B&S Engine starts but won't run

[ ... long description of hack snipped ... ]

Too early for YouTube. Arpanet was just getting started. A couple of years later, the computer center got a "butterfly" to enable interfacing to Arpanet -- which later became the internet. I had fun downloading and compiling useful programs from the original Simtel-20 site with that.

Enjoy, DoN.

[ ... ]

[ ... long description snipped ... ]

Now -- there would never be a fragile neurotic working with computers, would there? :-) (Other than the user who took a fortune cookie program output personally -- just because it happened to be for a Libra, and she was a Libra. :-)

Ah -- the PDP-8 -- so much hardware for so little capability. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

The Ph.D. project manager had been an instrument designer at Keithley, where he designed a meter that could detect 60 electrons per second.

These were custom circuits on ~2" x 4" cards that fit in the test head over the wafer. The current meter resolved to 100 femtoAmps over a common mode input voltage range of 0 to 100V. The only suitable coax and reed relay insulation with low enough dielectric absorption was special teflon foam tape from W.L.Gore.

That company built Analog Devices' production-line parametric testers, the machines that confirm each part meets specs, and had an arrangement to get enough of their hand-selected highest-performing op amps to build more sensitive and accurate analog circuits than anyone else. Most of them went back in testers for AD.

When Schlumberger bought the company the competitors sued with the FTC, claiming it was "unfair" that the biggest company in the industry now owned the technology leader. The distractions of the lawsuit destroyed them.

--jsw

O.K. My first thought was at least partially right. :-) (A small part of the industry -- down to counting electrons as they wander past. :-)

I remember that we had one of Keithley's picoammeters in a Faraday cage with the controls remoted to the outside with Teflon shafts. I forget what it was measuring, but they were sure careful about stray fields.

Impressive.

Eventually, that should saturate, and more make it out to the rest of the industry. :-)

Ouch!

Humanity is fragile, innit?

Complete with sweep/scan sounds? Cool!

The hand-selected ones had different part numbers that weren't in the catalog. There's always a bell curve distribution. We got the upper sigma for input bias and offset current, Radio Shack was rumored to get the lowest one. Other parameters didn't matter to us so maybe some audio synthesizer company got the ones with the highest frequency response. Our machines didn't check for that, only the guaranteed-by-test data sheet parameters, though I've measured Bode plots on the bench. As long as the circuit settled to the required accuracy within one millisecond we were happy.

That was for analog measurements. The digital memory chip testers sent out address and data at 50MHz, state-of-the-art in the early 80's when the test vectors had to be generated in the main rack and sent out long cables to the test head.

I bought a batch of Chinese Schottky solar panel isolation diodes that all are slightly below the reverse voltage leakage spec at room temperature, and worse above it, as though they were the rejects from a production tester.

In class they treat op-amps as ideal devices. I was exposed to the nitty-gritty of all the ways they aren't, and how to measure the discrepancies.

--jsw

Yabbut, I meant that had he saved it to video, it might still be around and have been put on YouTube to go viral.

OMFG Wieber is giving survival advice again!

Wieber brags that for 30 years he's been stocked up for 90 days minimum!

Wieber claims he has good food sealed in argon since '99!

Wieber has been dumpster diving!

Wait, what? Which one of those statements is not like the others?

"I called the local churches. I wasnt a mother in need. The food ran out. The lights and gas were turned off... So I went dumpster diving. And I sat in a house with no gas or electricity and ate my dumpster food, and shared it with my dogs and cats. We all were happy to have food. For two weeks."

Hey Wieber, why didn't you just eat some of your stash? Why did you need dumpster food for 2 weeks if you had 90 days food in stock? Weren't there any boars nearby that you could spear? Why didn't you think of writing up a description of a six course meal, and eating the printout?

Oh shit, I have to defend Gunner. Life sucks.

Seventeen years is well within the typical 25 year storage life for PROPERLY PACKAGED grains and legumes. Sealed cans filled with any noble gas IS properly packaged. The problem is O2 in the air. You can displace it with nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or any inert gas or you can capture it with an O2 absorber placed in the can just before sealing.

At that age the nutritional value of flour is questionable but it's eatable and will fill your belly.

