BIZ TRAVEL INDUCED IDLE PERIOD TIL NOV 9

TIME AWAY

I am traveling to Brazil and won't be back to work on anything until November 9th, when I can resume work on various aspects of the project.

TWIN 1401 SYSTEMS INSTALLATION AT COMPUTER HISTORY MUSEUM

The electrician had indeed wired the 1401 incorrectly to the 50Hz converter. Once that was diagnosed and fixed on Monday morning, the power came right up. The DE (German) system is now up, but its first 4K of memory is not working properly. Ron Williams was still troubleshooting this by the end of the day.

We hooked the first tape drive of each system to its 1401 processor and laid out the cables to run from tape drive to tape drive. The floor tiles must be cut to allow the cables to be connected, something that will be done by a contractor. Frank King and I marked out the tile cuts for the CT system tape drives, while Stan Paddock and others worked on the DE system drives.

Once the drives are fully connected, the floor tiles with cutouts and protective rims are all in place and the memory defect is fixed on the DE system, both 1401 systems will be completely operational, ready for the unveiling to the public later in November.

CONSOLE PRINTER (TYPEWRITER) COMPLETION

It was time to test it with the system for producing monovelocity typing. For some reason, it is failing to work properly. The first few runs gave me an apparently correct behavior, althought the letter E, which is one that gets a low velocity signal, looked just as faint as before. When I turned it back on with a minor change to test out something, I found it was now blocking all print.

When I pulled the circuit out, I then had even the dummy cycles striking, which makes sense, but the no-print line from the logic board should be 24V for all printables and my circuit should leave the solenoids alone. It has stopped working right, which could be failure of one of the two transistors in the mini circuit board leaving it permanently on, or it could be something more subtle. I will have to wait to diagnose this until I get back.

I also ran a test of the margin release button, to validate that I could block the auto new line function in order to space over if the right margin needs to be set further to the right than its initial setting. It turns out that I don't need this, I can just use the tab and space buttons on the front of the typewriter to move beyond the current margin to the location where I wish to issue the set right margin command. I will remove the unneeded logic for the margin release and can 'sign off' on the adapter logic as final.