Zel's Fleet Blog - BX, Jag XJ-S, Sinclair C5, Mercedes 208D & 230TE, AC Model 70.

[Stickyfinger]

CLAY BAR and spray tar remover

[Gibbo2286]

CLAY BAR and spray tar remover

Nah! Paraffin and a yellow duster.

[Zelandeth]

Luckily a rag and tar remover were all that was needed as even by the time I'd been out, collected the package I was out to get, got stuck in the traffic jam on the A5 because someone had driven into the back of a van (BMW 1 series, no surprise there then) and got home again...it was still liquid enough to come off without too much of a fight. Gives you an idea how liquid it was when I drove over it...

Does now mean that the entire car needs waxing again though as it will have stripped that off as well as the tar. That will be a task for the weekend then.

Heaven help any poor cyclist who was unfortunate enough to ride down there, they'd be trying to get tar out of their teeth for a month.

[Stickyfinger]

Heaven help any poor cyclist who was unfortunate enough to ride down there, they'd be trying to get tar out of their teeth for a month.

Just add feathers

[CitroJim]

Heaven help any poor cyclist who was unfortunate enough to ride down there, they'd be trying to get tar out of their teeth for a month.

Just add feathers

We could fly then

[Zelandeth]

So...Lada. Waiting for the new ECU to arrive. Invacar...waiting for the donor vehicle to become available. Activa...well...working. Only stuff on that I'm really wanting to get done is a darn good deep clean in the short term.

Cleaning a car when it's tipping it down is a pain...so ignored that.

Instead sat down this evening and switched the outside world off for a bit and try to get some work done on a project that's been sitting on the back burner since late 2015.

I really struggle to get stuff done sitting on my modern machine as there are just too many distractions. The old Toshiba however just does what I tell it to, it doesn't try to be helpful or anything.

Wound up getting just over five and a half thousand words bashed out over a couple of hours and actually feel like I've made a decent dent in the project at long last. Feels like I might actually get the thing finished at some point.

The fact that I've still got a machine from 1993 that's still earning it's keep makes me far happier than it probably should do.

[CitroJim]

Gosh Zel, that Tosh brings back some memories and I was delighted to bits when I saw it for real The weight of it is epic!

One can easily see why they were christened 'luggables'

[Hell Razor5543]

I remember a cartoon in one of the "DOS for Dummies" books. A sales rep has just been asked about portable PC, and suggested the enquirer speaks to another member of staff (not sure about the name). That particular member of staff has the right arm a gorilla would be proud of, extending down past his knee, while his left arm is normal.

[CitroJim]

^^

Nice one James

[Hell Razor5543]

Here are a few examples of The 5th Wave;

https://aresluna.org/attached/pics/usab ... comic2.jpg
https://the5thwave.com/system/files/ima ... de/801.png
https://the5thwave.com/system/files/ima ... ode/77.png

[Zelandeth]

Somehow I survived carting that thing most of the way across Aberdeen everyday for a fair chunk of my time at college. Granted I did drive a Lada at the time as well, so upper body strength was pretty much a prerequisite for surviving the drive as well...

Weight wise it's pretty much on par with what you'd expect given what's crammed into the box - essentially a reasonably well specified 386 based desktop for the time.

I've a massive soft spot for portable machines from this era (or any hardware for that matter), so if you ever do see or hear one destined for the recycling bin, save it! They do still turn up from time to time believe it or not.

I really do need to reassemble the Toshiba T-1200... that's a couple of generations before the 5200 above, running an 80C86 at a whopping 3MHz, a 720K floppy drive, 640k of memory (and 512K extended I think) and a 20mb hard drive. It got taken to bits years ago due to a power supply problem (leaky caps unsurprisingly), but never got reassembled at the time.

Much though I enjoy these machines, they can be utterly maddening to work on sometimes...unlike desktops of the time they were often very much not intended to come apart again.

[Zelandeth]

Today has been frustrating to say the least.

New ECU arrived. Unfortunately it's totally different inside the case, not least in that there's no plug in modules for config data etc...back to the drawing board on that one...unless anyone knows someone who knows anything about 90s era Vauxhall/Opel ECU setups...

