Cobbling together a microfilm reader to explore a promising vintage microfiche find.
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ธ.ค. 2020
- A microfilm find from a subscriber may have landed us a cross-reference list for old HP parts. Which would be a key find for vintage HP instruments repair! We quickly hack out a microfiche scanner with an Andonstar 207 electronic microscope to find out.
Andonstar 207 (no affiliation with the company): www.andonstar.com/e_products/D...
The scans of the most important HP fiches can be found here:
drive.google.com/file/d/1JxDF...
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The name is aNdonstar...
i hope you upload all of those fims as high res scans to the internet archive, it deserves to be seen and preserved
That would be nice, I have a large number of mystery HP diodes that aren't in the Keysight "find-a-part" or the usual suspect cross references.
Yeah this is a near mythical reference
I second that recommendation!
I would love to help get the images processed into digital tables. @CuriousMarc let me know when the images are available.
I used to know how to Use microfiche when I was 16 years old back in 1982 at Alameda Naval Air Station in Northern California.
Big thumbs up to Brian for his donation and preservation for those parts and reference material.
The tube shown at the end was used in the HP 608A/B/C/D signal generator in the front-end RF oscillator which produces a sine wave in a range from 10-420 megahertz. The cross-reference shows it as a 4042 but this is equivalent to the 5674 tube which is specified in the manual. A somewhat similar tube, the 5876 (1921-0002) is used as a grounded-grid amplifier in the final output stage.
No kidding! And I just happen to have a 608D in the hallway, has not made it yet to the lab! Indeed it has two very similar pencil output tubes! How do you know all this? Brian’s tube does say 4042 on it, and its unopened bag had the HP number on it, so it looks like the microfiche cross reference is correct on that one at least. Yet another mystery to solve, and thanks so much for the always well informed tips!
@@CuriousMarc It's something that I read about when I thought about getting a 608D which was being offered for sale at a local electronics shop (which closed a few years ago). When I saw that tube again it sparked a memory so I went and looked at the service documentation again...
@@douro20 Thanks, this is very helpful. Now I have a circuit to inspire myself from. Maybe we can actually make that tube work again!
I hope you release all of the cross reference lists....great upload as always Marc!
Yeah, I can imagine him uploading it to the Internet Archive.
next episode: why is Marc's 5Ghz Wifi router visible across the Atlantic?
Unfortunately, more power doesn't necessarily mean more range at microwave frequencies. The signals will not go beyond the horizon.
You can bounce signals off the moon if you have enough power and some high gain directional antennas though.
@@rocketman221projects wait for what Marc will come up next from his magic attic :D
With enough gain you can do tropospheric scatter
@@sashimanu ...like a "Russian Woodpecker". Can't wait to see what Marc will build from his recent acquisitions.
@@rocketman221projects so basically "why is there a hole in the moon?" :)
For a moment, I thought @CuriousMarc must be British because he did a video about Fiche & Chips.
Lawrence Fiche-burn groans.
8:40 i guess the minus makes it brigther because you see the inverted image, but the Exposure Value setting is applied for the non-inverted image ;)
It breaks my heart that I worked for Fairchild, AMD and HP (Santa Clara & Mtn View) in the early 1980's and had access to an unlimited supply of rare chips and parts, but I only collected very few items. I was one of the last employees at Fairchild (near Moffet Field) before their oldest main plant shut down. If I only had a time machine to go back. When I find the things I did save, I'll be sending them to you Marc. I have some old employee badges I'll send you too when I locate the other stuff. I also saved a few original vintage photos of telecommunication satellites that Fairchild helped build if someone is interested in purchasing them.
Was Fairchild on Charleston or near Ellis St? That’s a Superfund cleanup site I think. I remember the Denny’s that used to be there and Chubby’s Broiler
@@mmaranta785 Close to Ellis St. I think. Moffet Blvd is/was close by. Moffet Blvd may be called Shoreline now? Whisman Rd also had early Fairchild buildings too, until the very end. The way Fairchild misused and disposed of chemicals, I'm sure all of the Fairchild manufacturing buildings are Superfund cleanup sites. I was amazed at how many chemical "accidents" they had. It was all about covering up chemical contamination's to the property and employees.
