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#1
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Need a new thermostat
On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote:
Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). 1) I know they make wireless thermostats and wifi thermostats, but I wonder if they made ones that are wired but can get by on only 4 wires, maybe by modulating the signal or something, and demodulating it at the furnace end. I have seen one of those. It has a unit next to the furnace, and the connection to the wall unit works like USB USB (2 wires for power, and 2 for data). I don't remember brand/model. 2) Also, a much harder question: For years I've been looking for this, a setback thermostat that had a Next button. So if you come home early, leave early, go to bed or get up early, instead of having to use the up or down button and count how mnay degrees you set the temp up or down, you push one button once, to go to the next time period/temparature. My thermostat doesn't have that, just the manual override (temporary (changes to schedule at next scheduled time) or permanent). [snip] -- Mark Lloyd http://notstupid.us/ "If I get hit or run over by a truck It's not His fault, it's just my own bad luck" [_PRAY TV_] |
#2
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Need a new thermostat
On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd
wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. 1) I know they make wireless thermostats and wifi thermostats, but I wonder if they made ones that are wired but can get by on only 4 wires, maybe by modulating the signal or something, and demodulating it at the furnace end. I have seen one of those. It has a unit next to the furnace, and the connection to the wall unit works like USB USB (2 wires for power, and 2 for data). I don't remember brand/model. 2) Also, a much harder question: For years I've been looking for this, a setback thermostat that had a Next button. So if you come home early, leave early, go to bed or get up early, instead of having to use the up or down button and count how mnay degrees you set the temp up or down, you push one button once, to go to the next time period/temparature. My thermostat doesn't have that, just the manual override (temporary (changes to schedule at next scheduled time) or permanent). [snip] |
#3
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Need a new thermostat
On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 16:25:39 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. 1) I know they make wireless thermostats and wifi thermostats, but I wonder if they made ones that are wired but can get by on only 4 wires, maybe by modulating the signal or something, and demodulating it at the furnace end. I have seen one of those. It has a unit next to the furnace, and the connection to the wall unit works like USB USB (2 wires for power, and 2 for data). I don't remember brand/model. 2) Also, a much harder question: For years I've been looking for this, a setback thermostat that had a Next button. So if you come home early, leave early, go to bed or get up early, instead of having to use the up or down button and count how mnay degrees you set the temp up or down, you push one button once, to go to the next time period/temparature. My thermostat doesn't have that, just the manual override (temporary (changes to schedule at next scheduled time) or permanent). [snip] The problem is, with a heat pump you need W1 and W2, that makes 5. One will start the heat pump compressor and if it can't make the stat - 10 degrees or something W2 kicks the heat strips on. You really need 2 wires for that (plus the hot, cool and fan). If you just want your furnace to be a single stage, that's OK but in Bal'mer he will need that toaster wire if he is not burning oil. |
#4
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Need a new thermostat
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#7
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Need a new thermostat
On 2020-04-25 9:49 a.m., Bud Frede wrote:
Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... i have open the door , close the door |
#8
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede
wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. |
#9
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. |
#11
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. |
#12
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Need a new thermostat
In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400,
wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. |
#13
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Need a new thermostat
On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky
wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. |
#14
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Fri, 01 May 2020 13:30:55 -0400, wrote:
On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi, Shugart, Panasonic, Matsu****a, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even used some Sanyo Denki drives. Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by IBM. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86 |
#15
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Need a new thermostat
On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 6:06:42 PM UTC-4, Clare Snyder wrote:
On Fri, 01 May 2020 13:30:55 -0400, wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi, Shugart, Panasonic, Matsu****a, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even used some Sanyo Denki drives. Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by IBM. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86 I agree with that. I never heard of any incompatibility between IBM PC floppy drives their media and the clones. The thing that made the Compaq and later PCs so successful was that they were just about 100% compatible with IBM. If you couldn't take a floppy disk from one machine to another, it would have been a disaster. |
#16
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On 2/5/20 8:06 am, Clare Snyder wrote:
On Fri, 01 May 2020 13:30:55 -0400, wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi, Shugart, Panasonic, Matsu****a, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even used some Sanyo Denki drives. Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by IBM. Indeed, the full height soft sectored drives by Tandon, TM100-2 as OEM in early PCs up until the AT, were exactly the same internally as drives in other computers. Might have had an IBM logo on the front plate but that was all. Those drives needed occasional head alignment and that involved an oscilloscope and an analogue alignment disk. You had to adjust the heads until the image on screen was symmetrical. Those alignment disks were A$100 each (in 1980s dollars) so you checked a drive's heads out before you put a valuable alignment disk in it. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86 Northstar Horizon was the only one I recall that was hard sectored until late in the piece. Earlier there were plenty in the 8 inch drives. There were also a few around running on the S100 bus system. I can't recall the brand now but I sourced one for a friend who had an orphaned S100 based CP/M system and the only way he could get a set of drives was through that bus. The unit was this one; https://ub.fnwi.uva.nl/computermuseu...es/exidy2a.gif The drives I sourced for the owner were very much like the drives pictured on the right. Got him a heap of blank disks too since they were, at that time, becoming very scarce. He probably still has it. -- Xeno Nothing astonishes Noddy so much as common sense and plain dealing. (with apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson) |
#17
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On 2/5/20 11:02 am, trader_4 wrote:
On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 6:06:42 PM UTC-4, Clare Snyder wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 13:30:55 -0400, wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi, Shugart, Panasonic, Matsu****a, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even used some Sanyo Denki drives. Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by IBM. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86 I agree with that. I never heard of any incompatibility between IBM PC floppy drives their media and the clones. The thing that made the Compaq and later PCs so successful was that they were just about 100% compatible with IBM. If you couldn't take a floppy disk from one machine to another, it would have been a disaster. Yes, the PC drives were 100% compatible. What did vary between manufacturers (but not IBM and compatibles) was the format (sector size, interleave, etc.) but a friend wrote a PC program that could read just about any disk. -- Xeno Nothing astonishes Noddy so much as common sense and plain dealing. (with apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson) |
#18
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 2 May 2020 11:34:49 +1000, Xeno
wrote: snipped Indeed, the full height soft sectored drives by Tandon, TM100-2 as OEM in early PCs up until the AT, were exactly the same internally as drives in other computers. Might have had an IBM logo on the front plate but that was all. Those drives needed occasional head alignment and that involved an oscilloscope and an analogue alignment disk. You had to adjust the heads until the image on screen was symmetrical. Those alignment disks were A$100 each (in 1980s dollars) so you checked a drive's heads out before you put a valuable alignment disk in it. I had (possibly still have) an alugnmrnt disk and the software for the Radio Shack COCO with the A-Dos controller that I used for years to check and align 5 1/4" floppies. I think it cost me something like $39 back in about '85 or so. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86 The CP/M box the dealership got just before I left to run the ADP financial system used single sided hard sectored 5 1/4 inch drives. I THINK it was a proprietory system - not the PC based CP/M 86. I know it only had one floppy and no hard drive - which made booting and loading the system a PAIN. I think it was a shugart drive but wouldnt swear to it. Maybee a Magnetic Peripherals Northstar Horizon was the only one I recall that was hard sectored until late in the piece. Earlier there were plenty in the 8 inch drives. There were also a few around running on the S100 bus system. I can't recall the brand now but I sourced one for a friend who had an orphaned S100 based CP/M system and the only way he could get a set of drives was through that bus. The unit was this one; https://ub.fnwi.uva.nl/computermuseu...es/exidy2a.gif The drives I sourced for the owner were very much like the drives pictured on the right. Got him a heap of blank disks too since they were, at that time, becoming very scarce. He probably still has it. |
