FOUND: A Super-Rare Commodore D9090!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- Dave undertakes the Christmas challenge of finding, repairing, testing, and demoing a super-rare Commodore D9090!
Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire: amzn.to/3diQILq
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Hi Dave! So, I do know somebody that has both the 9060 and the 9090. I could most likely borrow them and do an episode about them. That being said, I'm not sure what I could say about them that you haven't already covered in this video. I will think about it, though.
Please do! I think perhaps one interesting angle could be whether Commodore would have been more viable vs the alternatives had their drives been more affordable, and they'd have been much more affordable if not for the "smart controller" scheme. Commodore's decision to put two 6502s, multiple PIA chips, RAM, and an operating system inside the drive certainly made it expensive.
Plus, you could do a whole section on the I/O channels and commands, on how BASIC commands interoperate with the PRINT# and INPUT# statements. It was unconscionable that they shipped it with no IO commands in BASIC 2.0 at all.
Perhaps a hybrid episode is warranted, where you primarily focus on the "Professional" side of Commodore and talk about BASIC 4.0, the hard drives, all the commands added along with it, their hard drives, daisy wheel printers, and so on. I bet you could get a solid 15 minutes out of that, and it'd be interesting this "audience of one".
Other than printers, I have a nice setup here with a fully expanded 2001, 8050, 4040, 9090, and so on. I'd be happy to share some footage of that as absent the printer it's all "business class" hardware for the day. I've had a 4032 en route from Spain for a month as a Christmas present for a friend, but it hasn't made it yet!
In the pro line you could also talk about the 4016 (FAT 40!) and the 4032 and 8032, along with the SP9000. I have all the Waterloo language books for the SP9000 and could provide some nice B-roll for that, but no SuperPET on hand, unfortuantely!
On top of all of that, heck, you could do an entire episode on Batteries Included. I used the BI-80 card and the BusCard II to get 80 columns and IEEE-488 support on the C64, which kept me going before the Amiga cross-assembler. Back in the day as a game programmer, until I got my 128, I had an 80-column C64 with dual IEEE-488 drives (I think SFD-1001s, if I recall correctly). All enabled by Batteries Included technology of the day.
All that stuff is out of my wheelhouse for my channel, so I'm hoping you can do the heavy lifting :-)
Sorry for the ramble, I don't get much chance to reminisce about the CBM history!
Cheers,
Dave
PS: One of the greatest tragedies is that Ric Weiland at Microsoft took his own life some years back, and he wrote COMMODORE BASIC 2.0 that we know and love. There's a lot of questions I'd like to ask him about BASIC 2.0 that otherwise, only BillG knows the answer to, because Paul Allen has passed as well. But before BASIC 4.0, everything had to be done over IO channels, and it was worse than assembly!
I assume you've seen the source code to CBM BASIC. If not, perhaps we could collaborate on that at some point. I spoke at length to Monte Davidoff who wrote the math portions, and traced their lineage back to the PDP-5... stuff like that!
@@DavesGarage This is going to be epic! The Eight-Bit Guy and Dave's Garage together.
Maybe you could take a poll on what historic programs to run on these beauties...
I can't wait to see what the suggestions are!
This reminds me of my TRS80 BASIC days, 10 this, 20 that, 30 other, 40 go to 10... simplest code...
Money is on the line... :) Love the channel either way!
I have a D9060 and a D9090 and I would love to help if possible (I am from germany).
If anyone thinks it is hard to find a D90x0 you should try to find a (working) 8280! I have only seen one and that was broken (and not for sale). :o(
@@C64-Museum I've never seen the 8280! I have an 8050 and had an 8250, but never the big one!
I also worked as a repair tech in my youth... for the college bookstore. Lots of printers to fix. That was after the Navy and six years of working on ship's propulsion systems. I remember being one of two people on my last ship that even owned a PC. Everything then was done on paper. paper records for everything. Paper.
I find that a dead short is often a dead tantalum capacitor. They die either open or closed. In fact, the way it affected the power supply and even the circuit breaker makes me think that even more. Go poking around and look for one. Then remove it and test to see if 12 volts is then shorted. Actually measure the resistance too, don't just "tone it out". If it's no longer shorted then you found your problem. Tantalum's and Rifa caps love to die and barf out the smoke.
PLEASE more Commodore material, love it :)
I had two D9090's and a D9060. There was a BBS in Seattle that ran one for ages too. Sold them Marko Makela I believe in the 90s.
I've been in that elevator! I used to go there for fun with my young daughter when I lived near NYC. It was like a free amusement ride.
Great video, love all the info about old things the way you present them
I appreciate your persistence, well done! Great video.
I always dreamed of buying that desoldering suction gun but since being disabled I will never be able to afford one. Being very poor I fix all my electronics simply because I can't afford to replace them, the chinese soldering station I wasted $50 on turned out to be a joke and has broken more traces then fixed them. Hello from Colorado Dave, I love your channel, being your age I resonate with your interests brother. Stay healthy and prosperous my friend.