I have both a microfilm reader, and a 8000 dpi film scanner. want me to scan all this stuff?
That info should be in the public domain. So many people would appreciate it.
1:31 Going into full nerd envy to see such a stock of obscure parts stored with neat labels and quality cabinets.
Whoa! What a treasure trove of old HP parts and data!! Irreplaceable! Thank God for people like Brian who have the foresight to preserve stuff like this, and for people like you who continue this work into the future.
A database for looking up HP part numbers would be great! Tektronix also renumbers all the parts and there is the same problem of looking up manufacturer equivalents. Like HP, they also made their own custom parts for which there is no manufacturer equivalent.
The old RF hp equipment is still the best. This cache of microfilm is a priceless.
I love the UHF tube
Me too! I was quite surprised to find out what it was!
I went to the library to find an old Scientific American article. It was on Microfiche. The library staff wasn't even sure where the microfiche reader was located. They sent me to the basement, we found one and put it on a cart, and brought it upstairs. Staff had no idea how to load the roll or how to work the projector. Like wow! I felt like an actual time traveler. None of the staff had had a request for a microfilm roll or microfiche in at least a decade!
Clever solution to read that old film. There is so much information out there that will be or has been lost due to "progress".
At HP Laboratories in Palo Alto, we had a cabinet full of IBM punched cards that each had a microfiche insert.
There was a punched card for every HP part number. And indeed, there were 4 by 4, 4 by 5, and 5 by 5 digit HP part numbers.
The microfiche insert had the full set of drawings and specifications for a given part number.
At first I saw this system as a big pain in the butt, but eventually realized that the purpose was to qualify multiple vendors for each part and freeze the part specifications. The vendors would mark the parts with the HP part numbers. In production and servicing, parts with the same HP part number from any vendor could be used.
If memory serves me, all this stuff ended up on line so we could look up everything on internal HP Materials Engineering web servers. But I retired 5 years ago, so I no longer have access.
These are called aperture cards. Most of our Apollo documents were recovered from aperture cards.
Please publish the images of the microfiche, I’m sure it will help many people (including me)
I agree 100%! also hello again
Thank you for this amazing video! And thanks to Brian for his donation! It just shows how fast technology developed since these micro-fiches were made! 1984 tech is now truly „Ancient“ , and I feel really old now 😁
I just love these videos. A super genius using just that, ingeniousity, to create great tools without just throwing loads of money on the problem 👍👍👍
Again I'm stunned by these videos. Incredible!! You're preserving history!
Thank you so much for doing this. I have a small collection of HP equipment that I am repairing and looking up the HP part numbers always has been kind of a lottery. Great work!
That's an excellent solution. I had to learn how to run microfilm and microfiche readers for my freshman year Library Studies class - each machine was the size of a big refrigerator. There's an astonishing amount of information to be found on film...
Congratulations to 100.000 subscribers! I'm glad you finally made it. Keep on bringing us your interesting content!
Thanks!
Thanks, Marc! Another excellent episode, as always! What an amazing haul of old parts and documentation!
excellent, as always
I was looking for specific HP part numbers in one of my videos...
A long, long time ago one manufacturer would only supply me service information on microfiche. My small business could not afford or justify the cost of a reader, so I used my photographic enlarger and printed off 8 x 10 black and white prints. How times have changed.
Steve
Absolutely incredible work!
I remember several companies going to fiche, Seeing Marc with that pile gave me flashbacks!
It was a horrible experience doing component level troubleshooting with microfiche and a portable reader, I left a company that used HP computers because of it and wouldn't take an engineering job with anyone who did use them.
Watching a Copy machine repairman use them was a painful experience ! One tech told me it took many times as long from the old way of using prints. I agree.
If you only swapped boards it would be ok I guess but useless in the field otherwise.
Hell yeah, Brian. Thanks very much!
I don’t know diddly about electronics. But I love these vids.
