Msg: 5438 *Conference*
09-23-94 21:22:32
From: KENNETH SMITH
To : RICHARD HANSON
Subj: HARDWARE INSTALLED
Hi Rick, I'm back at school again, pursuing my Bachelor's in Computer Science at SUNY Fredonia. I finally installed all the hardware that I ordered from The Club into my Model T's the week before school (late August). I got it in July. [I have an ExtRam, XR-4, and a RamPac.] Amazingly, enough, it all works fine (so far). I'm not very good with a soldering iron, but everything went well. I wanted to put in the XR-4 into my T102 first, but I decided I had better start with the easier stuff. The RamPac is a breeze. Putting the ExtRam into my T200 was easier than I thought it would be (no soldering!). I really like that wire wrap tool that you included. The big challege was to put in the XR-4. Opening the case on the T102 was enough to give me the willies. It's all too common for me to take something apart that works, only for me to put it back together and have it never work again. I studied the excellent directions a dozen times, VERY carefully, then followed them. I just hope my soldering job will last forever, where I connected into the System Bus. Although I enjoyed the experience, I don't want to have to do it again. I'm just afraid that someone will come out with a ROM chip, that I absolutely MUST have, and I'll have to remove the XR-4 or ExtRam. To avoid that, I'll PAY EXTRA to buy the ROM image on disk! I suppose for legal reasons, you'd have to send the chip along with it, but I'd want it anyway, as a tribute to Murphy's Law. Maybe I should write some serious software for these Model T's. A program to copy an entire diskette to the RamPac would be nice. . . . Just One disk swap instead of the dozen that it seems to take for FLOPPY and BACKUP.BA. And if it's written right, you could make multiple copies of the diskette, while only reading it once. The MS-DOS BACKUP command isn't even that good! I saw an article in Portable 100 about it, and I am a Computer Science major. . . . And maybe I could write another program that would capture TELCOM files directly do the RamPac. If I only had the time. Well, that's all for now. It's a pleasure doing business with you. --Ken Smith