A GFCI is basically a current transformer and an electronically triggered shutoff switch. The hot and neutral wires pass through a magnetic ring. Current in the wires induces a magnetic field in the ring. However, since both the hot and neutral wires pass through the ring in the same direction, the magnetic field is proportional to the difference in the currents between the two wires. A sense wire wrapped around the ring can then sense the magnetic field in the ring through induction - the magnetic field will generate a voltage in the wire. This voltage can then be used to trip the shutoff switch, either directly or with some signal processing electronics. The point is to detect when more current is flowing down the hot than is coming back in the neutral. If there is a ground fault somewhere (say, the hair dryer got dropped in the tub and now the heating element has an electrical connection to the grounded plumbing) this difference in current will cause the GFCI to shut off the power.
So any induced magnetic field, may it be from a ac or dc current flowing around the supposed path will trigger the device.
Learn from Dave: NEVER EVER use a f'n off the shelf PSU when testing hardware. Especially with never replaceable, precious collectibles, old hardware ... which you tried to preserve for posterity. Artwork, museum pieces ... my heart cries. Be professional and use bench power supplies with correctly adjusted current limitation. FROM THE START, in every repair session and not when its already gone. How sad:/
I once had to make up my own code shortcut... my stepper motor laser imaging system/program had to draw the image then move onto the next; Long story short, I had to go to different sections as they completed last one, or loop until finished. But which loop?
Ended up with a if/then -push-to-stack-, then at the end just did a return_from_subroutine number on stack. Took all the guesswork out, 1if/then set bits-2push-3rts. done.
Merry Christmas Dave and everyone.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing. 🙂
I love hearing about your early career! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! OMG, the DecRomancer! lol Necromancer more like it! Thank you for the laughs and memories lol :)
3600 rpm is a harmonic of 60HZ and the motor could be somehow inducing enough to trip the breaker - the spec is ~30mA and electronic kit leak current to ground to begin with cause is RF/EMF filters. Electricians in the UK are seeing a lot of this happen as more chargers / DC power bricks are used
A current imbalance that can trip the GFCI can be caused by a number of issues. An inductive or capacitive load or a glitch that causes a temporary imbalance
Love this, please do more like this. You ever think of setting up a BBS?
wow - a blast from the past
Interesting video there Dave. Had to subscribe because of the combination of Microsoft and Commodore.
One interesting thing I would love to see a video about is how the relationship between MS and commodore was. As a true Amiga-fan from those years, the only software I can remember Ms released on the Amiga was AmigaBasic.
Why didn’t excel for example reach AmigaOS when it did on the Macintosh?
And finally, what was your thoughts on the Amiga back then?
Looks like the Dave, your disc motor is over heating. When it over heats the resistance drops. Good luck mate. From a ex-army technician.
Devices with motor always have the possibility of dumping all its potential energy stored, what could cause a lot of damage to the power supply or other parts of the circuit. I do not use GFCI or AIR BAGS. “We die like real men”, so I am not sure why it was popping.
LOL! A challenge! Silliness.
What a long strange trip it's been.
Tandon made some good drives.
"One of two mechanical disks."
As opposed to what "other" kind of disk... or whole drive mechanism?
120 v 60 Hz vs 220v 50Hz ? different frequencies causing some strange bucking and peaking of V/A ? as in pulsing startup power at 50Hz causing problems with a 60Hz psu....just a wild guess.
Lol, Dave I wonder how much my A1200T unit would cost now. Cost me 3000 Aud.
Drilling out unused PCB pads to prevent user RAM upgrades is the kind of aggressive contempt for tinkerers that would make Steve "Slots were a mistake" Jobs blush.
One day in 2011 by Caltrain and Starbucks... Bit of a rude boy to me.
Well Steve Jobs had the memory chips of the 128K Mac soldered in such that we had to desolder them all to do our own upgrade to a 512K Mac (where it finally had enough memory to be useable), so I think Steve could definitely stand his ground in this department (the Apple upgrade path was to pay a great deal more money and swap in a 512K Mac motherboard)
But it was a one time decision, never repeated.
@@saganandroid4175 Apple Computer, under Steve Jobs management, brought out the 2007 1GB PowerPC MacMini, which could not be expanded beyond that 1GB. Running OSX kernel and OS services used so much memory on that computer that it was similarly as useless as that original 1984 128K Mac. For the original Mac, 512K of memory made all the difference in the world. That would have been the case with this MacMini - 2GB would have made this an entirely viable computer.
The original IBM OEM PC and XT motherboards came in two versions. 256KB and 640Kb. There was a huge price difference, but the only difference was a 29 cent IC to decode two additional address lines, and to solder a jumper aacross tw pads. I used to get bags of free used 256K RAM, so I converted a lot of boards to 640KB.