I’m an big HP calculator fan. And any HP instrument that can be repaired has got to be worth repairing.
i love your work marc, your accent is excellent, your references to youtubers, seeing how organized you are, salvaging of equipment, hacking, your choice of words.
Thanks. I am not too sure about the accent though ;-)
The material numbering system and its documentation / archiving method of a company is an extremely interesting topic, anyhow.
That's been a delight for me, as I'm doing component / document / numbering system management in my company.
Many thanks!
I do the same! The system I curate started in 1979, and we have largely adhered to it ever since.
Great find ! I had a bunch of backlight illumination from old Automation computer vision and inspections machines but got rid of them in my last move in june sadly. I would surely shock myself with the CCL driver haha I need to get back to work on my HP85 project.
I love these kinds of data recovery videos!
Cool! I used to work in a library, and for whatever reason it seems like microfiche is often overlooked, even though it's often a great document resource
Also, after watching some of this video, I can tell you that while there are cheaper options out there for scanning microfilm/fiche (many libraries have them), you have basically recreated one exactly as those library models work. The film readers have takeup reels and all that, but for fiche you literally just sandwich it between two pieces of glass and move it around, by hand, in front of a backlight. Plus yours is probably faster and better quality than the library-quality ones, which, as is often the case, tend to be more expensive than they should be, and rely on slow/annoying proprietary software interfaces
Agreed. Microfiches hold so much stuff! And it's random access! It was the archival medium of choice before massive digital storage became so cheap. Which in the grand scheme of things is not that long ago.
@@CuriousMarc Yes! Plus, properly stored, it's very stable over very long periods of time. I stopped working at the library in 2017, but I think even then they were still photographing daily newspapers on microfilm, and I think a lot of places might still use microfilm for official archival copies.
Congrats on 100k subscribers!
CuriousMark, It would be interesting if you could scan or OCR process those microfiches and share with the community...
just found this channel, interesting accent and top notch tech skills, I'm enthralled.
Hearing Marc quote AvE always makes me smile... and cringe a little. :-)
Especially when he says "doodalee-doo" and not the colloquial "doobalee-doo". That said its Marc so he gets a pass ;-)
@@blapty I think it was actually the Green brothers who started "doobalee-doo" so it has great internet heritage!
You know I think AvE would be highly flattered to know someone like Marc was a fan.
THAT is so cool! I want an Adonstar 207 now and i don't know why LOL!
Fantastic! What a find. If you haven't already thought of it, a good quality flat bed scanner would probably do a good job of digitizing those microfiche. I have used one to digitized black and white and color 35 mm negatives with excellent results. If you decide to go ahead with a project to preserve this data and need volunteers to do the OCR/formatting/proofreading, sign me up! I'm a huge HP fanboy and would love to see this information put into a database.
I need to do a similar setup, I have rolls of film from vintage aircraft blackboxes, using some old school photofilm method to record data. I'll check the e-waste bin that shopping center for a brokenld portable dvd player :-p
Slick find! Nice scanner. :D
I like this microscope, thanks for showing it :)
Thank Brian for me. Awesome 👍😎
Now we have it on tape: Marc says he won't be bothered with such bulky obsolete electronic stuff!
I worked in the microfilm / fiche industry for 40 years stating in 1973. We started because line printers were too slow and whoever received the 5th or 6th part of a NCR printout was not happy. The fiche you showed were computer generated by a COM system. That would take tapes or direct feed and display the print data on a CRT or use a laser to expose the film. The originals were actual photographic film. The copies which you have were done on a system similar to blue prints. The copies of the entire fiche would take about 5 seconds or less. While the technology is outmoded now, it still serves an archival need. The originals should last 500 years and it just takes simple optics to read them
Will a desktop magnifier, like to read magazines and books, work to read microfiche?
Would be really nice to have all those fiches scanned and available for other enthusiasts... but I know its lots of work 😌
I feel so jazzy all of a sudden!
You know Marc, I just noted on my local Craigslist someone was selling FOUR microfiche readers. Minolta, Canons, one had a built-in printer. All of them could handle spool or sheet film. All needed some TLC for they are in various states of disrepair. But I know a man of your talents would take them on and bring them back to life.
