HP 2648

[Jay West]

You wrote...
> Your first description doesn't seem to match the pictures.
I'm not sure what you mean here.

> Given that I haven't seen terminals like these for sale in
> ~15 years, I'd try to fix it up if it were me.
There's plenty of damage not visible in the pictures. For example, all four 
threaded extrusion mounts that hold the CRT in place were snapped, and in 2 
of the 4 locations, those resulting pieces still attached to the tube were 
shattered themselves further across the thread. The extrusion mounts snapped 
well below the threaded portion, and some of those pieces are missing. 
Several of the "catch" mechanisms required to put the side panel back are 
broken and missing, as well as the threaded extrusion on the backplate. 
Believe me, as bad as I want one of these terminals, I would definitely 
repair it if possible. I can't see that being possible without a donor unit. 
I'm not completely amature at repairing such things. The external breakage 
could be repairable, IF the pieces were all there which they aren't. But 
some of the damage, the crt mounts as one example, can't be repaired.

> And get a refund
> for the inconvenience.  Key is not seeing broken *circuitry*.
I do not see any broken circuitry. However, I see no way, given the specific 
pieces that were sheared off (and many of them missing) to hold the unit 
together.

> The non-resin/plastic parts of what I saw (looked at about
> 75% of the pics)  seemed OK.  There's a peek at a video
> PCB, but looks like it may be unbroken.
I don't see circuitry broken. The tube miraculously appears to be intact but 
that's sometimes hard to tell until it's powered up.

> Where's the powdered
> keycaps?
The powdered keycaps - some are in the bottom of the box. You will see some 
whole ones in the picture, but some of those little black specs are the 
puverized keycaps (the black underneath). Some of the pieces I had started 
putting into a plastic bag, then gave up. The picture is the remainder. They 
keyboard is missing about 20 keys. I was able to find 9 of them. Of the 
remaining keys, some are obviously the tiny bits in the bottom of the box, 
others I would expect fell out of the tears in the box during shipping.

>> "received in damaged condition" sticker
> Possibly made by a transferring agent N, after USPO #N-1 damaged it.
I agree, it is very possible the USPO is to blame for much of this. However, 
keep in mind several things. The terminal was packaged with newspaper. Don't 
even try to defend that. Second, when I opened the box first, much of the 
newspaper wasn't even crumpled, just perfectly flat sheets laid on top. No 
excuse.

Jay West