Why even bother?

I love well made electronic gadgets and the HP-12C is a very good example of just one. It was conceived and planned at the start of the 1980's and it is still current today, granted by todays standards the processor is a little slow, but the chap Dennis Harms, who led the team designing this calculator, who was told by Mister Hewlett himself to "not fuck it up" mentioned that, in todays age, we dispose of obsolete phones on almost a yearly basis and here is a calculator that has now endured almost forty years of useful life.

You can go to a dollar or a thrift store and buy a scientific calculator for next to nothing nowadays and it is all part of our throwaway society that we have somehow arrived at, stuff is not designed to last nowadays. Therefore, why even bother making that stuff out of quality materials that will endure.

So, the question to myself is "why even bother?" with a vintage calculator that, to most people, has an odd operating system in the form of reverse polish notation, or RPN. It comes down to something very simple and that is I want to continue learning how to do things, and that was true back in the middle of 1994 when I bought my first RPN calculator, the magnificent HP-42S and subsequently I went "all in" by buying the HP-48GX graphic calculator.

The HP-48GX was all I needed for the remaining thirteen years of my engineering career, and it is true that one of the most important aspects of those years was my ability to create programs on that calculator that would make my working life easier.

In retirement, there is little major use for a calculator, so I reason that if I do not bother, then the particular blob of grey matter that I used when I was working will simply erode away, to the point where it won't work, or my own personal version of non-volatile memory will no longer retain variables. It is that reason now, not to make things easier as I get older, but in a way, to present learning challenges to myself to attempt to exercise my brain and stall the inevitable downward spiral.

That's why I bother. 

Ebay Arrivals August 2020

This is just one of the arrivals this month, I'm always searching for things that I can buy with my "eBay dollars" that I gain from selling various things. It gives me guilt free pocket money that burns a hole in my pockets, and I decided I would travel down the RPN rabbit hole once again and purchase one of the most significant calculators in the HP lineup.

That is Hewlett Packard from "back then" and not the company it is nowadays.

The above unit is the HP-12C Financial calculator, it is a Voyager model, introduced in 1981 with an estimated life span, by the project team, of two years. In defiance of that projection the model has become HP's longest and best-selling product, in continual production since its introduction. This almost mint example cost me C$35.90 including shipping, from a Canadian seller.

The serial number on the HP-12C is 3425S03298 which means that it was built in (1960)+34 = 1994 and in week 25 in the Singapore facility. The 03298 is the unit number so there are a few fun nerdy facts for you.

A little personal history is in order regarding my interest in the RPN calculators and it was from my 1985 stint at McDonnell Douglas in California. I was so impressed at the time by the HP-11C and the HP-15C Scientific calculators that I was standing in a store in Long Beach about to buy the cheaper HP-11C (it was on sale at around US$75) and I rationalized I could "amortize" the cost into my expenses at the time.  

History shows that I walked out of that camera store without a calculator.

Nine years would pass before I would buy my first RPN calculator, and I felt at the time that I had wasted a lot of time using tradional "algebraic" units, but finally my "Reverse Polish Notation" days had arrived (complete with steep learning curve). 

The impact on my generation of handheld calculators is huge, I started as an apprentice in 1974 and was advised to buy British Thornton draughtsman instruments and a slide rule, within eighteen months we were all encouraged (by the Ford Motor Company) to leave the slide rule behind and buy a CBM (Commodore Business Machines) SR7919 Scientific Calculator, and the company allowed us to have the cost deducted from our pay slips over twenty weeks.

I still have one of those too.

I'll talk more about calculators, and eBay acquisitions, in future posts.

Installing an SSD and Memory in a second NUC

The 240GB Intel 730 series SSD arrived, so today I installed it, and an extra 2GB of memory into another of the NUC6CAYS computers. The 2GB of ADATA memory was taken from the original NUC when I installed the matched pair of SK Hynix memory, so for this new NUC it will have a matched pair of ADATA memory for a total of 4GB.

I'm leaving the plastic on the NUC, my OCD about this sort of thing has long faded and I have no issue in treating these devices like Italian furniture.

Four screws and the hard drive tray is exposed.

Lift that tray up and pivot to the right without disconnecting the cables exposes the pre-installed 2GB of memory.

I simply place the second piece in the upper slot and click into place. On the left of the photo you can see the pre-installed Wi-Fi card and the attached antennas.

The SSD slides into place in the hard drive tray and clicks into place, the base is screwed back in.

Total time elapsed about five minutes, I expect it can all be done in a minute.

The NUC6CAYS is pre-installed with Windows 10 Home on a 32GB eMMC drive and the UEFI BIOS has a record of activation. The next steps are to wipe that eMMC drive (to free up 32GB of storage) and to re-install the operating system on the 240GB Intel SSD which will become the boot drive. I will then update the BIOS from within Windows 10 using the Intel utility. 