Because packaging replacements is not trivial or without cost.

Fool's errand.

...only because you chose to make silly excuses for someone who's the polar opposite of prepared. Or do you think that begging churches for food is somehow a trait of a prepared "survivalist?"

Sure, but he didn't have any of that or he'd have eaten it before calling churches for a handout. And then resorting to dumpster diving when the churches (rightfully) declared him unworthy of free food.

Hahahaha! You believe he had food for an emergency, but don't believe an event requiring begging qualifies as an emergency? Makes as much sense as his million miles of motorcycle riding I guess.

Here's a better excuse you could have made up for him: that the emergency was 90 days PLUS 2 weeks. (legit since his entire life has been pretty much one big emergency) Then all you'd need to do is square that story with this one:

"In the past 40 yrs..I think Ive been unemployed for a total of hummm...6 days."

See below. Storage foods are not cheap. They are not your first go-to if there are any other alternatives.

I commented on what you wrote about what Gunner wrote. I have no idea if either of you are being honest.

No, two weeks of hard times is not an emergency in terms of dipping into the long term stash.

I have no intention to make up excuses for Gunner. I was commenting that your assumptions show you understand nothing about prepping/survivalism and how storage items are treated.

As he wrote it, he knew in advance the duration was limited to 2 weeks. I sure as hell would not dip into my reserves because of that rather short term situation. One I'd almost reduce to calling an inconvenience.

You are making assumptions and in any case your love of attacking Gunner have nothing to do with what I wrote. Don't put assumptions about me as fact and then try to use them to attack me. All I did was point out you are full of shit on a single point. Nothing personal.

Go ahead and trash Gunner. It's very amusing to see his contradictions pointed out. He's a pretty major fraud; but don't bitch when I point out you don't understand what you are babbling about in one particular post.

Better to beg or dumpster dive, eh? LOL

Opening stored food is an inconvenience. Begging churches for food when you already have food is exactly the kind of dishonesty that made Wieber infamous. Once you read that, it was just plain stupid to pretend that hoarding food makes sense. Would you do the same for money? "Hello padre, could your congregation members give me 100 bucks so I don't have to spend my savings?"

Nope. You and Weiber both like to argue yourselves into corners. Now you'll do more of what he always does: blurt out more non sequiturs without ever rationally explaining why begging for food is preferable to eating your own food. It only makes sense if you have the morals of a crackhead.

BTW, job one of being prepared is to get a job. It's hilarious to read Weiber bragging about being prepared for emergency times when he isn't even prepared for normal times.

Of course.

I believe it. :-)

Reasonable -- for what you were doing.

Ouch! Perhaps a buffer near the test head which could be pre-loaded from the computer, and then triggered to spit it out at the RAM on command. If the tests were repetitive enough, that would minimize the total bandwidth sent to the test head -- and local checking for errors and only spit the errors back to the computer to minimize the bandwidth the other way.

I remember long ago when I worked for Transitron -- one of the products was what they called a "ref-amp" -- a potted transistor with a Zener and forward diode (called a Stabistor, and selected for temperature behavior) in series with the emitter. The transistor B-E forward drop, that of the diode and of the Zener were matched by a minicomputer measuring large batches of each device at three temperatures -- -50C, +50C, and +150C, and punching out a deck of cards

-- one per device. These went to the mainframe to be sorted to get the minimum temperature sensitivity. The devices were in multi-device carrier submerged in a bath of silicone oil -- a different one for each temperature.

I remember when we got a few of them back from a customer, and I had to test them through the whole temperature range. At the -50, the other silicone oils set up to a gel, and at the +150, the low-temp one boiled, so we mixed about 50-50 of high and low temp oils. Put the DUT in the bath, toss in a handful of dry ice chunks, and wait until it got below the -50, and then turn on the hotplate under it and take a reading at ever 10 degrees C on the way up. Then turn off the hotplate, wait for it to cool down, swap in the next device, and repeat. (Yes, the devices did go out of spec between the three points at which they were tested before assembly. :-)

Anyway -- someone else wandered into the room, and tossed in some dry ice while the bath was still quite hot. It boiled like mad (into the pockets of CO2 in the liquid), with vapor spilling over the edge of the really large beaker, spreading out over the bench, and curling in to the still hot hotplate coils.