This is a real treasure!!! :-)
Man, I wish I had the note-taking/journaling practice that you do. Looks very useful.
I imagine you stitched those scans with Hugin just like die shots?
I used to know how to Use microfiche when I was 16 years old back in 1982 at Alameda Naval Air Station in Northern California.
I had to use microfilm and microfiche and microopaques and can't say I miss them.
Back in the stone age I had to use microfiche and a hand held viewer (a frame to hold the fiche and a magnifying lens, you held the whole thing up to a light to see it) a real pain in the neck!
Noob questions here, why you needed the information stored in microscopic film and not in paper?
@@michelangelop3923 Now you can set up a copier to scan everything to PDF and store them on the network. Before computerization was good enough for storing terabytes of images, microfilm was easier to store, easier to distribute than the original. If you've got newspaper, very few places will have the bound sets. You could put a book on a few fiche.
@@michelangelop3923 former library employee here. Unless documents were bound into an actual book, they were extremely difficult to maintain in a collection. Film and fiche allowed periodicals, reports, government publications, catalogs and all sorts of other things to be reproduced, shipped, stored and accessed at very little cost in materials or storage.
@@michelangelop3923 it was how large archival databases were done back in the pre-digital age, generally of information that didn't need to be looked at super often but was important to archive for archival's sake. i am sure you can imagine how much space doing that with boxes full of binders full of papers might take up (and still do to this day) while being able to shrink down dozens of pages onto microfilm would be a benefit
The music remind me a 70's new car deluxe advertisement, hahahah, nice!
Help the old lady on my street do the UK census the other week foundnoit she worked in a microfilm company that used to be in our town that did maps and things. It was Quite interesting finding that out. Probably explains why my local library had an extensive range of microfilm viewers and such to use when I was a kid, always wanted to try them out but never could, to young and they charged you per 10mins to use them. I'm pretty sure the phone was listening to the conversation because now I'm getting suggestions for microfilm video
Oh that's brilliant. I never thought of using the backlight of an lcd. I can use that for film I have. Also never thought of using a microscope. I managed to find a portable microfiche viewer but still a bit annoying compared to pdfs. But it was only 50 bucks and REALLY needed it.
"Oh you need little teeny eyes for reading little teeny print, like you need little tiny hooks for micro-fish!"
8:44 Minus probably makes it brighter, because its inverted
RCA still has large divisions in Lancaster, PA. Just down the road from me.
Do you plan to upload the pictures you have taken?
A little website that you can enter the HP part no on and retrieve the details would be an asset to HP tinkerers around the world.
What an awesome treasure trove of Hyrogliphics. Time to convert the media from Microfish to Microbits...
I used some IKEA picture-frame glass for the same purpose, trying to capture some old film negatives. I was a little surprised to find I got much better image quality from my DSLR + macro lens than from my flatbed scanner.
What a guy!
Fantastic gift of valuable information and parts. I’ve often wondered how technical documentation, particularly service manuals, were typeset and illustrated back in the day before desktop publishing was a thing. There must have been an impressive department behind this documentation.
The cross reference list almost looks like a printout but I can’t help wonder how the microfiches were made and did HP invent an interesting device to assist with their creation, perhaps even a stepping CRT-to-microfiche device. I’ve not researched this in any way so am away to Google!
@SteelRodent There were devices that “printed” directly from computers to microfilm a surprisingly long time ago. Stromberg Carlson introduced one in 1959 ... Other vendors included Calcomp and Dicomed (and maybe III). I think directly to microfiche (rather than roll film) was available in the second half of the 1970s... A lot of really “cool” technology has been around for a long time (well, stuff I think is cool, anyway ... :-) )
I've used a microscope to read a fiche I ordered from eBay to view equipment parts diagrams. All of this info is now free online making the old film redundant.
Andonstar sent me a ad207 earlier this year for review, and they just sent me an AD409 which gives a higher magnification and a 10” screen.
Recently found your channel and have been binge watching your videos! So glad I turned on notifications.
Edit: now I can't turn notifications on?
