Good haul of old pc stuph

[Tony Duell]

> [1] The CCR-81 is notorious for being not very trustworthy with one's data. 
> If you're looking for a Tandy data tape deck, search for the CCR-82 - 
> *very* good deck.

The really bad one in my experience is the CTR-80. This was supplied 
with some Model 1's and had a really nasty design bug. When turned off by 
the remote socket _in play mode_, the erase head would put a glitch on 
the tape.

On a Level II machine, the tape would be turned off if there was a 
checksum error in the last block read. So if you had a temporary error (a 
speck of dirt on the tape or something) which caused a bad read, the tape 
would stop and the _next_ block would be ruined. That tape would never 
load again. 

The work-around was to pull the remote-control plug and use it in manual 
control mode only. The fix, IIRC, was to solder a 10uF capacitor in 
parallel with the erase head.

-tony