I repaired a prototype IBM PC for a retired IBM engineer. He said that he was assigned to select the original power supply, and it was his test bed. They gave it to him when he retired. I met him at a local computer store, when he was trying to find a replacement floppy controller. The owner of the store was screaming at him, "Pull out your %^&%^ wallet and buy a daned computer, and toss that piece of crap in the dumpster on your way out of here! No one has had any parts for that piece of crap, in years!" I told him that I had a couple dozen of the boards, and I would fix it for him. His Christmas mailing list was on 5.25" floppies, that his newer computer couldn't read.
I replaced the board, then I upgraded it to 640KB. I gave him a better video card, with a printer port and cleaned it all up. It looked brand new. The mods freed up all but one of the five slots, and gave him more RAM. When e came to get it he said that he hoped the repair wasn't too expensive. I know that he would have paid a lot more, but I told him that it was $20. He was sobbing with joy as he carried out of my home shop. 😃
God, a collaboration between the two Daves would be awsome.
Hey, someone caught it! That's why I used the term "Biggie Eight" as well, since it was starting to sound like a rap battle callout :-)
The Tantalum capacitors are likely the reason there is a dead short on the hard drive board. As for tripping the breaker. I don't think the power supply is tripping the breaker as a result of a ground fault(if connected properly) or overcurrent. It is possible if you have an arc fault breaker that is picking up something funky.
Thanks! Makes sense and seems to be the consensus for the short issue, at least!
@@DavesGarage Is that new power supply a switcher? It replaced a transformer based linear supply and considering the kinds of loads imposed by that old equipment, there's most likely a complex interaction between the load, the switcher and the circuit protectors in the mains - I should know because I blew several switchers AND tripped the circuit breakers in this same scenario. Putting together a new linear supply with the same specs as the blown one resolved all issues.
Maybe a busted flyback diode?
@@DavesGarage
Hey Dave,
Could the failed capacitors be the cause for the other hard drives not working? I wonder if all of the hard drives were unable to maintain proper speed, which was the cause of the formatting failure. The root cause being hardware and inadequate power supplied to the drives motor.
Linear supply has an isolation transformer, so the outputs are isolated from mains, I grant is onto something
Imagine being so rich and so wholesome that you're version of "throwing down the gauntlet" is to offer to donate 1000$ to a charity of their choice. Dave, you are a treasure and a blessing and I think of you every time I open task manager.
I know folks who spend more a month on gaming. Not gambling, either... tabletop. Board games and RPGs.
@@WilliamHostman sad
@@WilliamHostman how? At least it’s a social activity.
After dropping over $1k on the drive itself and even more money on a bunch of hard drives. That 90s era Microsoft money is putting in work, that's for sure.
I don't think Dave is that rich. I don't think he has to worry about much but I don't know if I'd say "so rich".. and he offered to donate to a 501c which means charity which means tax write off which means 🤔 he's not actually spending money just preferring give that money to a charity in the name of something cool instead of stuffing it into the US govt in the form of taxes....
I have a Commodore hard drive in my attic... sure remember that sound! Guess I need to check which one! I worked for Commodore in the early 80's... still good friends with the guy who wrote the Dos Wedge you mentioned. I met him when I found a bug in that program and wrote him a letter. Later we worked together at Commodore.
At our Commodore office we shared a hard drive in a sort of early network... just piggybacked the IEEE cables and ran a set of remote status lights to each office. When the lights were quiet we figured the other guy wasn't using it. Worked pretty well!
Back in those days I wrote Scopy, which does copy files from disk to disk directly without going through the Pet. And it scrolls both ways! Written in Basic.
Some day I'll catalog my old Commodore gear and probably put it on Ebay.. got some prototype stuff too, like a very early 64. Serial #39, I think?
May I ask, what happened to Commodore? Does it still exist?
Please don't just put it all on eBay before you at least record a tour of everything - even if it's not plugged in and running.
@@pritambissonauth2181 they went bankrupt in 1994
@@loganmacgyver2625rip
so there like rca? making garbage?
@@TylerTMG the name changes lots of hands throughout the years. Some company made a mediocre off the shelf Chinese smartphone with the commodore logo stamped on the back for example
I'd love more Amiga and Commodore stories. Big fan of those systems
I enjoyed this episode. It reminded me of when I was staying at my Grandmother's house here in Scotland during the mid-80s when I found a bunch of Commodore PET BASIC manuals in a cupboard. My Uncle had been getting trained to code on PETs at work and had kept the manuals afterwards, as you do. I had my trusty Acorn Electron with me so I was able to work through all of the examples he'd been taught with a little light translation between BASIC dialects and complete all of the exercises set - interesting that both machines were 6502-based too. I eventually went on to become developer myself and my Uncle worked for the remainder of his career in IT. He sadly passed earlier this year so it was cool to remember this little chapter of my life which I might have otherwise forgotten about. Thanks.
