jlong@blackbird.afit.af.mil (Jeffrey K. Long) (08/28/89)
Well, thanks for the offers, but I now have a modem and am back online. Several people offered modems, but as luck would have it, I got hit by lightning the week before our annual computer swap meet in town! I picked up a ZOOM-2400 for $99 :-) If anyone is interested, I'll provide the details of my lightning strike experience. Got home, wife said guess what, got hit my lightning, but don't worry, I turned on you computer and it all still works ok! Well, all of the lights did come on, but that included the carrier detect light on the modem (all of the time)! I brought my new modem home, hooked it up, and nada!! Went and bought a new RS-232 cable, and then the computer could get the modem to dial out, but nothing ever showed back up on the screen, I mean not even the "ATDT XXX-XXXX" stuff! I pulled the case apart, made a cheap logic analyzer with a diode and a 3.3K resistor, and started chasing bits around. Found out the ST uses a 68901 chip to handle the serial port, with MC1488 and MC1489 chips to handle the translation from RS-232 to TTL logic levels. Well, my MC1489 (the RS-232 receiver) had been blown by the lightning also. I was pretty confident in my troubleshooting, but it still takes a great deal of faith in your conclusions to take the pliers to an otherwise perfectly healthy looking motherboard :-) I went ahead and got the old chip out, put a socket in for insurance and waited till Radio Shack (I know, but they are close by and sell the chips for $1.29) opened the next day. Came home and plunked the new chip in and away she went, in all her 2400 Baud glory!! Moral of the story, if you are the least bit handy with a soldering iron, and your computer takes a similar lighting strike over the phone line, you may want to replace the 1488 and 1489 chips (they are located right underneath your internal disk drive) before you rush your baby off to the Atari hospital in your town! ========================================================================= | Jeff Long jlong@blackbird.afit.af.mil (ARPA net) | | | | humble (and getting humbler by the day) graduate student; | | The Air Force Institute of Technology (what a great way of life??) | =========================================================================