

Paging AVGresponding on that one 


Dang. Sinclair died:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/16/home-computing-pioneer-sir-clive-sinclair-dies-aged-81

Thats so sad, we owe a lot to him, he is the reason why we have pocket sized calculators today, and he kick-started the computer programming craze that has led us to the modern day games we enjoy now. Many of those programmers cut their teeth on ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum computers. It might also be argued that perhaps if it were not for his pocket TV, we might not have the smartphones with their ability to play video now.

My first contact with a home computer was a Spectrum.

He was not the inventor of the pocket calculator. Not only did the -hp- 35 beat the Sinclair to market with a year, it also wasn't the first one. The Sinclair effort still is commendable for being very cheap and accessible.

Correct about the calculator, but what Sinclair did was to make them so affordable, that he started the whole "pile em high, sell em cheap" race, until then they were pretty much the domain of the businessman, he made them into a domestic product to be more accurate.

[bd139]

Paging AVGresponding on that one 


Dang. Sinclair died:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/16/home-computing-pioneer-sir-clive-sinclair-dies-aged-81

Thats so sad, we owe a lot to him, he is the reason why we have pocket sized calculators today, and he kick-started the computer programming craze that has led us to the modern day games we enjoy now. Many of those programmers cut their teeth on ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum computers. It might also be argued that perhaps if it were not for his pocket TV, we might not have the smartphones with their ability to play video now.

My first contact with a home computer was a Spectrum.

He was not the inventor of the pocket calculator. Not only did the -hp- 35 beat the Sinclair to market with a year, it also wasn't the first one. The Sinclair effort still is commendable for being very cheap and accessible.

Correct about the calculator, but what Sinclair did was to make them so affordable, that he started the whole "pile em high, sell em cheap" race, until then they were pretty much the domain of the businessman, he made them into a domestic product to be more accurate.

I’m not sure he even achieved that though. To quote my father “I’m not touching that shit” after some previous Sinclair experience.  He had a Casio Mini followed by an FX-10. Both were purchased from retail stores in the UK without having to resort to risky mail order.

I inherited these as my first calculators in the early 80s.

Sinclair had the market for people who were convinced they were getting a bargain. That was all. That market is still strong now!

The real killer was the HP scientific calculators. They were stupid expensive when they came out BUT the time savings over using a slide rule and the function parity was amazing so it was a no brainer.

[med6753]

Never had or used a Sinclair product. Seems I wasn't missing anything other than aggravation. 

[bd139]

You forgot financial loss to go with the aggravation.

Only saving grace was Amstrad was worse 

[Specmaster]

Paging AVGresponding on that one 


Dang. Sinclair died:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/16/home-computing-pioneer-sir-clive-sinclair-dies-aged-81

Thats so sad, we owe a lot to him, he is the reason why we have pocket sized calculators today, and he kick-started the computer programming craze that has led us to the modern day games we enjoy now. Many of those programmers cut their teeth on ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum computers. It might also be argued that perhaps if it were not for his pocket TV, we might not have the smartphones with their ability to play video now.

I wouldn’t give him that much credit.

He produced a bunch of error ridden articles for PW magazine, sold terrible quality kits that had a 50% return rate, sold a watch that caught fire, a computer that couldn’t compute and display at the same time, wobbly memory extensions that barely worked, a rubber keyboard from hell, joysticks that broke if you farted near them, a proprietary storage system which expertly corrupted your data or tore itself to shreds and built at least two lines of computers which didn’t sell at all well, designed a car which my arse wouldn’t fit inside and a bike which was impossible to ride.

He did however invent a new kind of cheap. The only thing we really owe him is keeping prices in check.

But we loved all this anyway.

I was an Acorn user 

Yep, it was his way of cutting corners so that he could undercut other makers was his main achievement, and that is why I said that we owe so much to him. It is very likely that the things like cheap pocket calculators, and such a healthy computer / software scene today is/was because he made such things affordable to the masses. Acorns, Commodore, Orics, Newbrains, Atari, Jupiter and MX were all much more expensive at the time.

I still have a scientific calculator and a ZX Spectrum that still work and the Spectrum has had a hard life and nerve never gave me any trouble at all. Also of course we have to remember that TTi also came out of Sinclair.

[Cubdriver]

Never had or used a Sinclair product. Seems I wasn't missing anything other than aggravation. 

A classmate in HS (early 80s) had one of those tiny Timex-Sinclair computers.  Think it cost about $100, which was a pretty big nut for a HS kid in 1982.  I never really tried to use it at all, but I can't imagine making a crappier "keyboard" even with great effort.

-Pat

[Saskia]

Which reminds me that the Mega 65, the Artix implementation of the c65 is to be up for preorder in cw39.

In other news, received my Procurve 5120  switch today. Boots, works, has 2 10 gbe uplink ports and is a lot less noisy than the other switch I got.
Will get a console cable from a friend. 20  ports should suffice for use at home .

[Specmaster]

Enough time for him to go bankrupt! 

Edit: also reminds me of the 80s joke. What’s 1 inch long and comes in 28 days? Sinclair’s Penis.