That's what I call determination! I still remember how I had plans to upgrade to a HDD on my C128 - which of course never happened for obvious reasons.
IMHO probably your best video so far, because it gives so much technical as well as personal insight. Love it!
Wonderful. This takes me back to the days of getting a hard drive together for my BBC micro, in the late 80s. I got a faulty power supply and case, (new capacitors needed in the switch mode - it initially started up the drive like an old car - it would spin up about 5 times then stopping, before running). I bought a few second hand SCSI drives, (thus bypassing the need for the dreaded ST506 SCSI board), and an after market BBC SCSI board.. Then I had to dig into the mysteries of low level formatting and changing the sector capacity: all the drives available were set for 512 bytes/block for PCs, Acorn used 256 Bytes/block. Took me weeks. Still have it, and it runs. 80 Megabytes on a BBC Master 128. Sidenote: Acorn really future proofed their ADFS. The block map went out to 4 Gigabytes. I just hope mine never gets full enough to need compacting: doing 80 Meg on a machine with only 64K of user RAM might take a bit longer than a Commodore low level format. . . .
Mike did you need the storage space for a database ?, i would like to hear about your late 80s usage of the BBC128k.
ADFS had some really odd limits though, such as supporting only 77 entry limit on directories.
Dave I loved this video, really enjoyed the story and it took me back to my early days dealing with mfm drives remembering putting the bad sectors with dos 3 debug.
I remember thinking 10mb was so huge, that they could not be that much data in the world how wrong was I.
I used to make money while at school by doing tech support for local firms, mostly dos and xenix with one company using a pair of 80col pets linked to xenix. Later I got into netware 2.2 and supposed about 8 netware servers before I could drive. My mum would have to give me a lift to the companies or if they were desperate enough sometimes someone from the company would pick me up after school.
Dave being a Commodore fan makes me enjoy his channel even more! Would love to hear what the Microsoft team he worked in made of the Amiga when it launched…
Wow, what a trip down memory land and a fantastic Christmas present, and thanks Dave for all you do!
I've really enjoyed watching your videos, and this was no exception! I also watch the 8-Bit guy a lot, so I'm hoping that he'll see and respond to this video! Thank you so much, and keep them coming!!!
I hope so too!
@@DavesGarage I want to see how Atari cpu is made and intel cpu like how does it work and arcade cpu
@@DavesGarage If possible, english subtitles would be great, for those of us who are not native (your accent is quite hard to understand for the french I am).
@@MAO-sz3wr i get english subtitles. However they are automatically generated.
But you don't understand the chaos theory Dave. Now that you made a video about it, the 15 dormant basement dwelling D9090s will soon find it way on Ebay for huge amounts and the 8bit guy will be able to grab one
hey Dave! love your vids, I always feel super nostalgic after almost every one ^-^
My first PC was a Commodore VIC-20 that I got from my Gran-dad for my . I think 5th birthday
spent many long nights POKE-ing around and having a blitz :D
That and sourcing games in magazines and whereever I could to (Painstakingly at the time) re-write back into
basic and finally, if I got it 100%, dump it to a tape (loved when I got it first try... so many I/1 O/0 hairpulling issues though..)
So my question, is totally unrelated to that!
What was your final investment cost for all that replacement hardware? I cant help but wonder >.< sometimes they gouge.. something
I am sure you know all too well!
Either way my friend - Happy holidays and a super new year, from another geek on the Autism spectrum :P
David's MFM emulator is basically magic as far as I'm concerned. It can even read in, decode, and emulate existing disks. We have them in several machines at the VCF museum in NJ.
We're lucky that David helps a bunch at the museum - including setting up the emulators for us! The Xerox Star I gave the demo of a few years ago is using one of his boards.
You should be able to use his board to test all the hard disks you bought, too.
If you can get the original drive to power up you can image it! Who knows what treasures await!
GFCI work by measuring amperage difference between hot and neutral (simple version, just imagine having a magnetic coil fed from the hot and neutral side pulling on a central magnetic relay switch, if it touches either side it trips). The assumption being if hot and neutral aren't balanced the 'missing' current is going through your soggy sneaker. But what if the current isn't missing.. it is just 'delayed'.. by something that is altering the phase of the current as it passes through. Certain circuits are notorious for this (motors being one), so are certain types of power supplies. So you aren't tripping because of over-current, you are tripping because your return current is 'delayed'
I've heard people mention current "delays" before, but it doesn't make any sense. Have you heard of Kirchoff's current law? If the current is flowing one way it _needs_ to be headed somewhere.
@@eDoc2020 Inductive or capacitive loads can cause phase differences between voltage and current. Inductors resist changes in current and capacitors resist changes in voltage. It's sort of like a reservoir containing water. Long term the water entering the reservoir must equal the water leaving the reservoir, but in the short term the reservoir may be filling or emptying resulting in a difference in the two current flows. Hope this helps explain things.
