antiquekid3
Veteran Member
I figured I'd start a new thread for my journey into bringing back a PDP-8/I from the dead. I acquired this system several years ago from a relatively local collector, but life and other projects have gotten in the way of working on it. In fact, I still have other projects that are battling for my time, so I expect this will come and go in intermittent bursts.
When I got the system, the previous owner had bypassed the original 704A power supply and replaced it with a 716 and H721. I would like to get the 704A working to get the system back to originality. A while back, I removed the power distribution board and capacitor for the ferroresonant transformer, in hopes to get those fixed up and tested, respectively. However, based on a little testing of the capacitor (and a replacement I purchased), I'm beginning to think there may be another issue, and the cap may have been a red herring. In any event, I removed the rest of the 704A supply today from the rack to test on the bench. I already noticed some of the spade connectors were not looking too hot. In fact, it looks like some of them had gotten quite hot before and degraded the insulation.
Anyways, here's an album with some photos of the system. It'll be nice to have a functional machine with a TC01/TU55/TU56 and RK05 to dump some of the tapes and disk packs that I've got.
Kyle
When I got the system, the previous owner had bypassed the original 704A power supply and replaced it with a 716 and H721. I would like to get the 704A working to get the system back to originality. A while back, I removed the power distribution board and capacitor for the ferroresonant transformer, in hopes to get those fixed up and tested, respectively. However, based on a little testing of the capacitor (and a replacement I purchased), I'm beginning to think there may be another issue, and the cap may have been a red herring. In any event, I removed the rest of the 704A supply today from the rack to test on the bench. I already noticed some of the spade connectors were not looking too hot. In fact, it looks like some of them had gotten quite hot before and degraded the insulation.
Anyways, here's an album with some photos of the system. It'll be nice to have a functional machine with a TC01/TU55/TU56 and RK05 to dump some of the tapes and disk packs that I've got.
Kyle