The Bendix G15 (Almost) Roars into Life!

This is the big one – we push that tantalizing green button to fully bring up DC and get the machine online! Of course, things don’t quite go as planned, and we didn’t get as far as we had hoped. But, lots of exciting things happened and the machine is in a very good state to be brought up fully and executing code soon!

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Intro Music adapted from:
Artist: The Runaway Five
Title: The Shinra Shuffle

Thanks for watching!

Chapters
0:00 Who let me get my hands on a piece of history?
1:24 Why has it been so long since the last episode?
3:15 A little bit of capacitor checking
5:48 Pushing the green button!
7:44 Hmm, that’s not great…
10:32 Pushing the green button again!
12:14 Why won’t it start up fully?
18:54 She wants to run though!
23:14 Baby bunny!

[CTRIX]

I'm so glad you waited until Lloyd was present to fire up the G15. Watching him wonder over within seconds (having noticed which parts had come to life) and instinctively start debugging, checking calibration, pointing out missing lights in the init sequence - how lucky we are to have a Bendix tech on board. Thanks Lloyd! Great to see you back on your feet

[dodgem]

Having a Bendix repair tech who repaired those machines in the 70's living 2 hrs away is like winning the lottery.

[nysaea]

Man, Mr Lloyd just casually turning knobs like it's second nature really stole the show there! What a team!

[ml.]

Lloyd worked, repaired and programmed G15s in the 70s and lives 2 hours away?! That's about as probable as restoring a completely undocumented machine and finding all the engineering documents about that machine in the unused space between partitions on the hard drive .

[CuriousMarc]

Woohoo, you got memory! Congrats! She definitely wants to run.

[halfsourlizard]

This literally got ur girl crying: Couple of nerds from different generations powering up + debugging a beautiful piece of history + getting those sweet toobs churning out some heat again. Can't wait to see y'all programming that thing and getting that teletype kerchunking away: I'm really interested to get a sense of what the programming model is even like -- I gather that you need to configure the hardware first for whatever problem you're doing (swapping cards in / out / moving them around), but I'm totally clueless what the capabilities of the machine are and what interacting with it looks like. Hard to imagine a time before a Unix-style command-line ... love seeing history coming alive.

[Putersdcat]

Watching Lloyd work those indexed trim pots to balance the DC rails was pure magic, like watching a pilot fly by instruments

[malcolmgibson]

I love the way Lloyd is so laid back about having one in his garage.

[TheRetroBristolian]

So pleased to be a patron of the channel, the fact you specifically waited for Lloyd to be able to join you shows what a gent you really are. Love the series - keep up the good work!

[wdmm]

You should get the computer that was used in the Don Knott"s classic, "How to Frame a Figg."

[chriswareham]

Having Lloyd, someone who worked on these machines when they were still in active use, relatively close to where you are and also restoring another G15 is mind-blowing. What an incredible episode in the resurrection of this machine!

[kromaine]

Lloyd noticed your suspenders, guess old computer tech's like us wear suspenders today. Regards, Ken

[JanusCycle]

I really appreciate that you make videos about these larger computers. They are so much harder (and heavier) to ship around, and even just move them about in your workspace. The effort you go to is amazing, thank you David.

[SockyNoob]

Lloyd is an absolute legend. You can tell he was around those systems a lot back then. Must have been awesome having him there.

[simonstergaard]

Freaking EPIC... Loyd you are the man !!! You gotta interview him about his professional life.. we want to know

[anotheruser]

David, you can zero out your test leads on the DMM by pressing the ZERO button whilst shorting the leads. This makes for the offset of the test leads resistance to zero thus a more accurate reading.

[shawnerz]

Congratulations in getting this far with the G15. Looking at the size of that thing, I'm sure ERCOT thanks you for your support! 😁

[captainchaos]

I had no idea that it had a link right back to the father of digital computers. That's amazing.

[paulcarboneNY]

The only thing missing is a period correct Tektronix 500 series scope :)

[AnthonyRBlacker]

Wow to have Lloyd living 2 hours away and he was a TECH back in the 70s working on these thing?!?! A MA ZING! I know this has been posted already down here but I had to say it myself.. you hit the jackpot, what a win!!