I feel your pain. As a field service engineer for the UK's largest independent maintenance company with 400 engineers I worked on a product range called Molecular Computers (that meant something else in the 1980's) which ran a multi-user CP/M varient called n/star and had a Z80 CPU board for each user on a mega-bus like a blade server run by an FP or file processor board with anything from 10 megabyte Seagate drives with stepper motors to 8 inch 70 megabyte Priam drives with voice coils like today's drives. With up to 32 users all running WordStar on their own 64K processor board it was state of the art and as fast as a mainframe if you weren't running a massive database. Fun fact, format the C: drive and it would format the D: drive too. 40 staff not working during a hours downtime meant a man-week of lost production and a day's downtime was a disaster, so formatting a drive for 8 hours was kinda expensive. Fun times.
Irrelevant in 2023? Maybe.
Irresistible must click? Yes! ( also, jealous of your high school lab! We had Tandy computers where we practiced Logo).
Ground fault breakers can trip when the full bridge rectifier on the primary side of an switch mode powersupply has one of it's diodes failed 'open'.
It than becomes a half bridge rectifier in essence the power supply draws pulsating DC wich your breaker doesn't like.
thats super interesting and thank you for sharing. :)
The GFCI shouldn't care about pulsating DC; as the current flows out live and back to neutral there shouldn't be any flux generated in the sensing coil.
@@eDoc2020 with classic versions the core gets saturated, modern smart ones with arc sensing will trip.
@@picobyte Arc sensing ones are called AFCIs. There are combo AFCI/GFCI units but I don't think they're common. At the very least _receptacles_ with AFCIs are extremely rare.
Love this. It's a great example of the "don't give up" approach to solving a problem... Love your ideas for linking in with the 8-bit guy too. And yes, I do appreciate the sounds of a booting MFM drive. Almost as much as I do hearing the Amiga 500 HDD controller click between tracks when loading....
Dave! You’re awesome! Thanks for sharing your knowledge and your journey! Merry Christmas
happy 200k subs for christmas
This sounds like something Adrian Black from Adrian's Digital Basement would be into!
I think that your AC breaker issue is probably due to such old hard disks used to employ AC inductor motors (onto separated circuit), pretty much like old 8 inches floppy drives. Take a quick look to the motor label.
ELI5 GFCI monitor what goes out on the hot and what come back on the neutral, if that ever changes (a leak outside of the circuit) it will trigger but if it stays the same no mater how much is drawn then as far as it concerned no problem
GFCI Ground fault Current Interrupter only monitors the power differential between the hot and neutral. So long the power stays withing the "loop" from the hot to the neutral it will never trip. How ever if it finds a path to ground weather it be the grounding electrode(green wire) or the earth it senses a discrepancy and then will trip. A circuit break works on 2 different mechanisms, magnetic and thermal. When your circuit shorted and did not go to ground but pulled a quick spike it trigger the magnetic trip. The thermal trips if your pulling close to or a little over the ampacity of the breaker.
Back in the early 1980"s, before working at MS, I wrote books on programming the C64 and C128 aimed at smart teens. Funniest hardware memory was getting the floppy drives to work by just tightening up the drive band by feel. Love this episode. Thx always for your excellence, Dave.
And books like that got me started at age 5.
@@forbiddenera You were a smart teen by the age of 5 - wow.
BASIC Computer Games is one of the ones I remember
I was too poor for a C64... had to settle for a Vic20, still spent lots of hours typing in programs... I found I could type them in faster than trying to load them from tape. A disk would have been quite the luxury. =D
@@MikelNaUsaCom i had a c64/128 but by then it wasn't worth much I wish my mom never got rid of it though
Hello Dave,
Would you please provide some background on that short video sequence showing the old computer systems? The sequence started at timecode 5:28! Is it actual footage from the era of your visit to the computer surplus store -or- more recent?
Thanks.
In 1984 when I was 4 years old I played my very first PC game on a apple computer that was similar to this.
Well done Dave, such a champion in retro hardware. I too started my life with a TRS-80 (only 4 of them) , then a BBC at school, then finally my own PC a 4k 6809 based PC that was built by a university in NZ.
Outstanding video, Dave! In 1982/83 my first computer job out of high school was working for Tandon Corp. in my home town of Simi Valley, CA. My first year was spent testing Tandon's floppy-disk boards. The IBM PC had recently appeared, and we couldn't get these drives out the door fast enough! The next assignment involved performing final tests on Tandon's hard drives (602s/603s). By the end of 1982 Tandon was migrating to their ½-height 252 drives, which stored an amazing 20-MB.