#19
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 2 May 2020 11:44:00 +1000, Xeno
wrote: On 2/5/20 11:02 am, trader_4 wrote: On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 6:06:42 PM UTC-4, Clare Snyder wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 13:30:55 -0400, wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi, Shugart, Panasonic, Matsu****a, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even used some Sanyo Denki drives. Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by IBM. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86 I agree with that. I never heard of any incompatibility between IBM PC floppy drives their media and the clones. The thing that made the Compaq and later PCs so successful was that they were just about 100% compatible with IBM. If you couldn't take a floppy disk from one machine to another, it would have been a disaster. Yes, the PC drives were 100% compatible. What did vary between manufacturers (but not IBM and compatibles) was the format (sector size, interleave, etc.) but a friend wrote a PC program that could read just about any disk. My Coco with A-DOS could even read PC disks. As long as the data was compatible with a program on the computer. A lot of qbasic and other versions of basic would halfways run on the cocobasic - and I ported a lot of stuff over. Haven't done any basic programming for AGES. Used to edit a lot of 6809 machine language too - been likely 30 years or more since the last attempt. Had OS9 and c compiler too - I'd be totally useless on it now - - - |
#20
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Fri, 01 May 2020 18:06:24 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 13:30:55 -0400, wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi, Shugart, Panasonic, Matsu****a, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even used some Sanyo Denki drives. Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by IBM. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86 I know there were some 5.25" clone drives that didn't work on an IBM (maybe Commodore?) Once you got to the 3.5" none of the clone drives worked on first generation PS/2s They inverted the logic on pin 2. IBM drives did not have a media select pin. |
#21
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Fri, 1 May 2020 18:02:06 -0700 (PDT), trader_4
wrote: On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 6:06:42 PM UTC-4, Clare Snyder wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 13:30:55 -0400, wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi, Shugart, Panasonic, Matsu****a, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even used some Sanyo Denki drives. Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by IBM. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86 I agree with that. I never heard of any incompatibility between IBM PC floppy drives their media and the clones. The thing that made the Compaq and later PCs so successful was that they were just about 100% compatible with IBM. If you couldn't take a floppy disk from one machine to another, it would have been a disaster. They all wrote compatible data formats. I was talking about the interface. On the 3.5s you could write a disk a clone wouldn't read. Just format a 720 at 1.44. The clone will puke on it. Another IBM machine will work. |
#22
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
wrote :
On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. |
#23
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On 2/5/20 6:27 pm, FromTheRafters wrote:
wrote : On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate.** no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires* (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires* installed (3 for later use). *I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece.* The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared.*** Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop* everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. Disk drives were always procured from OEMs. IBM drives set a standard that was followed by the clones but there was nothing particularly special about them. The only thing that IBM really had full control over was the BIOS. That was why the clones had workalike BIOSes. I read somewhere that was the biggest mistake IBM made - the open architecture - and they tried to rectify that with the PS2 - and why the PS2 disappeared. This, from Wikipedia, might explain it; The IBM copyright appears in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo, and the company reportedly received no patents on the PC, with outsiders manufacturing 90% of it. and Perhaps Chess's most unusual decision for IBM was to publish the PC's technical specifications, allowing outsiders to create products for it. Because of this, and the open architecture, I see no earthly reason why IBM PC floppy drives would be any different to any other similar spec OEM drive. If another PC Clone had difficulty running a PC drive, then it would be safe to assume the clone had the issue of compatibility, not the drive. With an open architecture like the ISA bus, any drive that adhered to standard specifications would/should work. For the PS/2 however, I could believe that drives may have been a little different from standard. Next-generation IBM PS/2 The IBM PS/2 line was introduced in 1987. The Model 30 at the bottom end of the lineup was very similar to earlier models; it used an 8086 processor and an ISA bus. The Model 30 was not "IBM compatible" in that it did not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays; it came with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and optionally a 3.5-inch-sized hard disk. Most models in the PS/2 line further departed from "IBM compatible" by replacing the ISA bus completely with Micro Channel Architecture. The MCA bus was not received well by the customer base for PC's, since it was proprietary to IBM. It was rarely implemented by any of the other PC-compatible makers. Eventually IBM would abandon this architecture entirely and return to the standard ISA bus. The above was IBMs doomed attempt to regain control of the PC market. It was a dismal failure. -- Xeno Nothing astonishes Noddy so much as common sense and plain dealing. (with apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson) |
#24
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 02 May 2020 01:12:39 -0400, wrote:
On Fri, 01 May 2020 18:06:24 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 13:30:55 -0400, wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi, Shugart, Panasonic, Matsu****a, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even used some Sanyo Denki drives. Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by IBM. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86 I know there were some 5.25" clone drives that didn't work on an IBM (maybe Commodore?) Once you got to the 3.5" none of the clone drives worked on first generation PS/2s They inverted the logic on pin 2. IBM drives did not have a media select pin. Wasn't much that DID work on first gen PS/2s - and their Micro-Channel???? It was going to "revolutionize" the computer world. We got involved with a couple of microchannel clone projects - almost killed us - and almost killed IBM too. EISA bus technology didn't do much better but at least it was compatible with the standard ISA bus peripherals |
#25
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 02 May 2020 01:15:02 -0400, wrote:
On Fri, 1 May 2020 18:02:06 -0700 (PDT), trader_4 wrote: On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 6:06:42 PM UTC-4, Clare Snyder wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 13:30:55 -0400, wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi, Shugart, Panasonic, Matsu****a, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even used some Sanyo Denki drives. Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by IBM. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86 I agree with that. I never heard of any incompatibility between IBM PC floppy drives their media and the clones. The thing that made the Compaq and later PCs so successful was that they were just about 100% compatible with IBM. If you couldn't take a floppy disk from one machine to another, it would have been a disaster. They all wrote compatible data formats. I was talking about the interface. On the 3.5s you could write a disk a clone wouldn't read. Just format a 720 at 1.44. The clone will puke on it. Another IBM machine will work. I remember 1.44s formatted to 720. To read them on a normal PC you just had to put tape over the density selector notch on the diskette case. There was a "switch" in at least some versions of DOS to change the density. the /F: switch seems to ring a bell. I know it was there in DOS 6.2 - not sure about how many earlier versions. |
#26
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Saturday, May 2, 2020 at 1:36:04 PM UTC-4, Clare Snyder wrote:
On Sat, 02 May 2020 01:15:02 -0400, wrote: On Fri, 1 May 2020 18:02:06 -0700 (PDT), trader_4 wrote: On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 6:06:42 PM UTC-4, Clare Snyder wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 13:30:55 -0400, wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi, Shugart, Panasonic, Matsu****a, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even used some Sanyo Denki drives. Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by IBM. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86 I agree with that. I never heard of any incompatibility between IBM PC floppy drives their media and the clones. The thing that made the Compaq and later PCs so successful was that they were just about 100% compatible with IBM. If you couldn't take a floppy disk from one machine to another, it would have been a disaster. They all wrote compatible data formats. I was talking about the interface. On the 3.5s you could write a disk a clone wouldn't read. Just format a 720 at 1.44. The clone will puke on it. Another IBM machine will work. I remember 1.44s formatted to 720. To read them on a normal PC you just had to put tape over the density selector notch on the diskette case. There was a "switch" in at least some versions of DOS to change the density. the /F: switch seems to ring a bell. I know it was there in DOS 6.2 - not sure about how many earlier versions. I recently sold a high density, removable 100MB floppy drive from an old Gateway notebook. It was backward compatible with 1.44, for the high density you had to use special diskettes. That standard wasn't used much, never really went anywhere. But I guess somebody needed one for $40. |
#27
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 2 May 2020 20:12:39 +1000, Xeno
wrote: On 2/5/20 6:27 pm, FromTheRafters wrote: wrote : On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate.Â*Â* no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wiresÂ* (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wiresÂ* installed (3 for later use). Â*I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece.Â* The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared.Â*Â*Â* Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stopÂ* everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. Disk drives were always procured from OEMs. IBM drives set a standard that was followed by the clones but there was nothing particularly special about them. The only thing that IBM really had full control over was the BIOS. That was why the clones had workalike BIOSes. I read somewhere that was the biggest mistake IBM made - the open architecture - and they tried to rectify that with the PS2 - and why the PS2 disappeared. This, from Wikipedia, might explain it; The IBM copyright appears in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo, and the company reportedly received no patents on the PC, with outsiders manufacturing 90% of it. and Perhaps Chess's most unusual decision for IBM was to publish the PC's technical specifications, allowing outsiders to create products for it. Because of this, and the open architecture, I see no earthly reason why IBM PC floppy drives would be any different to any other similar spec OEM drive. If another PC Clone had difficulty running a PC drive, then it would be safe to assume the clone had the issue of compatibility, not the drive. With an open architecture like the ISA bus, any drive that adhered to standard specifications would/should work. For the PS/2 however, I could believe that drives may have been a little different from standard. Next-generation IBM PS/2 The IBM PS/2 line was introduced in 1987. The Model 30 at the bottom end of the lineup was very similar to earlier models; it used an 8086 processor and an ISA bus. The Model 30 was not "IBM compatible" in that it did not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays; it came with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and optionally a 3.5-inch-sized hard disk. Most models in the PS/2 line further departed from "IBM compatible" by replacing the ISA bus completely with Micro Channel Architecture. The MCA bus was not received well by the customer base for PC's, since it was proprietary to IBM. It was rarely implemented by any of the other PC-compatible makers. Eventually IBM would abandon this architecture entirely and return to the standard ISA bus. The above was IBMs doomed attempt to regain control of the PC market. It was a dismal failure. The PS/2 was never aimed at the home market. It was designed to be integrated into an office with a mainframe. The Microchannel was an attempt to eliminate all of that IRQ and memory assignment BS you ran into when you plugged a card in. By being proprietary, cards were designed not to come up with these conflicts and as a general rule that worked. It also made it less likely that a PC hobbyist was going to be screwing with the company owned machine on his desk. I ran PS/2s until I lost the channel for free parts, then I went back to an open architecture machine. I agree the 5.25" diskette and all of the hard drives were industry standard but a PS/2 3.5" diskette drive wasn't. There was no media sense pin in the drive and pin 2 in the cable (media select) was controlled by the adapter, not the drive. You could format a HD disk at 720 and vice versa. You just needed to bulk degauss the diskette when you changed formats. |
#28
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 02 May 2020 14:49:02 -0400, wrote:
On Sat, 2 May 2020 20:12:39 +1000, Xeno wrote: On 2/5/20 6:27 pm, FromTheRafters wrote: wrote : On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate.** no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires* (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires* installed (3 for later use). *I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece.* The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared.*** Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop* everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. Disk drives were always procured from OEMs. IBM drives set a standard that was followed by the clones but there was nothing particularly special about them. The only thing that IBM really had full control over was the BIOS. That was why the clones had workalike BIOSes. I read somewhere that was the biggest mistake IBM made - the open architecture - and they tried to rectify that with the PS2 - and why the PS2 disappeared. This, from Wikipedia, might explain it; The IBM copyright appears in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo, and the company reportedly received no patents on the PC, with outsiders manufacturing 90% of it. and Perhaps Chess's most unusual decision for IBM was to publish the PC's technical specifications, allowing outsiders to create products for it. Because of this, and the open architecture, I see no earthly reason why IBM PC floppy drives would be any different to any other similar spec OEM drive. If another PC Clone had difficulty running a PC drive, then it would be safe to assume the clone had the issue of compatibility, not the drive. With an open architecture like the ISA bus, any drive that adhered to standard specifications would/should work. For the PS/2 however, I could believe that drives may have been a little different from standard. Next-generation IBM PS/2 The IBM PS/2 line was introduced in 1987. The Model 30 at the bottom end of the lineup was very similar to earlier models; it used an 8086 processor and an ISA bus. The Model 30 was not "IBM compatible" in that it did not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays; it came with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and optionally a 3.5-inch-sized hard disk. Most models in the PS/2 line further departed from "IBM compatible" by replacing the ISA bus completely with Micro Channel Architecture. The MCA bus was not received well by the customer base for PC's, since it was proprietary to IBM. It was rarely implemented by any of the other PC-compatible makers. Eventually IBM would abandon this architecture entirely and return to the standard ISA bus. The above was IBMs doomed attempt to regain control of the PC market. It was a dismal failure. The PS/2 was never aimed at the home market. It was designed to be integrated into an office with a mainframe. The Microchannel was an attempt to eliminate all of that IRQ and memory assignment BS you ran into when you plugged a card in. By being proprietary, cards were designed not to come up with these conflicts and as a general rule that worked. It also made it less likely that a PC hobbyist was going to be screwing with the company owned machine on his desk. I ran PS/2s until I lost the channel for free parts, then I went back to an open architecture machine. I agree the 5.25" diskette and all of the hard drives were industry standard but a PS/2 3.5" diskette drive wasn't. There was no media sense pin in the drive and pin 2 in the cable (media select) was controlled by the adapter, not the drive. You could format a HD disk at 720 and vice versa. You just needed to bulk degauss the diskette when you changed formats. As I noted you could do it on a clone too if you knew how. Kind of a STOOPID thing to do - formatting a 1.44 to 720 |
#29
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 02 May 2020 13:36:01 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 01:15:02 -0400, wrote: On Fri, 1 May 2020 18:02:06 -0700 (PDT), trader_4 wrote: On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 6:06:42 PM UTC-4, Clare Snyder wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 13:30:55 -0400, wrote: On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires installed (3 for later use). I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi, Shugart, Panasonic, Matsu****a, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even used some Sanyo Denki drives. Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by IBM. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86 I agree with that. I never heard of any incompatibility between IBM PC floppy drives their media and the clones. The thing that made the Compaq and later PCs so successful was that they were just about 100% compatible with IBM. If you couldn't take a floppy disk from one machine to another, it would have been a disaster. They all wrote compatible data formats. I was talking about the interface. On the 3.5s you could write a disk a clone wouldn't read. Just format a 720 at 1.44. The clone will puke on it. Another IBM machine will work. I remember 1.44s formatted to 720. To read them on a normal PC you just had to put tape over the density selector notch on the diskette case. There was a "switch" in at least some versions of DOS to change the density. the /F: switch seems to ring a bell. I know it was there in DOS 6.2 - not sure about how many earlier versions. You could override the format selection from the drive in DOS and I think that started in 4 or 5. I skipped 4 but I am sure it was available in IBM DOS 5.0. Not sure about MS DOS. By then it was 2 different products. The other issue was if you formatted with a thin head (1.44) it did not clean the crap in the gap and a wide head (720) would puke on it. We just got in the habit of bulk degaussing diskettes before we formatted them. IBM had a part number for a good degaussing tool. (basically a big coil). We also played with the 2.4m 5.25" drives out of 3174s. That would work as a 1.2m OK but you needed a different controller to get 2.4M. If you used a machine with a 2.88m 3.5 controller and the pass through card that supported the 5.25" drive, you could use Format/f to use the disk at 2.4m but I think that only worked on PC DOS 6.3. Dunno for sure because, by then I was all 3.5" diskettes. My hacker buddies were doing it somehow tho. We also had the tool to low level 520 AS/400 hard drives to 512 so SCSI was our hard drive controller of choice. ;-) |
