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■sl The Seruiceman

Another journey into the (largely) unknown . .

In a sense this month’s story is a sequel to the one I related last month, in that both represent jobs of the kind which take you out of the familiar round of TV receivers and video recorders. But this one concerns a personal Computer, and a fairly ageing one at that, by modern standards.

As it happcns, the Computer didn^łt belong to a customer at all — it belongs to mc. IPs a System 80, a clone of the Tandy TRS-80 which was importcd by Dick Smith Electronics bctwecn about 1980 and 1984. They were madę in Hong Kong, I believe, and to the best of my knowledge quite a fcw tens of thousands were sold. „

This one is one of the “Mark II” models, with a numeric keypad at the right of the main keyboard instead of the casscttc tape deck built into the original models. The Mark II model could be providcd with a matching ex-pansion* box and floppy disk drives, and was promoted for morę serious ‘business” use. It uscd a Z-80 ciglit-bit mi-croprocessor, and had a maximum of 48K of RAM — miniscule by modern standards, but it sccmed imprcssivc then.

I bought one about five years ago, completc with the 48K of memory and two floppy disk drives. The initial idea was to use it at home as a word pro-cessor, to write this column, and this worked out quite well. But a little later I bought a couple of additional software packages, one to keep track of spare parts and the other to take some of the hassle out of customer invoicing. Before long, it was spending most of its time at the shop.

The way these things go, after about two years it was getting harder and harder to use the System 80 at home for word processing. At the same time, it was getting close to obsoletc — such is the speed that Computer technology roars on. Obviously some other solution was becoming necessary.

This was about the time that IBM had released its 16-bit PC in Australia, so after a bit of consultation with Mrs Serviccman and our fricndly accountant, I bought one of these. Naturally as my newest toy, it was taken home to bc-come the word proccssor (!). Ifs still being used for this purpose, as it hap-pens, and Tm writing this column on it.

The System 80 was left at the shop, because this would cause the least dis-ruption to daily business. The stock control and accounting software packages available for the IBM all secmed to me horrendously expensive (nothing much has changed!), and they also scemed to be incompaiible with those Pd bcen using on the System 80. After having gone through the exercisc of set-ting up a spare parts invcntory database and the invoicing package only a couple of years before, I didn t fancy going through the wholc shebang all oyer again.

So it was easier to leave everything running happily on the System 80 at the shop, and take the shiny new IBM

... carrying on the dubious tradition of the plumber’s pipes leaking, etc ...

home. I still had to go through the business of changing over from the System 80's word processing packagc to the Wordstar which came with the IBM, but that didn t turn out to be too bad.

Everything went along quite happily until a couple of weeks ago, w hen we

turned on the System 80 one Monday morning to be greeted by a scrccn fuli of random “garbage". It madę ii forlorn effort to boot up a disk. but then scemed to sit there in stony silcncc.

As luck would havc it. I was abso-lutely snowed under with paying jobs from customers at the time (Murphy*s Law, no douht!). So all I could do was turn it all off again and make a fcw cx-asperated observations about carrying on the dubious tradition of plumbcrs' pipes leaking and bootmakers* children having to walk around in their socks.

It was actually the following Saturday afternoon before I could get a chance to tackle the System 80. In the meantimc I had managed to dig out the technical manuals Pd madę a point of getting. as insurance against just such an cventual-ity.

Wow before prcKecding with the ac-tual servicing story itself (finally!). I should notę that wliere personal eonu puters are concerned, l‘m far from being an expert. In fact they re even morę in the catcgory of “unfamiliar territory” than the movic projector job I describcd last month. I do havc an un-derstanding of the basie principlcs. but when it comćs to the fine details I m easily lost. From comments madę bv some of my colleagucs. Pm surę Pm not alone here.

In fact I suspcct that the only people who are really familiar with PCs and their peripherals are the tcchnicians who’ve madę a speciality of servicing them exclusively. So my analogy last month of doctors is probably cvcn morę appropriate here — the best person to solve this kind of problem is a spccial-ist. not a “master of nonę” GP likc my-self.

Still. that s all verv well in theory. When its your own jolly Computer, and you are after all supposcd to be a Mr Fixit, you just dive in and hope for the best. But the point Pm trying to make

40

ELECTRONICS Australia, September 1987