Finally, in early 1983 I transferred to what Tandon called their "Voyager" division, which was involved in the design and final test of the D9060/D9090 drives for Commodore Computer Corp. Being a youngster, I performed mostly mundane tasks like burning the EPROMS that went into the SASI interface boards, along with running the HDD/interface testing (writing A5A5A5A5... etc.) and other patterns to the disc. Strangely enough, your video highlighted some of the power issues you experienced with your D9090, since I performed a Hi-Pot test on each unit before it was shipped. There seemed to be some reason why we were checking for voltage leakage, and a few of the units did fail the Hi-Pot test. All in all, in the half-year spent at the Voyager facility (one small warehouse-sized building), we probably shipped around 1,000 units or so (don't remember exactly)... not at highly mass-production scale. The entire division employed no more than 15 people, which included the assembly/test workers along with a few hardware design engineers and programmers. As you mentioned, the drives were quite heavy, since they contained along with the drive, the P.S. and controller boards. I believe the main purpose Tandon launched this venture with Commodore was to increase the sales of their hard drives. I don't remember the pricing, but the D9090 sold for maybe $3,000 at the time... so anything less would be a bargain (in 1982 dollars). Of course due to several factors, including the high cost of the D90X0 units, the growth of hard drive subsystems integrated directly into IBM PCs, along with the IBM-PC standard itself dominating the entire PC landscape, the Commodore hard drive subsystems were destined to become a niche product. As with Dave, I grew up being exposed to PCs such as the Vic-20, Commodore-64 and TRS-80, along with Byte magazine. These were what can now be described as the "good-old days" or in Hollywood lore the "glamorous days" of the PC revolution.
Many people don't realize that in the late 1970s/early 1980s the local area (Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Chatsworth and Woodland Hills) became somewhat of a tech mecca for disk technology. Companies including Tandon, Micropolis, MPI, Pertec, and a dozen others I can't recall sprouted up in the area. This also attracted value-added firms like Packard Bell, which was for a time the world's largest PC manufacturer, although one can argue with the term "value-added." Finally, Seagate Technology's R&D facility was located in Simi Valley for several years, although it wasn't as popular as the President Reagan Library as a tourist destination. Those companies are mostly gone today, but the notion that this little corner of the world hosted its own version of "Silicon Valley" lives on in the annals of computer history, including that of the D9060 and D9090 peripherals. Times change, and Simi Valley is now home to AeroVironment, which is responsible for much or most of the design and construction of the Mars Ingenuity helicopter. In summary, it is a truly amazing tribute to the efforts of Dave and others that the legacy of these still-amazing products continues to this day. Thank you!
Michael/SanPedro, CA,
So much lost history. Makes me sad and nostalgic. Good on people like you to bring it up once in a while. Thanks
Another thoroughly enjoyable, educational and nostalgic story time. Thanks Dave!
Glad you enjoyed it
Thanks. I’m Missing the Joe Walsh intro though ☹️
Sounds like tantalum cap. They fail like that when old ones are powered up. You can allow about 300mA to bleed on the 12 volt rail and the bad one will get very hot so you can find it with out burning the traces. You can replace it with another tantalum, but I prefer to replace them with polystyrene caps. Honestly even a basic multilayer ceramic would work just fine on it due to modern design and the "low speed" of that hardware.
Agreed, it's one of the only components I can think of with "fail closed" behavior as the default without knowing the circuitry of these devices. Only other thing I was thinking is that the drive did some kind of triac-based PWM to directly use AC for the drive motor, where a coil in the motor frayed and is shorting to the metal body. That would certainly trip GFCI and probably fry other components along the way.
@@Tawnos_ I almost wonder if he was using a non isolated power supply, and has the negative is bonded to earth ground like most computers are; then when it takes a rail to ground its able to put the 6mA on ground as a diffrental that causes the trip.
@@Tawnos_ Most semiconductors fail short. A regular signal IC won't pull down the line but the motor driving circuitry might. Modern drives also tend to have a Zener diode for protection; if you feed them 20v they short (don't ask how I know), although I'm sure that's not what happened on Dave's.
Having said that I would still suspect a capacitor as the failure occurred when the drive was running.
Retro computing is oddly satisfying. It's all about spending too much money on doing something a lot harder than it needs to be.
The D9090 is a really cool piece of hardware, built in the classic Commodore fashion. Lovely!
One of the driver chips that power one of the phases of the poly phase motor, has probably shorted to ground. That or the motor phase coil shorted. The main power capacitors on the drive itself are also a possible.
Had the 5 MB D9060 version of this. To use it with my C64 required a cardbus “cartridge” - a massive adaptor that with the hard drive combined caused some pretty good TV interference. 5mb - something like 18,000 blocks if I recall - seemed limitless, even ram a BBS on that for a while!
I never had a D90X0, but I did have an SFD-1001, which was IEEE-488, and used an adapter of some kind but now can't remember the name!
