Absolutely. I have lots of fun restoring old machines; it's one of my favourite hobbies. Not only do I get a nostalgia kick from remembering systems from my younger years, but I also learn a great deal about how they worked internally and about electronics. Once they're fixed, I lose interest and move to the next project.
Portugal has no electricity as we speak. Funny enough telcos and 4G/5G are fine for now, I'm guessing batteries and diesel backups kicked in and are doing their job.
Update: still no electricity, 4G/5G is barely working, city is more chaotic than usual but not that dramatic as some media say - there are huge queues to the buses and smaller shops that are still working, more people are outside.
Old-school PSTN folks looked at XKCD 705 and chuckled. Late to the party, pal.
The telephone network was designed from the ground up to be completely independent of _everything_ except fuel deliveries. If grid power is up, that's convenient, but it's totally not required.
In many places, that's because telegraph and telephone lines got there before the power grid did. Lines running along railroads connected communities that had no centralized power generation. Delco-light plants at individual farms might be the only electric power for miles, aside from the communications lines themselves. Even if the only phone was at the rail depot, it still had to power itself somehow. As those communities sprouted their own telephone offices and subscriber lines branching throughout town, the office had its own batteries for primary power, and eventually generators to recharge them. (Telegraph networks largely ran from just batteries, recharged chemically rather than with generators, for years.)
Fast-forward a century and there was just never a need to depend on anything else. As long as the diesel bowser can get down the driveway, the office can run indefinitely.
Among old AT&T/Bell/WECo hands, the devotion to reliable service goes far beyond fanatical. Many offices built during the cold-war have showers in the basement and a room of shelf-stable food, though these are no longer maintained. The expectation was that whoever was in the office when the bombs dropped, would keep things running as long as they could. And when they couldn't anymore, well, there was probably nobody left to call anyway.
Depending on country there are sometimes very strict requirements - or just traditions sometimes - around building up strong survivability in face of total loss of grid power. Including diesel and turbine generators on bigger BTSes let alone exchanges. If you drop capacity per terminal (so bandwidth) you can cover a lot more range at times which helps with mobile network resiliency.
> Including diesel and turbine generators on bigger BTSes let alone exchanges.
Or if you’re AT&T, grid natural gas backup, so your CO goes down if electrical and natural gas both go out once the batteries die. Did I mention how they didn’t build in roll-up generator connection points and had to emergency install those?
yeah you're both right, WCS is on the main board in PAL machines, but not the Kickstart ROMs. I got confused because when I finally fixed the issues with the CPU socket I already had the Parceiro plugged in and it injects Kickstart on boot from the SD card. I'll edit the blog.
> That was beautiful. Nicely done, and congratulations on your restomod A1000!
Author here. Thanks, had a lot of fun! Not sure why the original post from a few days ago didn't merge with this one, it's the same url ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42832032
Yeah, you posted it a few hours before I did (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42839928), and neither got voted up (and, mysteriously, mine was not detected as a dupe inside a very short time window, as it seems like it should happen).
I'm going to blame the first part on us being in Europe and most of the HN crowd living in US timezones :)
The earlier machines had much higher quality capacitors that are mostly still OK afaik. Consensus (if I may be so bold as to try to represent it) in the Amiga community today is: definitely recap the later Amigas (A600, A1200, A4000, CD32) with their cheaper SMT caps that usually leak and slowly destroy the motherboard, but A1000* and A500 usually don’t need it.
*The caps on the motherboard, anyway. I am not sure about the durability of the internal PSUs. I haven’t bothered to replace anything in either of the A1000s I acquired recently.
reply