Well he is supposed to have made £14million profit within his first 2 years in business. I really don't understand why people hate him so much, yes it was mail order in the early days, but there again so was much of the other tech stuff from other companies. Please allow 28 days for items to arrive was rife at the time of his ZX80 and ZX81 machines, but the Spectrum was also in the shops, and I mean in the shops. I recall even WS Smith had, most of the other large chains and indeed so did many local newsagents, even some Coop food stores had a small computer section.

The newspapers of the time were stuffed full of adverts for this or that product from all kinds of manufacturers products and all of them saying much the same thing, order now, pay now and wait upto 28 days for delivery, so Sinclair didn't start that off, he simply used the system to fund his operation in the early days. It was even very recently we have had similar schemes to start business running https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdfunding.

[bd139]

If he made £7m in the first two years and invested £7m in quality control he’d still be in business.

[tggzzz]

I’ve actually driven a C5. It was horrible.

But maybe sufficient to get around large factory sites, or for tourists at holiday resorts.

Brizzle is currently infested with Voi electric scooters, which at least have the benefit of having a smaller footprint on the pavement, and having heads above exhaust height.

[tggzzz]

Thats so sad, we owe a lot to him, he is the reason why we have pocket sized calculators today, and he kick-started the computer programming craze that has led us to the modern day games we enjoy now.

Err, no and no. He was beaten to the first pocket calculator by more than 2 years. The home computing craze was already well underway when he jumped on the bandwagon. What he was a very good self publicist and good at producing a product that was as cheaply made as possible and just functional enough to keep him out of court.

...please allow 28 days for delivery 

Oh yeah, we can thank him for the law stopping people taking your money before the goods were ready to ship.
My first "computer" was a Science of Cambridge MK14. Put me of his products for life.

I remembered Sinclairs audio amps from the 60s, and so bought a pre-assembled Sinclair Scientific for £25. It still works, but then so does my HP35!

I bought Acorn's first machine (a System 1) for work. I did the job, and the client was amazed that we demonstrated the system concepts in 1 month rather than 6 months.

[Specmaster]

He freely admitted that he was no businessman, he made many bad decisions in his life, but equally he has been very influential as well. Acorn was formed when his partnership with Criss Chris Curry broke up, and Chris then went on to develop the BBC micro, far more expensive of course as it had a proper keyboard etc.

Also, all the companies people have so far mentioned, the like of HP, Casio etc were already well-developed and flourishing businesses in their own right, on the other hand Sinclair was starting from scratch, having been a technical journalist before starting his business and the "allow 28 days for delivery" was by that time an established method with new startup companies of raising enough capital to produce the goods, a look through newspapers of the era will confirm that.

I brought my Mother a Casio CQ1 that was advertised I think in the "News of the World" newspaper in the 70's and too also said "Please allow 28 days for delivery" but that was not Casio selling but a UK agent for Casio products.


It is therefore wrong to dislike him for that aspect of his business model. Yes, he purchased huge volumes of transistors from Plessey who had deemed them of not being upto their preferred standards, and that was one reason why so many things either worked or didn't when they arrived. If like me, you got lucky, the products worked well, but that did mean you had to make do with membrain keyboards that were horrible to use, but the plus side is that such ways of taking cost out, made them so much more affordable.

As mentioned earlier, he was involved in the early days of Thurlby & Thandar (later became TTi) and some of his influence can be seen in some pieces of their kit, like Thurlby 1905a bench DMM which sports a horrible keyboard like that found on his ZX80 and 81 computers, but the meter itself is a very nice meter.




EDIT:
As I mentioned above, the Spectrum keyboard was horrible to use for any length of time, so I changed it.



I took the board out of the case, and with the help of a special interface module made my Miles Gordon Technology of Cambridge, I was able to get hold of a fried MTX512, threw away the main board, modify the case to accept the Spectrum board mounted inside, and modified the keyboard PCB to work with the MGT interface and the Spectrum, and the Spectrum still lives in this keyboard today, but the keyboard now suffers from stiff sticky keys.



Every key on that keyboard was mapped into doing some specific function on the Spectrum and the keyboard itself was made of anodised metal so is very heavy to boot as well 

[BU508A]

Echoes from a distant past

Part three - The Rohde & Schwarz NGU laboratory power supply unit for vacuum tubes

Edit:
Part one - Siemens Rel. send. 22b
Part two - The Two Transformers
Part three - The Rohde & Schwarz NGU laboratory power supply unit for vacuum tubes
Part four - The Rohde & Schwarz Vacuum Tube Meter URI BN 1050
Part five - The Rohde & Schwarz UVN BN 12001 NF Millivoltmeter
Part six - The Nordmende digital multimeter DIVO 3355 (with Nixie tubes!)

Hello,

today I'd like to introduce you to the Rohde & Schwarz lab PSU, type NGU, developed for designing vacuum tube circuits.
This devices comes in nearly mint condition. No rust visible on the outside nor on the inside. The mains cable is stiff and brittle,
but this will be replaced anyway. It weighs ca. 12kg and can produce several outputs of DC and AC voltages.
The main regulated DC output voltage (R&S called this the "U") goes from 100V up to 300+V with a max current of 100mA.
This is lethal territory so better be careful!