Edit 2: guess I found a TH-cam glitch? Accidentally hit unsubscribe from my Nintendo switch (immediately resubscribed) but now notifications are turned off and when I try to turn them on, TH-cam says I can’t because it is content made for kids, and I’ve tried on multiple devices However, when I switch to another account I can turn notifications on just fine. Very weird.
Edit 3: I unsubscribed then resubscribed from my phone, and that seemed to fix the problem!
To ease in transferring the films maybe setup a XY milling table as the base for the Andostar? that way you can easily move around the film while it is mounter solidly.
Scan a “fish”. Lmao! I used those 40 years ago to identify HP parts.
If you wanted HP data would HP have it anymore or would now be Agilent or Keysight? Does Keysight have access to the warehouses of 1980's manuals and schematics?
imagine all the nearly-lost data that's just sitting around in peoples closets and attics, just waiting to be thrown away and lost forever
Please upload that, I already work on old HP, we dont have documentation
Sometimes cobbling your own devices is far better and cheaper than buying the dedicated one. Curiously enough something related to your issue presented to me. I was looking for the price of drum scanners, turns out I can buy a luxury car with the cost of one, if you ask for someone with a drum scanner to scan some film turns out its expensive as hell, not surprising considering how much the scanner is, scanning a 35mm film costs around $20 to $40 per image or about $1000 bucks for a 36 exp roll, scanning some large format films at 2k DPI is costing you around $200. Solution; build my own scanner with microscope objectives, a cooled sensor camera a motorized precision stage and a custom light source. Result: capability of almost 3 times higher DPI (31k DPI) than even the best drum scanners, low noise and ultra high dynamic range and color accuracy, cons its much slower than a drum scanner. All costing almost an order of magnitude less than the drum scanner.
I wonder if those fiches contain the service documents / schematics for the 8590B, this seems to be impossible to find.
If any of your HP contacts have a Barney Oliver Integrated amplifier, or parts laying around. I would be very interested it talking with them!
Where can we find the Hp parts list to the real parts name list? and will you be helping update that archive with your findings?
Curious how you've come out on this so far. I'm looking for info on HP zener diodes 1902-0000 through 0100, 1902-0900 through 1000 and 1902-3000 through 3200 also Diodes 1901-0000 through 0100. There's a lot of holes in the Keysight find a part, I have several hundred that I'm unable to precisely identify.
I will go to bed 13 minutes from now. I hope you and your family are well, sir!
Goodnight!
Going to bed too, finally managed to get the video out! Good night!
My first thought was, use a ICE Dia Scanner and OCR Software
Would get rid of those scratches and dust very easy and fast but idk if they produce a device in size of your microfilms
Edit: Epson v600 or v700 could fit ^^
I was waiting for the fish pun before giving my mandatory like :)
I am inexperienced with HP part numbers, but I think I have a bunch of parts with their house numbers. I will have to get them out. Would you want to look them up for me?
Do you have plans to scan all of them and make a public database of the results? Given the nonuniformity of the sheets, that seems like a huge task. Maybe start with a wiki with just the images and let people convert them a section at a time?
And that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Doodle do!
maybe 3709a constellation analyzer manuals in this fiches? I cannot find it anywhere ._.
Scan a fish... I love simple humour. Still chuckling.
Next you will be building a couple of stepper motors to automatically position for each page on a film.
Fantastic =D Those will be super useful for anyone trying to find subsitutes for HP parts from that era!
any way to have a publihed scan ?
Hey Marc ,great videos ,could you share your microfiche captures ,I also have a lot of old components and would love to see what I have .can you create a zip file or a pdf your follows could download I know I would appreciate it ,Thanks you for the great entertainment stay safe
Wow! Who knew fish go transparent when you squish them so flat! Guess it's probably something to do with the scales.
Microscope potato vision? I like it.
A standard camera at point blank range would work well, treat it like a photographic negative
damn i wish i could have half of your knowledge
What OCR software do you use?
Seeing the solutions to the problems of solving the original problems are almost better than seeing you solve the original problem. If that makes any sense.
Old skool tech