On 2015-Oct-09, at 10:28 AM, Marc Verdiell wrote: > Glen, > I'm right in the middle of resuscitating an HP7970E (1600 bpi with the HP-IB > interface). The main problem I had so far was the rubber in the reel hubs > had completely fused to the tape reels that were left on the hubs. I had to > disassemble the hub locking mechanism and use lots of careful X-Acto knife > work to separate the two. A few tape rollers were rough or stuck - just > oiled them for now. Then it started to work, I am very surprised. There are > three red switches on the motor control board inside to make the tape go > forward, reverse and fast rewind. So it's pretty easy to test if the > transport works and the motor servos and tension arms move how they are > supposed to.
I had that problem with the stuck reel hubs. Failed to take my own advice-to-self to leave the reels unmounted and they stuck again, although easier to get off this time as it hadn't been many years under pressure. > Brent, > Wow, looked at your site, and you actually wrote a HP 2100 cross-assembler? > Nice. Would it work for the HP21MX too? Did you compile it using the command > line tools in XCode? I had originally written it in a re-targetable cross-assembler in a now-outdated development environment under MacOS9. Last year rewrote someone else's assembler (C source) - it should work in any standard C environment. Was using it to re-assemble HPBASIC. I'm not familiar enough with the 21MX machines to say what may have been added/changed from the early 2100's in assembly terms, but it shouldn't be difficult to add to the assembler. Can send you the source if you wish. I had a simulator written in the old OS9 environment too, but haven't brought that into a current state. > Marc > > ========================================================== > Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2015 13:29:37 -0700 > From: Brent Hilpert <hilp...@cs.ubc.ca> > To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" > <cctalk@classiccmp.org> > Subject: HP & 800BPI / was Re: Tape cleaner on eBay > Message-ID: <858603d2-2d79-45d6-993c-a8939d996...@cs.ubc.ca> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > On 2015-Oct-07, at 12:56 PM, Glen Slick wrote: >> I have an 800BPI 7970B in a 2113B rack system. I've never gotten >> around to trying to get it up and running. Are they fairly reliable >> drives to get going again? I don't have any other 800BPI drives to >> write any tapes to read with it. > >> On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 12:46 PM, Brent Hilpert <hilp...@cs.ubc.ca> wrote: > Well, the unit here was in pretty good physical condition as received. > It had a cascading failure in the capstan driver but it was a fairly > straightforward fix. > I think there was one sluggish/partially-seized pulley bearing (freed up > with some oil). > Pretty rugged drives as you know. I wonder about the capstan rubber in the > long term but I think that's about the only thing to worry about on age > alone. > I think bitsavers nowadays has manuals and schematics for the B version as > you have, years ago I had to do some reverse-engineering for the capstan > repair. > This page is over ten years old and needs some updating, but FWIW: > http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hilpert/e/HP21xx/HP2116CSys/index.html > Note the tape drive repair log page linked there.