Let's start with some pictures from the outside.
Front with the lid cover on, top and bottom view, front without the lid cover.


The brittle mains cable and the glowing eye of an HAL9000 (probably).


So, let's see what's in the inside.
Top view, bottom view. And we have a date code: January, 27th, 1961
Beautiful wiring as always with this old R&S devices. No sign for leakage or rust but some corrosion (we'll see that later).


There are five vacuum tubes in it and all are located in one corner of the NGU.
Easy to access and to replace. All tubes can be exchanged without adjustments except of the two 85A2.
Those are the voltage refrences of the NGU. Kind of the vacuum tube version of modern Zener diodes. 
EL34 (6CA7)- power pentode
EF80 (6BX6) - RF pentode
ECC82 (12AU7) - AF twin triode
85A2 (0G3) - voltage regulator tube (two of them)


Some Bosch electrolytic capacitors from October 1960. They are huge and must have cost a fortune back in the days.
A strange construction to hold another capacitor in place. Looks expensive (the holder).


The mains transformer. Lots of windings, lots of tappings. This must have been an expensive beast as well!
Not only the transformer itself but also the assembling of it.
There are some stains on the outside of the transformer but they can be removed easily with a dry paper towel.


Mains input and the fuses. The red cable is the PEN, another sign, how old this device is.
The fuses are corroded which I'm finding a bit odd. They are inside of a plastic cover and the corrosion looks like,
if a battery or an electrolytic cap has spewed its guts on them. I've removed the fuses (they look as they were the original ones),
cleaned the fuse holders with lots of IPA and replaced the fuses with new ones. This blue-greenish stuff was very crusty,
so I used a small piece of paper towel wrapped around a small screwdriver. I wasn't able to remove all of the corrosion but most of it.


The rotary switch for the coarse setting of the U voltage. The potentiometers are Rosenthal branded. Germans know Rosenthal as well for their
excellent porcelain tableware, but their potentiometers are also top quality. These ones work smoothly as they were brand new. Well done!


Some detailed views of the wiring and parts being used.
You may have noticed those blue dots on all those solder joints. I'm not sure what's their purpose. Some kind of quality control?


Here are some measures of the outputs.
BM235 - 6.3VAC for heating the vacuum tubes
121GW - measuring E₁ (goes from 0V down to -10V DC)
U1252B - measuring E₂ (goes from 0V down to -100V DC)
BM869s - measuring the DC and AC of the U output (DC goes from +100V up to +311V)
I'm not sure, why the U output is that much off. Perhaps some adjustments needs to be done, perhaps the 85A2 needs to be replaced. I'll find out.

(please also note, how crappy the display of the 121GW compared to the others is. I'm a bit disappointed in this respect (sorry Dave).)

Here are some pictures from the manual, including a hi-res photo of the schematics.
Features page one, features page two, example for how to connect two NGUs together, schematics.
I do really enjoy, how much effort and love for details R&S putted into their manuals. It is not only the pictures
but also their clear explanations on how their devices are working. It is really a pity, that such things aren't
available anymore. In every single line one can read all the pride of the people which have designed this device.


I hope, you've enjoyed this teardown and report of the R&S NGU.
Please stay tuned for part four, the Rohde & Schwarz URI vacuum tube multimeter.

Thank you for watching.

[xrunner]

Incredible - mostly looks as if it just came off the assembly line! 

[25 CPS]

Some of you guys mentioned the Sinclair C5.  Right now this is what’s just down from the top of the Toronto Star’s front page and the C5 came to mind right away when I saw the picture there.  It looks like one of the local auto parts magnates is getting ready to try out the same concept all over again:



I can understand the logic but I still don’t see it taking off now, just as it didn’t then.

[Cerebus]

Driving that looks as much of an attempt a vehicular suicide as 'driving' a C5 did. I personally do not fancy being in a lightweight plastic/GRP vehicle with no energy absorbing crumple zones or strong rigid central cell - i.e. a vehicle that ignores everything about making vehicle occupancy survivable in a crash. I can't see any seatbelts either, and the outward visibility looks pretty poor. At least the whole vehicle isn't below every other drivers line of sight like the C5 was.

[med6753]

Incredible - mostly looks as if it just came off the assembly line! 

Agreed, that supply is clean.  It is weird about the corrosion on the fuses and no where else.

I am surprised that the maximum B+ is 300V. I would think +500V maximum would expand it's usefulness.     

[med6753]

Some of you guys mentioned the Sinclair C5.  Right now this is what’s just down from the top of the Toronto Star’s front page and the C5 came to mind right away when I saw the picture there.  It looks like one of the local auto parts magnates is getting ready to try out the same concept all over again:



I can understand the logic but I still don’t see it taking off now, just as it didn’t then.

Yea, right. Canadian winters and snow. Gonna work just fine.