#30
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 02 May 2020 17:36:14 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 14:49:02 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 2 May 2020 20:12:39 +1000, Xeno wrote: On 2/5/20 6:27 pm, FromTheRafters wrote: wrote : On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate.Â*Â* no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wiresÂ* (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wiresÂ* installed (3 for later use). Â*I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece.Â* The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared.Â*Â*Â* Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stopÂ* everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. Disk drives were always procured from OEMs. IBM drives set a standard that was followed by the clones but there was nothing particularly special about them. The only thing that IBM really had full control over was the BIOS. That was why the clones had workalike BIOSes. I read somewhere that was the biggest mistake IBM made - the open architecture - and they tried to rectify that with the PS2 - and why the PS2 disappeared. This, from Wikipedia, might explain it; The IBM copyright appears in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo, and the company reportedly received no patents on the PC, with outsiders manufacturing 90% of it. and Perhaps Chess's most unusual decision for IBM was to publish the PC's technical specifications, allowing outsiders to create products for it. Because of this, and the open architecture, I see no earthly reason why IBM PC floppy drives would be any different to any other similar spec OEM drive. If another PC Clone had difficulty running a PC drive, then it would be safe to assume the clone had the issue of compatibility, not the drive. With an open architecture like the ISA bus, any drive that adhered to standard specifications would/should work. For the PS/2 however, I could believe that drives may have been a little different from standard. Next-generation IBM PS/2 The IBM PS/2 line was introduced in 1987. The Model 30 at the bottom end of the lineup was very similar to earlier models; it used an 8086 processor and an ISA bus. The Model 30 was not "IBM compatible" in that it did not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays; it came with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and optionally a 3.5-inch-sized hard disk. Most models in the PS/2 line further departed from "IBM compatible" by replacing the ISA bus completely with Micro Channel Architecture. The MCA bus was not received well by the customer base for PC's, since it was proprietary to IBM. It was rarely implemented by any of the other PC-compatible makers. Eventually IBM would abandon this architecture entirely and return to the standard ISA bus. The above was IBMs doomed attempt to regain control of the PC market. It was a dismal failure. The PS/2 was never aimed at the home market. It was designed to be integrated into an office with a mainframe. The Microchannel was an attempt to eliminate all of that IRQ and memory assignment BS you ran into when you plugged a card in. By being proprietary, cards were designed not to come up with these conflicts and as a general rule that worked. It also made it less likely that a PC hobbyist was going to be screwing with the company owned machine on his desk. I ran PS/2s until I lost the channel for free parts, then I went back to an open architecture machine. I agree the 5.25" diskette and all of the hard drives were industry standard but a PS/2 3.5" diskette drive wasn't. There was no media sense pin in the drive and pin 2 in the cable (media select) was controlled by the adapter, not the drive. You could format a HD disk at 720 and vice versa. You just needed to bulk degauss the diskette when you changed formats. As I noted you could do it on a clone too if you knew how. Kind of a STOOPID thing to do - formatting a 1.44 to 720 Unless you had a convertible and couldn't find 720 diskettes. ;-) .. |
#31
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 02 May 2020 20:33:59 -0400, wrote:
On Sat, 02 May 2020 17:36:14 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 14:49:02 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 2 May 2020 20:12:39 +1000, Xeno wrote: On 2/5/20 6:27 pm, FromTheRafters wrote: wrote : On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate.** no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires* (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires* installed (3 for later use). *I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece.* The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared.*** Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop* everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. Disk drives were always procured from OEMs. IBM drives set a standard that was followed by the clones but there was nothing particularly special about them. The only thing that IBM really had full control over was the BIOS. That was why the clones had workalike BIOSes. I read somewhere that was the biggest mistake IBM made - the open architecture - and they tried to rectify that with the PS2 - and why the PS2 disappeared. This, from Wikipedia, might explain it; The IBM copyright appears in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo, and the company reportedly received no patents on the PC, with outsiders manufacturing 90% of it. and Perhaps Chess's most unusual decision for IBM was to publish the PC's technical specifications, allowing outsiders to create products for it. Because of this, and the open architecture, I see no earthly reason why IBM PC floppy drives would be any different to any other similar spec OEM drive. If another PC Clone had difficulty running a PC drive, then it would be safe to assume the clone had the issue of compatibility, not the drive. With an open architecture like the ISA bus, any drive that adhered to standard specifications would/should work. For the PS/2 however, I could believe that drives may have been a little different from standard. Next-generation IBM PS/2 The IBM PS/2 line was introduced in 1987. The Model 30 at the bottom end of the lineup was very similar to earlier models; it used an 8086 processor and an ISA bus. The Model 30 was not "IBM compatible" in that it did not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays; it came with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and optionally a 3.5-inch-sized hard disk. Most models in the PS/2 line further departed from "IBM compatible" by replacing the ISA bus completely with Micro Channel Architecture. The MCA bus was not received well by the customer base for PC's, since it was proprietary to IBM. It was rarely implemented by any of the other PC-compatible makers. Eventually IBM would abandon this architecture entirely and return to the standard ISA bus. The above was IBMs doomed attempt to regain control of the PC market. It was a dismal failure. The PS/2 was never aimed at the home market. It was designed to be integrated into an office with a mainframe. The Microchannel was an attempt to eliminate all of that IRQ and memory assignment BS you ran into when you plugged a card in. By being proprietary, cards were designed not to come up with these conflicts and as a general rule that worked. It also made it less likely that a PC hobbyist was going to be screwing with the company owned machine on his desk. I ran PS/2s until I lost the channel for free parts, then I went back to an open architecture machine. I agree the 5.25" diskette and all of the hard drives were industry standard but a PS/2 3.5" diskette drive wasn't. There was no media sense pin in the drive and pin 2 in the cable (media select) was controlled by the adapter, not the drive. You could format a HD disk at 720 and vice versa. You just needed to bulk degauss the diskette when you changed formats. As I noted you could do it on a clone too if you knew how. Kind of a STOOPID thing to do - formatting a 1.44 to 720 Unless you had a convertible and couldn't find 720 diskettes. ;-) . The convertible wouldn't accept a 1.44 drive? |
#32
