Unexpected win : RISC PC

[a1exh]

My first computer was an Acorn Electron in 1982 and while I never owned their successor the Archimedes in the day I always had an affinity for them.

You might have read that I managed to bag an Acorn Archimedes A5000 Alpha a few years ago but the battery damage was beyond my capabilities. I was able to remove the battery, stabilise it with white vinegar, deionised water and IPA but it's in storage awaiting my soldering skills to catch up. More recently I bagged an Archimedes A310 which is arguably the first Archimedes, mine works but it is running Arthur (RiscOS 1.x) only has 1MB RAM, no HDD controller and while I am interested in upgrading it in the future, I was still looking for something else to finish my 32-bit Acorn collection.

A week or so ago a telephonics engineer replaced the RISC PCs that were operating an internal telephone and answer machine network in a building and sold off the approx 10 RISC PCs "sold as seen" individually on eBay. I know these computers are notorious for battery damage and SMT capacitor leakage and are notoriously difficult to fix if the rot has gone too far but I had too much wine the night they all sold, each one going one after another 2 minutes intervals between, the next one going for even more than the last. Overcome with bidding fever I bid what I considered was a "low-ball" amount in the last 5s of the last one to sell, not expecting to win but I did. Oops.

I *believe* it is a MK-III (A1208-000) motherboard? I read they are an improvement over the older ones with 16-bit stereo sound but the downside is there is no schematic of this board only earlier ones which can make it more difficult to repair.

As expected the battery has leaked and needs to come off ASAP. It's a lot worse than I had hoped. It's reached the SIMM socket one of which is very green.

Again my skills at soldering mean I probably won't be able to fix this myself in the near future. I'll get it out of the case, remove the battery, neutralise the alkali and clean with deionised water. I am hoping this time to either bribe the Technician here at Toshiba who assembles much more complicated PCBs than this all the time OR bribe someone else with experience of fixing RISC PCs. The technician at my work won't have the time to help with the diagnosis but he can whip things off and put new ones back on.

It came with a 200MHz StrongARM processor (but I have bought a known good 610 for bring up).

Hopefully it can come back to life.

[paulb]

A week or so ago a telephonics engineer replaced the RISC PCs that were operating an internal telephone and answer machine network in a building and sold off the approx 10 RISC PCs "sold as seen" individually on eBay.

I wonder how that solution was designed. Around the turn of the century, I worked for a company that did solutions for call centres where the telephony was managed by conventional switches (Alcatel, Nortel, and so on) with some kind of interfacing being done with products from companies like Dialogic. Although the clients could be exotic occasionally - Sun JavaStations in perhaps a couple of deployments - it would obviously have been remarkable had any Acorn products turned up.

[a1exh]

I wonder how that solution was designed. Around the turn of the century, I worked for a company that did solutions for call centres where the telephony was managed by conventional switches (Alcatel, Nortel, and so on) with some kind of interfacing being done with products from companies like Dialogic. Although the clients could be exotic occasionally - Sun JavaStations in perhaps a couple of deployments - it would obviously have been remarkable had any Acorn products turned up.

I'm not sure. This was the equipment that apparently was used to do CallerID. Connects via serial port.

[paulb]

I'm not sure. This was the equipment that apparently was used to do CallerID. Connects via serial port.

Thanks for posting this! It seems that Crucible Technologies made various telephony products, including testing products that simulated telephone exchanges or other aspects of the telephone network. And as the link indicates, they still seem to be around today.

[philpem]

Octopus Systems (the Teletext folks) did a Caller ID system back in the day - could this be part of that?

No idea what it would have been feeding into, though. I'd have imagined a commercial system would have such functionality built-in.