Thanks everyone for the kind words. It is tragic that so many things do end up getting thrown away when a loved one passes away, and it's wonderful that so many people like Ken who have interesting collectibles look for the right homes for those items. Ken mentioned in his posts about his vintage woodworking tools, and he gave me a tour of his wood shop while I was there. Very impressive the sorts of things he had, and while I feel I have an above average understanding of woodworking and the tools associated, there were some tools he showed me which were quite valuable - and I would have never known, just looking at them.
Our computer collectibles are much the same for those who are not well versed in vintage computers. All too often, I've gone to an estate sale and found a really interesting thing sitting next to a couple 10 year old computers, and asked, "There's supposed to be a whole computer that goes with this object, what happened to it", and all too often, the answer is "oh, we threw that away 3 weeks ago." You can imagine the shock on their faces when I say something (with honesty) like, "I would have paid up to $1000 for that."
As to the comment about the labels or fuses - not a terrible idea. however- the cable is well specified in the documentation, and the same documentation clearly states that using a cable other than specified could cause severe catastrophic damage to the system. I suspect that at that voltage, Mt. Vesuvius 8212 needed less than 1/2 an amp of current to pop its top. What arced through it and to other chips was probably in the milliamps. Fusing all the pitfalls would be very tedious, not to mention expensive (at least in the original design work)... let alone the IMSAI engineers lacking precognition of a standard pinout that hadn't even been invented at the time.
The system still has a couple quirks that I need to work out, but the major issues are resolved. I will revisit it in the future when I am better equipped to find those faults.