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 02 May 2020 21:37:47 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 20:33:59 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 17:36:14 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 14:49:02 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 2 May 2020 20:12:39 +1000, Xeno wrote: On 2/5/20 6:27 pm, FromTheRafters wrote: wrote : On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate.Â*Â* no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wiresÂ* (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wiresÂ* installed (3 for later use). Â*I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece.Â* The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared.Â*Â*Â* Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stopÂ* everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. Disk drives were always procured from OEMs. IBM drives set a standard that was followed by the clones but there was nothing particularly special about them. The only thing that IBM really had full control over was the BIOS. That was why the clones had workalike BIOSes. I read somewhere that was the biggest mistake IBM made - the open architecture - and they tried to rectify that with the PS2 - and why the PS2 disappeared. This, from Wikipedia, might explain it; The IBM copyright appears in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo, and the company reportedly received no patents on the PC, with outsiders manufacturing 90% of it. and Perhaps Chess's most unusual decision for IBM was to publish the PC's technical specifications, allowing outsiders to create products for it. Because of this, and the open architecture, I see no earthly reason why IBM PC floppy drives would be any different to any other similar spec OEM drive. If another PC Clone had difficulty running a PC drive, then it would be safe to assume the clone had the issue of compatibility, not the drive. With an open architecture like the ISA bus, any drive that adhered to standard specifications would/should work. For the PS/2 however, I could believe that drives may have been a little different from standard. Next-generation IBM PS/2 The IBM PS/2 line was introduced in 1987. The Model 30 at the bottom end of the lineup was very similar to earlier models; it used an 8086 processor and an ISA bus. The Model 30 was not "IBM compatible" in that it did not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays; it came with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and optionally a 3.5-inch-sized hard disk. Most models in the PS/2 line further departed from "IBM compatible" by replacing the ISA bus completely with Micro Channel Architecture. The MCA bus was not received well by the customer base for PC's, since it was proprietary to IBM. It was rarely implemented by any of the other PC-compatible makers. Eventually IBM would abandon this architecture entirely and return to the standard ISA bus. The above was IBMs doomed attempt to regain control of the PC market. It was a dismal failure. The PS/2 was never aimed at the home market. It was designed to be integrated into an office with a mainframe. The Microchannel was an attempt to eliminate all of that IRQ and memory assignment BS you ran into when you plugged a card in. By being proprietary, cards were designed not to come up with these conflicts and as a general rule that worked. It also made it less likely that a PC hobbyist was going to be screwing with the company owned machine on his desk. I ran PS/2s until I lost the channel for free parts, then I went back to an open architecture machine. I agree the 5.25" diskette and all of the hard drives were industry standard but a PS/2 3.5" diskette drive wasn't. There was no media sense pin in the drive and pin 2 in the cable (media select) was controlled by the adapter, not the drive. You could format a HD disk at 720 and vice versa. You just needed to bulk degauss the diskette when you changed formats. As I noted you could do it on a clone too if you knew how. Kind of a STOOPID thing to do - formatting a 1.44 to 720 Unless you had a convertible and couldn't find 720 diskettes. ;-) . The convertible wouldn't accept a 1.44 drive? Nope, It did not have a high density capable controller. The 1.44m disk wasn't on the market yet. (similar to the original PC that was limited to low density drives). |
#33
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sat, 02 May 2020 23:53:17 -0400, wrote:
On Sat, 02 May 2020 21:37:47 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 20:33:59 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 17:36:14 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 14:49:02 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 2 May 2020 20:12:39 +1000, Xeno wrote: On 2/5/20 6:27 pm, FromTheRafters wrote: wrote : On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate.** no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires* (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires* installed (3 for later use). *I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece.* The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared.*** Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop* everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. Disk drives were always procured from OEMs. IBM drives set a standard that was followed by the clones but there was nothing particularly special about them. The only thing that IBM really had full control over was the BIOS. That was why the clones had workalike BIOSes. I read somewhere that was the biggest mistake IBM made - the open architecture - and they tried to rectify that with the PS2 - and why the PS2 disappeared. This, from Wikipedia, might explain it; The IBM copyright appears in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo, and the company reportedly received no patents on the PC, with outsiders manufacturing 90% of it. and Perhaps Chess's most unusual decision for IBM was to publish the PC's technical specifications, allowing outsiders to create products for it. Because of this, and the open architecture, I see no earthly reason why IBM PC floppy drives would be any different to any other similar spec OEM drive. If another PC Clone had difficulty running a PC drive, then it would be safe to assume the clone had the issue of compatibility, not the drive. With an open architecture like the ISA bus, any drive that adhered to standard specifications would/should work. For the PS/2 however, I could believe that drives may have been a little different from standard. Next-generation IBM PS/2 The IBM PS/2 line was introduced in 1987. The Model 30 at the bottom end of the lineup was very similar to earlier models; it used an 8086 processor and an ISA bus. The Model 30 was not "IBM compatible" in that it did not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays; it came with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and optionally a 3.5-inch-sized hard disk. Most models in the PS/2 line further departed from "IBM compatible" by replacing the ISA bus completely with Micro Channel Architecture. The MCA bus was not received well by the customer base for PC's, since it was proprietary to IBM. It was rarely implemented by any of the other PC-compatible makers. Eventually IBM would abandon this architecture entirely and return to the standard ISA bus. The above was IBMs doomed attempt to regain control of the PC market. It was a dismal failure. The PS/2 was never aimed at the home market. It was designed to be integrated into an office with a mainframe. The Microchannel was an attempt to eliminate all of that IRQ and memory assignment BS you ran into when you plugged a card in. By being proprietary, cards were designed not to come up with these conflicts and as a general rule that worked. It also made it less likely that a PC hobbyist was going to be screwing with the company owned machine on his desk. I ran PS/2s until I lost the channel for free parts, then I went back to an open architecture machine. I agree the 5.25" diskette and all of the hard drives were industry standard but a PS/2 3.5" diskette drive wasn't. There was no media sense pin in the drive and pin 2 in the cable (media select) was controlled by the adapter, not the drive. You could format a HD disk at 720 and vice versa. You just needed to bulk degauss the diskette when you changed formats. As I noted you could do it on a clone too if you knew how. Kind of a STOOPID thing to do - formatting a 1.44 to 720 Unless you had a convertible and couldn't find 720 diskettes. ;-) . The convertible wouldn't accept a 1.44 drive? Nope, It did not have a high density capable controller. The 1.44m disk wasn't on the market yet. (similar to the original PC that was limited to low density drives). Award offered a bios upograde for the portable to support the 1.44 floppy drive. The controller had no problem with the high density drive - just the Bios. Phoenix provided one too.Available within a year of initial introduction of the convertible. (another of IBM's terrible ideas) about the same time the 1.44 arrived on the scene. |
#34
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sun, 03 May 2020 01:49:23 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 23:53:17 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 21:37:47 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 20:33:59 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 17:36:14 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 14:49:02 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 2 May 2020 20:12:39 +1000, Xeno wrote: On 2/5/20 6:27 pm, FromTheRafters wrote: wrote : On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate.Â*Â* no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wiresÂ* (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wiresÂ* installed (3 for later use). Â*I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece.Â* The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared.Â*Â*Â* Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stopÂ* everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. Disk drives were always procured from OEMs. IBM drives set a standard that was followed by the clones but there was nothing particularly special about them. The only thing that IBM really had full control over was the BIOS. That was why the clones had workalike BIOSes. I read somewhere that was the biggest mistake IBM made - the open architecture - and they tried to rectify that with the PS2 - and why the PS2 disappeared. This, from Wikipedia, might explain it; The IBM copyright appears in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo, and the company reportedly received no patents on the PC, with outsiders manufacturing 90% of it. and Perhaps Chess's most unusual decision for IBM was to publish the PC's technical specifications, allowing outsiders to create products for it. Because of this, and the open architecture, I see no earthly reason why IBM PC floppy drives would be any different to any other similar spec OEM drive. If another PC Clone had difficulty running a PC drive, then it would be safe to assume the clone had the issue of compatibility, not the drive. With an open architecture like the ISA bus, any drive that adhered to standard specifications would/should work. For the PS/2 however, I could believe that drives may have been a little different from standard. Next-generation IBM PS/2 The IBM PS/2 line was introduced in 1987. The Model 30 at the bottom end of the lineup was very similar to earlier models; it used an 8086 processor and an ISA bus. The Model 30 was not "IBM compatible" in that it did not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays; it came with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and optionally a 3.5-inch-sized hard disk. Most models in the PS/2 line further departed from "IBM compatible" by replacing the ISA bus completely with Micro Channel Architecture. The MCA bus was not received well by the customer base for PC's, since it was proprietary to IBM. It was rarely implemented by any of the other PC-compatible makers. Eventually IBM would abandon this architecture entirely and return to the standard ISA bus. The above was IBMs doomed attempt to regain control of the PC market. It was a dismal failure. The PS/2 was never aimed at the home market. It was designed to be integrated into an office with a mainframe. The Microchannel was an attempt to eliminate all of that IRQ and memory assignment BS you ran into when you plugged a card in. By being proprietary, cards were designed not to come up with these conflicts and as a general rule that worked. It also made it less likely that a PC hobbyist was going to be screwing with the company owned machine on his desk. I ran PS/2s until I lost the channel for free parts, then I went back to an open architecture machine. I agree the 5.25" diskette and all of the hard drives were industry standard but a PS/2 3.5" diskette drive wasn't. There was no media sense pin in the drive and pin 2 in the cable (media select) was controlled by the adapter, not the drive. You could format a HD disk at 720 and vice versa. You just needed to bulk degauss the diskette when you changed formats. As I noted you could do it on a clone too if you knew how. Kind of a STOOPID thing to do - formatting a 1.44 to 720 Unless you had a convertible and couldn't find 720 diskettes. ;-) . The convertible wouldn't accept a 1.44 drive? Nope, It did not have a high density capable controller. The 1.44m disk wasn't on the market yet. (similar to the original PC that was limited to low density drives). Award offered a bios upograde for the portable to support the 1.44 floppy drive. The controller had no problem with the high density drive - just the Bios. Phoenix provided one too.Available within a year of initial introduction of the convertible. (another of IBM's terrible ideas) about the same time the 1.44 arrived on the scene. I never heard of anyone doing it. It would have been a nice upgrade but usually the upgrade was a back pack hard drive. It was slow but you did get lots of storage. |
#35
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sun, 03 May 2020 15:37:05 -0400, wrote:
On Sun, 03 May 2020 01:49:23 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 23:53:17 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 21:37:47 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 20:33:59 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 17:36:14 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 14:49:02 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 2 May 2020 20:12:39 +1000, Xeno wrote: On 2/5/20 6:27 pm, FromTheRafters wrote: wrote : On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate.** no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires* (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires* installed (3 for later use). *I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece.* The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared.*** Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop* everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. Disk drives were always procured from OEMs. IBM drives set a standard that was followed by the clones but there was nothing particularly special about them. The only thing that IBM really had full control over was the BIOS. That was why the clones had workalike BIOSes. I read somewhere that was the biggest mistake IBM made - the open architecture - and they tried to rectify that with the PS2 - and why the PS2 disappeared. This, from Wikipedia, might explain it; The IBM copyright appears in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo, and the company reportedly received no patents on the PC, with outsiders manufacturing 90% of it. and Perhaps Chess's most unusual decision for IBM was to publish the PC's technical specifications, allowing outsiders to create products for it. Because of this, and the open architecture, I see no earthly reason why IBM PC floppy drives would be any different to any other similar spec OEM drive. If another PC Clone had difficulty running a PC drive, then it would be safe to assume the clone had the issue of compatibility, not the drive. With an open architecture like the ISA bus, any drive that adhered to standard specifications would/should work. For the PS/2 however, I could believe that drives may have been a little different from standard. Next-generation IBM PS/2 The IBM PS/2 line was introduced in 1987. The Model 30 at the bottom end of the lineup was very similar to earlier models; it used an 8086 processor and an ISA bus. The Model 30 was not "IBM compatible" in that it did not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays; it came with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and optionally a 3.5-inch-sized hard disk. Most models in the PS/2 line further departed from "IBM compatible" by replacing the ISA bus completely with Micro Channel Architecture. The MCA bus was not received well by the customer base for PC's, since it was proprietary to IBM. It was rarely implemented by any of the other PC-compatible makers. Eventually IBM would abandon this architecture entirely and return to the standard ISA bus. The above was IBMs doomed attempt to regain control of the PC market. It was a dismal failure. The PS/2 was never aimed at the home market. It was designed to be integrated into an office with a mainframe. The Microchannel was an attempt to eliminate all of that IRQ and memory assignment BS you ran into when you plugged a card in. By being proprietary, cards were designed not to come up with these conflicts and as a general rule that worked. It also made it less likely that a PC hobbyist was going to be screwing with the company owned machine on his desk. I ran PS/2s until I lost the channel for free parts, then I went back to an open architecture machine. I agree the 5.25" diskette and all of the hard drives were industry standard but a PS/2 3.5" diskette drive wasn't. There was no media sense pin in the drive and pin 2 in the cable (media select) was controlled by the adapter, not the drive. You could format a HD disk at 720 and vice versa. You just needed to bulk degauss the diskette when you changed formats. As I noted you could do it on a clone too if you knew how. Kind of a STOOPID thing to do - formatting a 1.44 to 720 Unless you had a convertible and couldn't find 720 diskettes. ;-) . The convertible wouldn't accept a 1.44 drive? Nope, It did not have a high density capable controller. The 1.44m disk wasn't on the market yet. (similar to the original PC that was limited to low density drives). Award offered a bios upograde for the portable to support the 1.44 floppy drive. The controller had no problem with the high density drive - just the Bios. Phoenix provided one too.Available within a year of initial introduction of the convertible. (another of IBM's terrible ideas) about the same time the 1.44 arrived on the scene. I never heard of anyone doing it. It would have been a nice upgrade but usually the upgrade was a back pack hard drive. It was slow but you did get lots of storage. We sold hard drive addons for the original PC as well as bios upgrades which allowed them to use high density double sided floppies, as well as controllers that allowed use of the high density drives on the original bios on the PC. We also sold bios upgrades for the early PS/2 . Don't think we ever sold one for the brain-dead convertible, but we sold litterally thousands of the "lunchbox" portable computers and tens of thousands of add-on hard drives.(TCR was the largest distributor of hard drives for personal computers in Canada before Computer Brokers Canada ate our lunch) Interesting - through various mergers TCR became part of SYNNEX - as did CBC |
#36
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Sun, 03 May 2020 20:56:41 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote: On Sun, 03 May 2020 15:37:05 -0400, wrote: On Sun, 03 May 2020 01:49:23 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 23:53:17 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 21:37:47 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 20:33:59 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 17:36:14 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 14:49:02 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 2 May 2020 20:12:39 +1000, Xeno wrote: On 2/5/20 6:27 pm, FromTheRafters wrote: wrote : On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate.Â*Â* no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wiresÂ* (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wiresÂ* installed (3 for later use). Â*I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece.Â* The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared.