Story Index:

This motorcyclist has guts!
05/21/2023

Saving History
01/16/2023

Cool little Photosphere trick!
10/10/2018

Eclipse!!
08/29/2017

Summer Weekend in the Colorado Rockies
07/19/2016

Is there a Spring Cleaning for the mind?
05/16/2016

Kim's Day In The Sun
02/28/2015

Tracing Roots
01/15/2015

Whitney Completes Her Master's Degree
01/10/2015

Day Trip to Moorea
11/01/2012

Stopover in Tahiti
10/30/2012

Exploring New Zealand's Northland
10/27/2012

Waiheke Island
10/24/2012

2012 Triathlon World Championships
10/23/2012

Travails with Tom-Tom
10/21/2012

Off to New Zealand!
10/18/2012

Cycling on the Oregon Coast
07/24/2012

Partial Solar Eclipse, May 20
05/23/2012

"Tour of California" Bike Race comes through town!
05/15/2012

Wildflower Triathlon a family affair
05/07/2012

Truth in Packaging?
04/01/2012

Nik Graduates from Cal Poly
12/10/2011

Cal Poly's Open House Weekend
04/17/2011

The 2010 US Census is here
03/16/2010

Cultural Musings...
09/18/2009

2009 Triathlon World Championships
09/12/2009

Sightseeing around the Gold Coast
09/09/2009

South Bank: Brisbane's Fine Arts center
09/05/2009

Brisbane, Australia
09/04/2009

Catching up . . .
08/31/2009

Summa Cum Laude, Baby!
06/15/2008

Kim completes her first Half-Ironman
06/10/2008

Kim Visits Home for Wildflower Triathlon
05/16/2008

The Last Supper
02/16/2008

Farewell, Dad
01/15/2008

Whitney Plays Final Soccer Game
12/10/2007

Watch the Women's World Cup!
09/12/2007

Kim Blazes Chicago Triathlon
08/27/2007

Nik Bicycles Pacific Coast
08/15/2007

Whitney Begins Final Season
08/13/2007

More Triathlons for Kim
06/15/2006

Corvallis gets snow!
03/09/2006

Pac-10 Conference Player of the Week
01/15/2006

Whitney's new cat
09/26/2005

Kim in Chicago Triathlon
08/31/2005

Rare family get-together
08/23/2005

Empty Nest
08/11/2005

Whitney Signs National Letter-of-Intent
02/08/2004

ODP cancels European tour
04/11/2003

Whitney renamed to Regional Team
08/07/2002

Kim graduates from Willamette
06/17/2002

Whitney Stars in High School Soccer
03/07/2002

Nik graduates from UTI
01/07/2002

2001 - A Year for Remembrance
12/30/2001

Whitney selected to the 2001 State ODP pool for U-15 Girls
03/22/2001

Kim returns from Europe
02/02/2001

2000: A Year for Traveling
12/15/2000

Kim Travels Europe
11/24/2000

Whitney selected to the US Far Western Regional ODP Pool!
07/14/2000

Congratulations to Nik, Ygnacio Valley High Graduating Class of 2000!
06/30/2000
Is there a Spring Cleaning for the mind?

Since I'm now retired, I've resigned myself to accepting the reality that I'll never actually find a use for any of the 486 motherboards that have multiplied on my storage shelves over the years . . . or the mountains of zip drives, AT power supplies, 10base2 coaxial network cards, 24K modems, memory modules in a dozen bygone form factors, and so on.

It's taken me the better part of a month, but I've finally cleaned out three decades of stuff and hauled about 150 cubic feet of now-useless technology to the local e-waste depository.

One thing I couldn't part with, though, was my first PC, a genuine IBM 5150, plus a box of spare parts for it. (Okay, I kept my Commodore 64, too, but that wasn't actually a PC-class computer.) That 5150 is a collector's item -- and was the source for a lot of memories.

I hauled the IBM out of storage, hooked everything up, turned on the power, and . . .
    PARITY CHECK 1
    2040 201
Drat.

I grabbed a screwdriver, some extra chips from the spare parts box, and proceeded to troubleshoot. In 10 minutes I had it up and running again -- and all without referring to any notes or reference books.

For those of you too young to remember when memory consisted of discrete chips on the motherboard:
  • IBM POST code 201 means POST encountered a memory error;
  • 2xxx means the bad memory chip is in Bank 2;
  • xx40, when converted to binary, is 01000000,
    so the bad chip is the 2nd of the 8 chips in that bank.

I replaced the 4164 chip in the 2nd socket of Bank 2 with one from my spare parts box.

Now, I don't know whether to be impressed that I remembered how to do that, or to be depressed at how much useless and obsolete knowledge must be clogging up my brain.

Maybe there should be a way to do a Spring Cleaning of the mind.

IBM-PC (Model 5150-B)
My original 1982 IBM-PC (Model 5150-B) still works

Posted by Dan 05/16/2016
FreeStyle Journal 19.03.21
©2003-2011 by Dan Goodell

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