Then tried to get SETI@Home up and running on my desktop (last time I had it running was on a 133MHz Cyrix!). This ended up being a half day battle, which I've ended up with the actual client running - though the screensaver bit is still refusing to play ball. I'm going to ignore it for a couple of days then try again.

...do need to get it installed on the server too as that is running 24/7 and is idle probably 95% of the time.

Was determined to get something done today that would actually work, so finally got around to attacking the keyboard/mouse assembly from that DRS LXI ex military laptop I picked up a while ago. I was pretty certain it would turn out to be a perfectly normal PS/2 device based on what it was plugged into - essentially an off-the-shelf multi purpose industrial PC motherboard. Just in a very special case with some specialised expansion boards.

Sure enough, a bit of poking around to reverse engineer it (as I couldn't find a wiring diagram online anywhere) had it figured out.

Totally pointless project...but I'll figure something out to do with it...

[Hell Razor5543]

I still have one of those Fujitsu keyboards. It got very good reviews from PC Pro (whenever they evaluated a PC with that keyboard it got a mention). They were not cheap (£30, back in the nineties) but very solidly built. I have stripped mine down, and they are not simple. Key cap, key head, spring, spring cup, rubber membrane, contact membrane, and steel backing plate. If you type like you hate the keyboard all you will get is bruised fingers!

When I built my Mums' first PC I suggested she try out various keyboards, to find one she liked. After a while she told me she hadn't found one she could get on with, so I suggested she tried my Fujitsu keyboard. She started using it (tentatively at first, but then getting faster), and the last thing she typed before talking to me was "One day my Prince will come. Heaven help the poor bastard!", and then she asked me if I could still get hold of these keyboards. I said I wasn't sure, and she replied that, if I could not I would need a new keyboard as she wanted THIS one. I was able to get her a new Fujitsu keyboard.

[xantia_v6]

I really do need to reassemble the Toshiba T-1200... that's a couple of generations before the 5200 above, running an 80C86 at a whopping 3MHz, a 720K floppy drive, 640k of memory (and 512K extended I think) and a 20mb hard drive.

I have a T-1200 in my store room in NZ. I had one as a work computer when they were new, and did frequent long-haul business flights with it, using it for generating business proposals, user manuals and software development.

The extended memory was only 384 kB (making a total of 1 MB RAM), but you could configure the extended memory to be a 384 kB ram disk, copy your working files to it, then switch off the rotating disk and keep working. This allowed, if you switched the CPU clock to minimum and dimmed the back-lighting to minimum, a battery life of about 10 hours on a long-haul flight.

[Zelandeth]

I still have one of those Fujitsu keyboards. It got very good reviews from PC Pro (whenever they evaluated a PC with that keyboard it got a mention). They were not cheap (£30, back in the nineties) but very solidly built. I have stripped mine down, and they are not simple. Key cap, key head, spring, spring cup, rubber membrane, contact membrane, and steel backing plate. If you type like you hate the keyboard all you will get is bruised fingers!

Only had one Fujitsu keyboard that I can recall. Don't remember specifics about it, but seem to recall it being a decent example. Sadly it was killed by the damp problem at my parent's house which killed so much of my tech. The mould actually ate the traces on the contact membrane.

I have a T-1200 in my store room in NZ. I had one as a work computer when they were new, and did frequent long-haul business flights with it, using it for generating business proposals, user manuals and software development.

The extended memory was only 384 kB (making a total of 1 MB RAM), but you could configure the extended memory to be a 384 kB ram disk, copy your working files to it, then switch off the rotating disk and keep working. This allowed, if you switched the CPU clock to minimum and dimmed the back-lighting to minimum, a battery life of about 10 hours on a long-haul flight.

I do remember mine (this would have been in about 2001 I think), even with its original battery managing to easily last through a couple of days at school, when I was using it for note-taking etc. Being able to manually spin down the hard drive was really useful - especially as it was far from a quiet drive! One of the reasons I really want to get it back up and running is that there's stuff on that drive I want to recover, but it has a non-standard interface, so I really need the whole computer up to get data off it.