Â*Â*Â* Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stopÂ* everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. Disk drives were always procured from OEMs. IBM drives set a standard that was followed by the clones but there was nothing particularly special about them. The only thing that IBM really had full control over was the BIOS. That was why the clones had workalike BIOSes. I read somewhere that was the biggest mistake IBM made - the open architecture - and they tried to rectify that with the PS2 - and why the PS2 disappeared. This, from Wikipedia, might explain it; The IBM copyright appears in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo, and the company reportedly received no patents on the PC, with outsiders manufacturing 90% of it. and Perhaps Chess's most unusual decision for IBM was to publish the PC's technical specifications, allowing outsiders to create products for it. Because of this, and the open architecture, I see no earthly reason why IBM PC floppy drives would be any different to any other similar spec OEM drive. If another PC Clone had difficulty running a PC drive, then it would be safe to assume the clone had the issue of compatibility, not the drive. With an open architecture like the ISA bus, any drive that adhered to standard specifications would/should work. For the PS/2 however, I could believe that drives may have been a little different from standard. Next-generation IBM PS/2 The IBM PS/2 line was introduced in 1987. The Model 30 at the bottom end of the lineup was very similar to earlier models; it used an 8086 processor and an ISA bus. The Model 30 was not "IBM compatible" in that it did not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays; it came with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and optionally a 3.5-inch-sized hard disk. Most models in the PS/2 line further departed from "IBM compatible" by replacing the ISA bus completely with Micro Channel Architecture. The MCA bus was not received well by the customer base for PC's, since it was proprietary to IBM. It was rarely implemented by any of the other PC-compatible makers. Eventually IBM would abandon this architecture entirely and return to the standard ISA bus. The above was IBMs doomed attempt to regain control of the PC market. It was a dismal failure. The PS/2 was never aimed at the home market. It was designed to be integrated into an office with a mainframe. The Microchannel was an attempt to eliminate all of that IRQ and memory assignment BS you ran into when you plugged a card in. By being proprietary, cards were designed not to come up with these conflicts and as a general rule that worked. It also made it less likely that a PC hobbyist was going to be screwing with the company owned machine on his desk. I ran PS/2s until I lost the channel for free parts, then I went back to an open architecture machine. I agree the 5.25" diskette and all of the hard drives were industry standard but a PS/2 3.5" diskette drive wasn't. There was no media sense pin in the drive and pin 2 in the cable (media select) was controlled by the adapter, not the drive. You could format a HD disk at 720 and vice versa. You just needed to bulk degauss the diskette when you changed formats. As I noted you could do it on a clone too if you knew how. Kind of a STOOPID thing to do - formatting a 1.44 to 720 Unless you had a convertible and couldn't find 720 diskettes. ;-) . The convertible wouldn't accept a 1.44 drive? Nope, It did not have a high density capable controller. The 1.44m disk wasn't on the market yet. (similar to the original PC that was limited to low density drives). Award offered a bios upograde for the portable to support the 1.44 floppy drive. The controller had no problem with the high density drive - just the Bios. Phoenix provided one too.Available within a year of initial introduction of the convertible. (another of IBM's terrible ideas) about the same time the 1.44 arrived on the scene. I never heard of anyone doing it. It would have been a nice upgrade but usually the upgrade was a back pack hard drive. It was slow but you did get lots of storage. We sold hard drive addons for the original PC as well as bios upgrades which allowed them to use high density double sided floppies, as well as controllers that allowed use of the high density drives on the original bios on the PC. We also sold bios upgrades for the early PS/2 . Don't think we ever sold one for the brain-dead convertible, but we sold litterally thousands of the "lunchbox" portable computers and tens of thousands of add-on hard drives.(TCR was the largest distributor of hard drives for personal computers in Canada before Computer Brokers Canada ate our lunch) Interesting - through various mergers TCR became part of SYNNEX - as did CBC I had a ST238 on my First Day Ship 5150 PC1 (the first IBM PC) but I did swap the system board ;-) I never did it but there was a 5 slot "AT" board that fit in the 5150 case. It was for the luggable version of the AT. (5162). That was a 286 board with the same form factor as the original PC. in the 5155 case There was also a suite of short height cards for it. By then I was running a wooden AT with a 339 board in it so I never fooled with it. http://gfretwell.com/ftp/Woodiy%20AT.jpg http://gfretwell.com/ftp/Woodiy%20AT%20inside.jpg Shortly after that I made a PS/2-M70 woodie. with a 5" bay http://gfretwell.com/electrical/woody.jpg |
#37
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Mon, 04 May 2020 00:13:09 -0400, wrote:
On Sun, 03 May 2020 20:56:41 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sun, 03 May 2020 15:37:05 -0400, wrote: On Sun, 03 May 2020 01:49:23 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 23:53:17 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 21:37:47 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 20:33:59 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 17:36:14 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 14:49:02 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 2 May 2020 20:12:39 +1000, Xeno wrote: On 2/5/20 6:27 pm, FromTheRafters wrote: wrote : On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate.** no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires* (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires* installed (3 for later use). *I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece.* The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared.*** Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop* everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. Disk drives were always procured from OEMs. IBM drives set a standard that was followed by the clones but there was nothing particularly special about them. The only thing that IBM really had full control over was the BIOS. That was why the clones had workalike BIOSes. I read somewhere that was the biggest mistake IBM made - the open architecture - and they tried to rectify that with the PS2 - and why the PS2 disappeared. This, from Wikipedia, might explain it; The IBM copyright appears in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo, and the company reportedly received no patents on the PC, with outsiders manufacturing 90% of it. and Perhaps Chess's most unusual decision for IBM was to publish the PC's technical specifications, allowing outsiders to create products for it. Because of this, and the open architecture, I see no earthly reason why IBM PC floppy drives would be any different to any other similar spec OEM drive. If another PC Clone had difficulty running a PC drive, then it would be safe to assume the clone had the issue of compatibility, not the drive. With an open architecture like the ISA bus, any drive that adhered to standard specifications would/should work. For the PS/2 however, I could believe that drives may have been a little different from standard. Next-generation IBM PS/2 The IBM PS/2 line was introduced in 1987. The Model 30 at the bottom end of the lineup was very similar to earlier models; it used an 8086 processor and an ISA bus. The Model 30 was not "IBM compatible" in that it did not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays; it came with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and optionally a 3.5-inch-sized hard disk. Most models in the PS/2 line further departed from "IBM compatible" by replacing the ISA bus completely with Micro Channel Architecture. The MCA bus was not received well by the customer base for PC's, since it was proprietary to IBM. It was rarely implemented by any of the other PC-compatible makers. Eventually IBM would abandon this architecture entirely and return to the standard ISA bus. The above was IBMs doomed attempt to regain control of the PC market. It was a dismal failure. The PS/2 was never aimed at the home market. It was designed to be integrated into an office with a mainframe. The Microchannel was an attempt to eliminate all of that IRQ and memory assignment BS you ran into when you plugged a card in. By being proprietary, cards were designed not to come up with these conflicts and as a general rule that worked. It also made it less likely that a PC hobbyist was going to be screwing with the company owned machine on his desk. I ran PS/2s until I lost the channel for free parts, then I went back to an open architecture machine. I agree the 5.25" diskette and all of the hard drives were industry standard but a PS/2 3.5" diskette drive wasn't. There was no media sense pin in the drive and pin 2 in the cable (media select) was controlled by the adapter, not the drive. You could format a HD disk at 720 and vice versa. You just needed to bulk degauss the diskette when you changed formats. As I noted you could do it on a clone too if you knew how. Kind of a STOOPID thing to do - formatting a 1.44 to 720 Unless you had a convertible and couldn't find 720 diskettes. ;-) . The convertible wouldn't accept a 1.44 drive? Nope, It did not have a high density capable controller. The 1.44m disk wasn't on the market yet. (similar to the original PC that was limited to low density drives). Award offered a bios upograde for the portable to support the 1.44 floppy drive. The controller had no problem with the high density drive - just the Bios. Phoenix provided one too.Available within a year of initial introduction of the convertible. (another of IBM's terrible ideas) about the same time the 1.44 arrived on the scene. I never heard of anyone doing it. It would have been a nice upgrade but usually the upgrade was a back pack hard drive. It was slow but you did get lots of storage. We sold hard drive addons for the original PC as well as bios upgrades which allowed them to use high density double sided floppies, as well as controllers that allowed use of the high density drives on the original bios on the PC. We also sold bios upgrades for the early PS/2 . Don't think we ever sold one for the brain-dead convertible, but we sold litterally thousands of the "lunchbox" portable computers and tens of thousands of add-on hard drives.(TCR was the largest distributor of hard drives for personal computers in Canada before Computer Brokers Canada ate our lunch) Interesting - through various mergers TCR became part of SYNNEX - as did CBC I had a ST238 on my First Day Ship 5150 PC1 (the first IBM PC) but I did swap the system board ;-) I never did it but there was a 5 slot "AT" board that fit in the 5150 case. It was for the luggable version of the AT. (5162). That was a 286 board with the same form factor as the original PC. in the 5155 case There was also a suite of short height cards for it. By then I was running a wooden AT with a 339 board in it so I never fooled with it. http://gfretwell.com/ftp/Woodiy%20AT.jpg http://gfretwell.com/ftp/Woodiy%20AT%20inside.jpg Shortly after that I made a PS/2-M70 woodie. with a 5" bay http://gfretwell.com/electrical/woody.jpg We were building XTs running up to 12Mhz at least -and 20 and 24Mhz ATs. Were you running the 238 on MFM or RLL? We "upped" a lot of MFM drives to RLL. We put XT and AT as well as 386 and even some 486 boards into the lunchbox portables - green, amber,and white mono, cga, ega mono and color and even a few VGA screens. Sold a lot of the orange Plasma screens too. ESDI drives were popular for a short time before I left. We sold a lot of SCSI stuff too - including a lot of CD drives. We had CD servers with 2 and 3 controllers - 7 drives per controller. When I went out on my own I didn't bother building systems except for myself - and even then it was more "rebuilding" stuff that I took in on exchanges - I never had a requirement for anything "cutting edge" |