Dave's Garage hah had that one too. If I recall it used the “buscard” cartridge too. (Oops wrote cardbus before)
@@DavesGarage Oh, man, I had an SFD-1001 also. One whole megabyte of storage!! 🙂 (Actually a smidge more than that.) I don't remember the name of the interface I used, either -- but there were several available at the time. I had to buy two or three before I found one that was reliable. It plugged into the cartridge port, had a pass-through cartridge slot on the back, dip-switches to select the "drive number," an IEEE-488 ribbon cable that came out of the side, and -- every C64 owner's dream -- a *reset switch!*
I wish I'd known retro computing was going to be a thing in the future. I would've kept all my C64 stuff that I sold in the late '90s for a pittance compared to what it'd be worth today. (It sold for less than the cost to ship it all to the buyer! LOL).
Truly fun Dave. Thank you for taking us on your journey through MFM drive hell.
You can tell Dave is Canadian because when he shows a Ferrari testarossa it's wearing studded snow tires.
My brothers PET was the 1st computer I ever used
Would be wildly appropriate to get a mini series on CP/M Dave! Your career @ MS would have NEVER happened if not for the late GREAT Gary Kildall and his game changing CP/M OS!
Ok, that PET Circle of Life analogy is the first thing that made me chuckle for weeks
Maybe power is leaking to the frame?
You released the magic smoke. Once you release the magic smoke, you can’t put it back in
I used to work in a clean room changing platters and heads on those early hard drives. Seagate st251 and miniscribe 3650 and more. We had to write the zero track on the first platter for the stepper motor to reset to track 0.
Yeah, I really enjoyed this episode. You mentioned a lot of stuff i didn't realize I knew and had forgotten.
Great Christmas gift. Enjoyed the video. I wish my first PC would have been a Commodore 64. Instead, I made the unfortunate choice of getting a PCjr, maybe the worst PC ever made by a major computer vendor.
Well done-
Great to hear your Commodore stories; I didn't even realize you were Canadian. You must've driven right by my house in Thunder Bay on your cross-country trip to Ottawa, to take my dream job programming C64 games while I stayed in high school like a chump :) I eventually did make a bit of money doing C64 game programming but it took until the '90s and '00s, strangely. That's fantastic you were part of that early Canadian game dev scene; it's very poorly documented so I think many of us would love to hear more of your stories from that time with as many details as possible.
This was a trip down memory lane! The nostalgia almost reduced me to tears! I purchased what was reported (in the local newspaper) to be the first Commodore Pet sold by a retailer in Australia in 1979. Neither the retailer or the wholesaler exist anymore. I had purchased the 8k model, which I later managed to trade in for a 32k model a few years later. I'd tried to wire-wrap an Intel 8080 based single board microcomputer using information published in a magazine, but quickly realised that it was beyond my skills! I don't think I ever saw the Commodore Hard -Disk Drive in person, only read about them in US computer magazines. I was already a programmer who had worked on CDC Cyber 76 and Univac 1100 mainframes, as well as PDP 11 mini's by then. It all seems such a long time ago now!! 😃
Most interesting, I'm rather curious about your TRS-80 network adapter. I've got a model 1 that has been somewhat modified, and that I occasional boot up, however getting Ethernet/WiFi so I can FTP etc would be great.
I do have a 'hayes modem' emulator that talks WiFi, however that is basically gives telnet only, so there is still a huge divide between the TRS and my NAS & PC's.
I forget the name of the board I'm using as it's been 10 years I'm sure, but it contains a Network jack and a SD card, and there is software for TCP/IP, DHCP, and FTP. No WWW server though.
@@DavesGarage Thanks, back to good old Google to see if I can stumble upon it.
My 'Hayes modem', based on an ESP01 module, talking to the TRS at a dizzy 300bps, was originally intended for a Commodore 64, I just added a TTL to RS232 converter board.
Nice piece of Hardware I never new it existed! BTW: US homes do have 220V - actually 2*110V on two phases connected to "Neutral", but you can use as 220V for appliances that need it. Check your fusebox with your favourite electrician, and he will show you how to get 220V there. But it will be 60 Hz of course, not 50 Hz like Europe. But might save you the conversion box.
6:12 Commodore drilled holes in the motherboard of PETs to stop hobbyists from doing RAM expansion? That's just mean.
I love how your videos are like one big uninterrupted series of infodump. It's so packed and informative! Would be dope if you could somehow put timestamps in, so people like me can watch at exactly the point we need when working on some project like this Commodore drive and needing to look up a small piece of info. :D
Watching to the end, I was amazed that the description of this remote, intricate, Turing complete, and magical world was all so familiar. Yes, I still have some MFM drives on a shelf, along with some giant 10MB SCSI’s - they haven’t spun for decades. The magic of your story peaked when I heard the drive starting up! No wonder computers were so much fun then. Like starting an engine on a DC3.