After all that I will leave Windows 10 alone for an hour or so to bring itself up to date. 

eBay Arrivals, February

Amazingly, February is drawing to a close and as I said last post, I am still waiting on a few items before I can continue with a couple of projects, so to fill in the time I thought I would highlight some of the eBay loot from the last week or so.

The first items are a couple of Intel NUC computers from the original source, I had bought one from him at the great price of C$148 shipped and he told me he had one more left, so even though I had no idea what I needed it for, I could not resist.

I have a use for one of them, it will become an emulation machine for my old game library, I will detail the progress in the blog when a couple of other components arrive.

If I rewind to a year ago, my passion was with Raspberry Pi computers, mostly model 3B although I had a couple of previous generation models during those education months, suffice to say I learned a lot from them, and then in the middle of 2019 my interests moved back towards full sized computers.

All the Raspberry Pi units have now been sold back into the eBay ecosystem, developing cash for the new crop of projects. This is the circle of life for my continuing learning process with technology.

The next few pieces of tech are more modest, but they will be used for various important projects in the coming months :

A used memory module for one of the NUC machines, they come with 2GB preinstalled and this is a matching unit for the second slot, it arrived by Canadapost lettermail, total price six bucks.

I'll put that in perspective, travelling back through time to the early 1990's when I bought my first 386 computer, RAM was something like C$90 a megabyte, so applying that rate the above quantity of memory back then would have been (grabs calculator) C$180000

Next arrivals were a couple of 2.5" hard drives, one 500GB conventional unit with moving platter and a 120GB solid state drive.

This used 500GB unit is destined for a desktop project as I want to make the NUC machines as quiet as possible. This was C$18.90 delivered, so if I rewind once again to my original 386 when an extra 100MB hard drive cost me two hundred bucks, this amount of storage back then would have cost me (grabs calculator again) a cool one million dollars....

I think I still have the receipt for that original computer, so at some point I will post it to the blog.

The last arrival came all the way from Denmark of all places.

Samsung 128GB Solid State Drive, no moving parts and (apparently) 6.0 Gbps speed. This unit will be used for some project, perhaps a boot drive for a desktop. The price, including shipping across the planet, was C$23.94 which was rather impressive.

So, that's it for current eBay arrivals, I am waiting for a few more things so that I can kickstart the new NUC builds, and I will keep the blog updated as they arrive.

Waiting for eBay

I started on eBay back in 1998 when it was a very different experience than it is today, the primary difference is that nowadays there is enormous competition and so, over the two decades, eBay has grown and changed to compete and in many ways, that has made the experience worse for small sellers like myself.

I still find eBay is a great place to buy, but not as great to sell.

The thing about having a hobby is to enjoy it, and my ongoing interest over the decades has been the tech side, or electronics in general, and I made a decision a while ago that I would attempt to make my hobby revenue neutral.

I would achieve this by selling items that I found in thrift stores, yard sales or at the Computer or Hamfest events, to generate cash to buy things that I wanted, often at good prices on eBay, even when shipping costs were taken into account. This has been a very good system and I hope to continue as long as it is viable, but as I say, eBay is not as great a place to sell as it used to be.

The fees have risen over the years, plus now fees apply to the shipping costs as well, a smart move for the eBay shareholders, but effectively squeezing profit margins for all the little guys.

But hey, that is life, so live with it.

I'm not attempting a rant about eBay, just saying how things have changed and it is a challenge to keep a tech hobby like mine at a no cost point, but I am mostly achieving that. The title of this blog entry is my current condition, waiting for Canada Post to deliver several items I have purchased on eBay so that I can progress current projects that are sitting on the bench.

The Dell D326T Power Supply is not like the other

I discussed lightly during the T1700 project that Dell build certain proprietary features into their computers, this is never an issue as they produce their identical machines in such vast numbers that spares will always be available.

The caveat is that using a Dell component in another build can often provide various hurdles to overcome.

Take the D326T power supply as an example, also known as the less sexy L255EM-00

The D326T is a solid beast, ATX sized power supply with one (quite short) 24 pin ATX motherboard connector, one 4 pin ATX CPU, one 4 pin FDD and four 15 pin SATA connectors. It supplies 255 Watts total and is rated as 80 Plus Silver.

But not one molex connector.

I did say it was ATX sized, but that is a little bit off, mainly as it is taller than a standard ATX power supply by an annoying amount. It will not fit (without modification) into a bog standard ATX case, and I mean a sort of standard case from five or ten years ago.

When compared to a standard older ATX power supply, the Dell unit on the left measures about the same width and length, but the height is noticeably deeper.

Actually one half inch deeper.

If you can live with the lower number of connectors, and the proprietary shorter length, then all is good. The power output is more than adequate for general computer use, and the 80 plus rating means it can consistantly perform.

The only problem is that it won't fit in most cases.

Memories....