[time-nuts] Maintaining boatanchors (was Capacitor Failures)

Mark Sims holrum at hotmail.com
Sat Oct 23 15:19:25 UTC 2010


I make backup images of all my EPROMs and even bipolar devices.  I even built a device for reverse engineering secured PALs.  I have a fully configured Data I/O Unisite for programming.  This machine with all the device adapters, etc cost somebody well over $100,000

The Unisite is probably the most capable, robust, and expensive programmer ever built (and quite a boat anchor, itself).  It's a real shame they stopped adding new devices last year.  The 2900 and 3900's are smaller but don't do a few parts (mostly odd bipolar proms).  External interface is a standard RS232 terminal.  They do boot off of floppies (720kbfor the Unisite, 1.44Mb for the others).  There are also units with internal hard drives.  The floppy images can be burned from a CD  (all my computers still have floppy drives,  some 5 1/4",  one has 8 inch).  The last software release spans 9 diskettes.

I have accumulated a few spare machines when I bought some units just to get some oddball package adapter that I did not have.  Email me if interested...


 		 	   		  



More information about the Time-nuts_lists.febo.com mailing list