Corn Corner

by Cresby

Random Static

A friend was telling me that at work they had trouble with CMOS chips. Careful handling, reappraisal of design, change of suppliers all failed to reduce the failure rate. One day, as all good stories go, they realised that after ignoring the problem, it had gone away. Good engineering philosophy dictated a post mortem but little transpired. Could the wet weather have reduced static build up? Did chaining workers to benches help? Then one wag pointed out (I deny even the remotest hint of authorship) that the charge hand (pause!) no longer worked there. There was no suggestion of his being discharged, he was a down to earth chap don’t you know. As it happens, the offending chips were bus drivers so you would expect to see no failures for ages and then they would all arrive together.

Keeping Tabs

Has anyone ever tried Tabulating nothink? Not RAM but PROM nothink. In Nas-sys 3 with the alpha field on, you get all manor of wierd displays. It only occurs if XROM is linked to a memory address with no ROM (or pin 24 of it if you bend pins). The reason is related to indeterminate states on the data bus but ignore it, don’t send one of your Nascoms back like I did. (Thanks again to B&L at Kenilworth – mice guys).

NB. This is worth repeating, if you haven’t seen it or forgot: any Nas-sys command defaults to whatever is in the ARG1 to ARG9 locations which means with regular taks you don’t always have to repeat the length, width or alpha operands. Subsequent Modify or Execute commands pick up the same starting address if you omit their operands, which can be handy to know.

Flip Floppies

There is a company selling reversible floppy discs and I was about to buy one when I was distracted by special offers on normal discs. Most discs are double sided whether they are guaranteed as such or not. To make flip-floppies, all it needs is a soft-sectoring hole on ’tother side and a notch for write protect tabs. I would advise experimentation on older discs, a card slipped inside the jacket and the use of small sharp scissors (not a knife) to cut the plastic.