Good haul of old pc stuph

[Jim Leonard]

Tony Duell wrote:
> 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.

How do design glitches like that get past QA?  (Or was there no QA?)

One thing I love about my old IBM PC 5150 with ST-225 is that *it is still 
running 22 years later*.  I fire it up at least once a week to do some hobby 
programing or game playing and the damn thing just runs.  I can't say that for 
my modern machines -- I had an ATX power supply die on my twice in 5 years 
(had a 5 year warranty), and I've had modern drives fail quite spectacularly, 
etc., etc. but I've been spoiled by most of my old machines.  They just work.

I mention all the above because it was a surprise to hear that a piece of old 
consumer-level hardware had such a nasty flaw.

> 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.

Confused -- why would that fix it?
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)
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