IBM 5150 keyboard port bad?

[jakk]

Hi. I want to use an IBM 5150 to write floppies for my osborne 1(the only 5.25 drives I have besides the 5150 ones are high density drives and I think this is screwing teledisk drives). When the computer was last used about 5 years ago, it worked fine. Now,when I boot it up, I get a 301 keyboard error and then I am unable to go any further because the command interpreter is bad. I think I can fix that problem by copying command.com from the dos floppy to the hard drive,but my problem is that they keyboard port doesn't seem to work. WHen I plug a keyboard in, the only way I can get input is to jiggle the din connector(which produces garbage characters). I have tried several different keyboards, so I know it is not a keyboard issue. When I can get the pc to accept input, it is wrong i.e the '9' key shows up as '3'. I was wondering if anyone knows a fix for this. Is there a simple keyboard decoder ic I can replace, or is it more complicated. Thanks.

 

[Jorg]

Are you sure you (or someone else) didn't put it in the cassette port?

 

[Terry Yager]

Probably as you suspected, a bad connection. Pull the board and re-solder the pins of the connector, that may fix it.

--T

 

[jakk]

Hi. I'm sure it's not in the cassette port. Is my only other option to resolder it then? Thanks.

 

[Druid6900]

Yup, sounds like it. Cracked solder joints, especially on connectors, are fairly common on equipment, as it gets older.

Stiff joints on people. See above LOL

 

[Terry Yager]

Yeah, the 'wiggling the wires makes it work' bit is usually a dead give-away. Anything that sticks out is especially vulnerable, all it takes is a little bump.

--T