[Coco] Introducing myself - Carlos Bragatto

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 06 April 2007, Bob Devries wrote:
>Amiga OS version 3.9 and 4.x are available from the german company Haage
> & Partner. I imagine 3.5 is also available from them. Version 3.1 is
> available on the 'net if you know where to look.
>
OS3.1 was the single biggest upgrade they ever did while the amiga was 
still a viable way to work.  But without the eprom images it doesn't 
work, and they made sure that the only eprom with the right footprint 
disappeared from the market very shortly after 3.1 came out.  It was 
originally supplied in 27C4000's, and no other eprom had a compatible 
footprint.  And Atmel, whose chip it was, wasn't the least interested in 
another production run, I actually tried...  Not only that, but the ones 
they supplied were often underburnt (or miss-handled, they were cmos) and 
faded into the sunset in well under a year.  I had a burner, and had 4 of 
those chips I'd bought as service parts when 3.1 came out.  I used 2 to 
pie-rat it early on, and bought myself the real thing a week later as 
backup just to get the books which I still have.  I also have a copy of 
the guru book, a fairly scarce item.  I'd made disk images of them with 
the burner, and used everyone of those 4 eventually because they faded, 
and, while they could be erased and reburnt, the erase failed as often as 
the reburn, so at the end of the day, every copy running was a legal 
copy.  Maybe not in their chips, but a bought and paid for copy 
none-the-less.

Several of the sets they sold were blank!  We bought one set that way and 
a customer of mine bought a kit that way.  Fortunately by then I had 
collected just about all variations of them as disk files and was able to 
burn his blank chips, but I said I need to see the manuals for something 
to make sure I was doing it right, he had them, nice and shiny new.

Or in the case of the chips for the A3000-T, which had a different adaptor 
due to the older board, were only programmed in the bottom half of the 
chip.  But ALL amigas ran from the top half if the chip was too big.  
Those I looked at with the burner, copied the bottom half out to a disk 
file & then reburnt it into the top half without even erasing it.  Worked 
great & that kid thought I could walk on water.  Then he let the battery 
go leaky and it ate the motherboard, another very common cause of 
failures.  For real safety, that leaky nicad should have been replaced at 
yearly intervals, but it was soldered into a 6 layer board, a real cast 
iron bitch to change.

Commie's tech and QC depts., the legendary Dave Haney not withstanding, 
were a bunch of minimum wagers that should have been flipping hamburgers 
someplace.

And to top that story off, someone cleaning house at the tv station tossed 
that old tower box with the burner kit in it, out to the trash when Dave 
wasn't looking in about 2003, so that's all gone, including a burner we'd 
paid almost $1000 for at the time.  I think the theory was that "that 
packrat Heskett's gone, now lets clean this pigpen up."  Funny thing was, 
that pigpen kept them on the air for 20+ years.  Like Rodney, no respect 
when my back is turned, but lots to my face.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
The only perfect science is hind-sight.