FWOOF!

It was interesting seeing the silicone oil vapor burn. We had a CO2 extinguisher handy, and put it out, and were able to continue with the tests. One thing which I had not expected was that there was fine white sand over everything, from the burning Silicone oil. :-)

Sound adequate for the purpose, at least. :-)

Yep. In class, the input impedance is infinite, the output impedance is zero, the open-loop gain is infinite, balance between inputs is perfect, and no capacitance anywhere to delay signal changes. For most applications, you can get away with treating them as being like that -- but of course they are not.

My first exposure to op-amps was the plug-in modules with two tubes which were used as part of the Beta testers on the transistor production line. I had no idea how they worked at the time, so the schematics rather puzzled me. :-) Trying to remember who made them, and I *think* that it was Philbrick -- who also made ones with discrete transistors in little metal bricks.

I first learned how to use them from the Burr-Brown application booklet.

Enjoy, DoN.

That was the era of the 2102 1K x 1 and 2141 4K x 1 static RAM, and welding-sized power supplies for big (64K) banks of them. They had samples of 6116 2K x 8 and 6264 8K x 8 CMOS static memory but IIRC they weren't fast enough, so I was given them for my wirewrap 8080 computer. At first it had 256 bytes of memory.

DRAM was still being developed. A few years later I designed an ASIC controller for it.

When they closed they had been trying to design ceramic hybrid pin drivers to fit in the test head with some pattern memory on them.

The test head contains the electronics that have to be close to the probe card that contacts the IC bonding pads to test it while it's still on the wafer. The head can't be too large or heavy to position within a thousandth of an inch. It's the smaller box on the positioner on the purple machine.

I've never been in a clean room to see these machines in use. The wafer probing I did at Unitrode was all individual setups with standard lab test equipment, with no dust control since we were testing only prototypes. Wafers are brittle, but otherwise exposed ICs are surprisingly resistant to damage.

--jsw

If you have a Dell with the Diagnostic partition or the Pre-Boot System Assessment in the BIOS you can see how complex, huge and slow memory tests can be.

--jsw

Man, you morph and spin as good as Gunner.

What to do is each person's call. Eating long term reserves for a short time problem is idiocy.

Man, you morph and spin as good as Gunner.

Being short of food for a week or two is what I described as an inconvenience that does not justify breaking into long term stores. What you think you read is just the little voices in your head.

I'm making no pretences. You are making plenty of them. I said it would be foolish to use long term reserves for a short term problem. That's it. The rest is your voices again.

What I would do for money is not the issue. It's just more of your morphing. I have been employed all my life, rather profitably because I have some rather sellable skills. I have been rather frugal so my likelihood of being in Gunner's position is small.

But, aside from your morph, it's not about me. It's not about Gunner. It's about sane management of resources and that you seem to think blowing limited reserves for the hell of it is a sound fiscal plan.

Yet here you are too. Trying like hell to morph the thread to something other than your original demonstration of ignorance on a specific point.

There is no way I can compete with you on that score. You are as much a master of morph as Gunner is.

I never said it was. That is your voices again.

Ah, the personal attack. I was waiting for that. Thank you for conceding you have no valid point to make.

I won't argue that. It however IS one of those dreaded "non sequiturs". The issue was management of long term resources. The rest is your morph to keep an augment going. There is no argument; just your failure to understand the role of long term storage food.

It's really sad that you waste so much of you life going after Gunner instead of living. But that's your call. I made no statement in that direction. It's just another of your dreaded "non sequiturs".

Which retort? Oh, you mean the one you snipped?

I made zero comment about Gunner. I said it would be silly for anyone to dip into long term reserves for a short term problem - especially when there are a great many other alternatives to explore.

THAT is all I wrote. Are you hearing the same voices Tuesday hears when he reads and misunderstands what I wrote - a very simple point about storage food and NOT at all about Gunner.

If you disagree with me on managing storage food please present your thoughts. If you want to bitch about Gunner take it to someone that gives a damn.

has the history of their op-amp, the GAP/R Model K2-W. I had one in my collection, but I don't know what happened to it.