> Like starting an engine on a DC3
My first HD was 10 MB Seagate hooked up to a PC clone back in 1983-4 time period. Cost around $3k. And that old prop airplane sound is EXACTLY what it sounded like spinning up.
I'm going to assume the motor in the HDD had a faulty phase or something causing some sort of large negative inductive spike that either traveled through the snubbing capacitor between the primary and secondary sides of the power supply and down the line causing an imbalance and triggering the GFCI or down earth causing the same issue.
Merry Christmas, Dave.
Wow, fantastic video! As someone who started off back in the day (1979) with an 8K 2001-8 PET with the chiclet keyboard and built-in tape drive, it was around 4 years before I could even afford a disk drive. When I could it was the smallest of the bunch - the 2031 single drive - I used to look at the ads for the D9090 and D9060 drives and drool! That old PET (before it got passed on) had been upgraded from Basic 1 via Basic 2 to Basic 4 (via EPROMs on a hand-built, self-designed, hand-drawn PCB as the PET itself was socketed for the incompatible 6540 ROMs) and to 32K via a hand-assembled 32K board kit. Fun times!
Thanks for the great trip down memory lane. Like you, TRS80 first computer used and C64 first computer owned (At age 13). Installed hundreds of MFM and RLL drives in my day working in a computer store at age 16. Ah, the good 'ol days. :)
If the drive is introducing an AC ripple back into the power supply ground (shorted motor or driver chip) it may cause the GFCI to trip. GFCI outlets/breakers usually need around 10-15mA to trip.
@7:38 OMG. It just occurred to me that your hometown's name was featured on an episode of Seinfeld! LOL. Mulva???? LOL again. And hope you had a great time in NYC @29:33. It's certainly not what it was, but you didn't get mugged so that's a win. (Thanks to mayor moron)
Part of My C64 BBS machine was a CMD 20MB HD (running the JD kernel) back in 90-91
I have quite some rare Commodore items in the museum, but the D9090 is not one of them. I'd be very happy to put it in the public museum and tell the story (and link to this TH-cam channel). I already did similar things with the Amiga 4000 used for Titanic. You can even remain owner. Contact me for more details. We are an interactive museum with over 500 computers hands-on in the museum. And just so you know, we actually run all versions of Windows from Windows 1.02 to Windows Vista in the museum.
Excellent video! My friend has a 9090 that's having issues and I will be working on it in 2022. If you have any schematics, I would love to get a copy
Would it be OK to sample your MFM startup sound at 20:26 onwards for my W10 start up replacement sound? I just been binge watching your channel for so many past retro experiences. In 1980's as a pro COBOL programmer I could finally afford an IBM-clone 8086 PC with MFM drives. You bought back so many flash backs (good and nightmare) of hooking up MFM 20Mb HDD's that gobbled up in sheer wonderment the contents of multiple 5.25 FDD's. Surely technology could never advance as much as this at such a rate forever? Then on DX486 with DOS 6.x's I must have run Mbytes of your code; nay must be TerraBytes of your code
19:08 omg i want one..
*Checks price*
$463.31 CAD 😱💀
Sitting here with my future son-in-law, a computer science major and a "gainfully employed IT guy" drinking hot cocoa from my brand spanking new "Dave's Garage" mug and watching your latest vintage PET video...he actually seems to know what you're talking about and is genuinely interested! Thank you and Merry Christmas!
Thanks, and Merry Christmas to you guys as well!
D9090? Farrari Testerosa? Nope.... Cheryl Tiegs? Yeah Buddy!!! Racheal McLish. Yeah Man!
If it had tantalum caps anywhere, those often fail shorted.
I have a CBM4016 which i brought new sometime in the 80's, i added the extra ram to make it 32K not long after. after a lot of years sitting under the stairs in the house, about 20 i turned it on a it did not work. A video ran fault which was fixed with some "new" chips. :-) Plus the floppy drive let out the magic smoke when the mains filter cap let go.
I did a few videos on fixing the ram and cleaning it up and changing the mains filter on the floppy. Still seems to read 40year old disks that had been storred in the loft for the last 40years.
Great to see you got it running in the end.
One of my first jobs was repairing Commodore 64 computers and your description of how you diagnosed them was same as what we used. Although a much older version of the desoldering station.
I wore out a half dozen of the Radio Shack desoldering irons and used a lot of solder wick with additional Kester 1544 RMA liquid flux.
Dave you crack me up with the "keep throwing money at the drives" dialog. 😂
I threw a bunch of money at my C-64 setup back in the 80's, dont know how I ever got that past the wife. I installed a JiffyDOS update chip on the motherboard and bought an external chassis, can't remember the vendor now, that had a I think like 20 or 40 megabyte scsi drive in it. Running a BBS I had a crapload of upload/download storage. 😉
But everybody knows *German accent* Zat Zee German paperVeights are zee best and overenZineered paperVeights, in zee Vorld!