#38
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Need a new thermostat
On Mon, 04 May 2020 01:13:51 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote: On Mon, 04 May 2020 00:13:09 -0400, wrote: On Sun, 03 May 2020 20:56:41 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sun, 03 May 2020 15:37:05 -0400, wrote: On Sun, 03 May 2020 01:49:23 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 23:53:17 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 21:37:47 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 20:33:59 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 17:36:14 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 02 May 2020 14:49:02 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 2 May 2020 20:12:39 +1000, Xeno wrote: On 2/5/20 6:27 pm, FromTheRafters wrote: wrote : On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky wrote: In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder wrote: On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede wrote: Clare Snyder writes: On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote: On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote: Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the thermostat is inadequate.Â*Â* no easy way to run a new wire to the same location**. I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wiresÂ* (including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wiresÂ* installed (3 for later use). Â*I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single stage thermostat. I have the same setup here. In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them. A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written. I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now. There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me. It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc. I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-) Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something... Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price. That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free. in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own) The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me. The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece.Â* The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared.Â*Â*Â* Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr. 11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stopÂ* everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen. I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch. IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons. Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk. Disk drives were always procured from OEMs. IBM drives set a standard that was followed by the clones but there was nothing particularly special about them. The only thing that IBM really had full control over was the BIOS. That was why the clones had workalike BIOSes. I read somewhere that was the biggest mistake IBM made - the open architecture - and they tried to rectify that with the PS2 - and why the PS2 disappeared. This, from Wikipedia, might explain it; The IBM copyright appears in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo, and the company reportedly received no patents on the PC, with outsiders manufacturing 90% of it. and Perhaps Chess's most unusual decision for IBM was to publish the PC's technical specifications, allowing outsiders to create products for it. Because of this, and the open architecture, I see no earthly reason why IBM PC floppy drives would be any different to any other similar spec OEM drive. If another PC Clone had difficulty running a PC drive, then it would be safe to assume the clone had the issue of compatibility, not the drive. With an open architecture like the ISA bus, any drive that adhered to standard specifications would/should work. For the PS/2 however, I could believe that drives may have been a little different from standard. Next-generation IBM PS/2 The IBM PS/2 line was introduced in 1987. The Model 30 at the bottom end of the lineup was very similar to earlier models; it used an 8086 processor and an ISA bus. The Model 30 was not "IBM compatible" in that it did not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays; it came with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and optionally a 3.5-inch-sized hard disk. Most models in the PS/2 line further departed from "IBM compatible" by replacing the ISA bus completely with Micro Channel Architecture. The MCA bus was not received well by the customer base for PC's, since it was proprietary to IBM. It was rarely implemented by any of the other PC-compatible makers. Eventually IBM would abandon this architecture entirely and return to the standard ISA bus. The above was IBMs doomed attempt to regain control of the PC market. It was a dismal failure. The PS/2 was never aimed at the home market. It was designed to be integrated into an office with a mainframe. The Microchannel was an attempt to eliminate all of that IRQ and memory assignment BS you ran into when you plugged a card in. By being proprietary, cards were designed not to come up with these conflicts and as a general rule that worked. It also made it less likely that a PC hobbyist was going to be screwing with the company owned machine on his desk. I ran PS/2s until I lost the channel for free parts, then I went back to an open architecture machine. I agree the 5.25" diskette and all of the hard drives were industry standard but a PS/2 3.5" diskette drive wasn't. There was no media sense pin in the drive and pin 2 in the cable (media select) was controlled by the adapter, not the drive. You could format a HD disk at 720 and vice versa. You just needed to bulk degauss the diskette when you changed formats. As I noted you could do it on a clone too if you knew how. Kind of a STOOPID thing to do - formatting a 1.44 to 720 Unless you had a convertible and couldn't find 720 diskettes. ;-) . The convertible wouldn't accept a 1.44 drive? Nope, It did not have a high density capable controller. The 1.44m disk wasn't on the market yet. (similar to the original PC that was limited to low density drives). Award offered a bios upograde for the portable to support the 1.44 floppy drive. The controller had no problem with the high density drive - just the Bios. Phoenix provided one too.Available within a year of initial introduction of the convertible. (another of IBM's terrible ideas) about the same time the 1.44 arrived on the scene. I never heard of anyone doing it. It would have been a nice upgrade but usually the upgrade was a back pack hard drive. It was slow but you did get lots of storage. We sold hard drive addons for the original PC as well as bios upgrades which allowed them to use high density double sided floppies, as well as controllers that allowed use of the high density drives on the original bios on the PC. We also sold bios upgrades for the early PS/2 . Don't think we ever sold one for the brain-dead convertible, but we sold litterally thousands of the "lunchbox" portable computers and tens of thousands of add-on hard drives.(TCR was the largest distributor of hard drives for personal computers in Canada before Computer Brokers Canada ate our lunch) Interesting - through various mergers TCR became part of SYNNEX - as did CBC I had a ST238 on my First Day Ship 5150 PC1 (the first IBM PC) but I did swap the system board ;-) I never did it but there was a 5 slot "AT" board that fit in the 5150 case. It was for the luggable version of the AT. (5162). That was a 286 board with the same form factor as the original PC. in the 5155 case There was also a suite of short height cards for it. By then I was running a wooden AT with a 339 board in it so I never fooled with it. http://gfretwell.com/ftp/Woodiy%20AT.jpg http://gfretwell.com/ftp/Woodiy%20AT%20inside.jpg Shortly after that I made a PS/2-M70 woodie. with a 5" bay http://gfretwell.com/electrical/woody.jpg We were building XTs running up to 12Mhz at least -and 20 and 24Mhz ATs. I was running standard boards. 4.77 MZ XTs and 8 MZ ATs Were you running the 238 on MFM or RLL? We "upped" a lot of MFM drives to RLL. An ST 328 (30m) is an ST 225 (20m) running RLL. It is a lousy drive in retrospect with a stepper access so you end up with track drift after a while as things wear out. That was my only stepper drive disk. We put XT and AT as well as 386 and even some 486 boards into the lunchbox portables - green, amber,and white mono, cga, ega mono and color and even a few VGA screens. Sold a lot of the orange Plasma screens too. ESDI drives were popular for a short time before I left. We sold a lot of SCSI stuff too - including a lot of CD drives. We had CD servers with 2 and 3 controllers - 7 drives per controller. I never did take the ESDI path. I went straight to SCSI. once I got into PS/2 stuff and expanded beyond the F2DBA drives. |
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