Subj : Re: Commodore Pet keyboard repair
To   : James Harris
From : James Harris
Date : Mon Jan 15 2018 00:58:01

On 12/01/2018 22:56, James Harris wrote:
> On 11/01/2018 16:04, Jim_64 wrote:

....

>> But, please try the alcohol cleaning again first.  It really should work.  
You could also move some contact around to see if the issues follow the 
contacts or there is some issue with the PCB/cabling.
>
> Again, that's good advice. I have cleaned them a few times with the
> isopropyl alcohol and some more keys are working. There is no great
> staining coming off on to the cotton buds but I guess there could be
> enough which has built up over time.
>
> They are not all working yet but I'll keep at it - at least until the
> new pads arrive.

Success! I have a working Pet. Lots and lots of rubbing the black pads
with a cotton bud dipped in isopropyl alcohol did it.

This must be the first time I have used a Pet in decades and it's a
really strange nostalgic experience. For example:

I'd forgotten how one has to make space to insert characters but I
remember how cursor movement characters show up if too many spaces are
inserted - similar to the effect of typing an odd number of double
quotes on a line.

It was really weird that keyboard shortcuts like typing L shift I as a
shortcut for LIST came back to me immediately as if it was more a muscle
memory that a mental one.

I remembered Pets being ready as soon as the phosphor glowed but I'd
forgotten how slow they are in Basic; characters appear on the screen as
if they were coming over a modem! When I was of school age a friend and
I wrote some machine code and were blown away with how fast it was
compared with the Basic programming we were used to. Speaking of which,
I remember, with regret, the absence of a repeat key and writing a
machine code routine to try to provide autorepeat - unsuccessfully, IIRC.

I took a look at the character set and I'd forgotten that some Pets -
like this one - had no lower case. IIRC later Pets did but I'm not sure
what they did with the graphics characters which they presumably
displaced to make the lower case chars available.

Anyway, just a few reminiscences. This has transported me back to many,
many years ago!


--
James Harris

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