psteichen
Member
Thanks everyone for your helpful comments on my previous post. I have another question regarding this machine. To summarize, I have an IMSAI 8080 that has been in storage for 20+ years, and probably more like 30+ years since it's been hooked up to a terminal for any meaningful work. Not knowing about the tantalum capacitor issue, I pulled it out of storage two weeks ago and fired it up. Everything seems to work fine. The two drives both spin up, all the LEDs (save one on the PIO card) light up. The processor seems to be running as I get some rapid flickering of the address bus LEDs when I select RUN.
So my next step is to toggle in some simple programs to test the processor further. Possibly even a program that will output something to the terminal. I don't have the original terminal used with the machine, but I have several old serial terminals that I will try. I'm also waiting on delivery of some 10 sector, hard sector 5.25" diskettes from a generous anonymous source who was willing to part with some of his personal supply.
But first I wonder if I need to take a step back. Like I said I already ran it for over an hour testing it a few weeks ago. Now I read on various forums that I'm risking a catastrophe by powering this thing up. Is this true? Or have I already verified that the caps are good by running for an hour without issue? Also, are there any issues with the large caps in the power supply? I can't imagine a very destructive fire being caused by a little cap the size of my pinky nail....but those bad boys on the power supply could certainly do some lasting damage.
Any thoughts are appreciated.
So my next step is to toggle in some simple programs to test the processor further. Possibly even a program that will output something to the terminal. I don't have the original terminal used with the machine, but I have several old serial terminals that I will try. I'm also waiting on delivery of some 10 sector, hard sector 5.25" diskettes from a generous anonymous source who was willing to part with some of his personal supply.
But first I wonder if I need to take a step back. Like I said I already ran it for over an hour testing it a few weeks ago. Now I read on various forums that I'm risking a catastrophe by powering this thing up. Is this true? Or have I already verified that the caps are good by running for an hour without issue? Also, are there any issues with the large caps in the power supply? I can't imagine a very destructive fire being caused by a little cap the size of my pinky nail....but those bad boys on the power supply could certainly do some lasting damage.
Any thoughts are appreciated.