8-Bit Guy controversy

[StephenHorn]

10 hours ago, StinkerB06 said:

He then bought the wrong type from the hardware store, putting it in the PSU caused the machine to not turn on.

Something else that occurs to me, and if there's an engineer or technician who reads this then please correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't Dave's choice of fuse have nothing to do with whether or not the PSU was dead?

I mean, there are three possibilities, right? Either the replacement fuse was correct, or it was wrong and would not blow in the event of overdraw, or it was wrong and would blow under normal circumstances.

• 
  If the fuse was correct, then it was correct and the PSU was simply dead.
  


• 
  If the fuse was wrong, and would not blow in the event of overdraw, then we would have seen magic smoke, angry pixies, or Dave might have simply died(*) on camera. Since none of that happened, the PSU was already dead.
  


• 
  If the fuse was wrong, and would blow under normal circumstances, then it would have blown if the PSU was not dead. Since that didn't happen, the PSU was already dead.
  

In all of these cases, the PSU was already dead and the choice of fuse made no difference.

(*) If it bleeds it leads, right? I mean, dying seems like a steep price to pay to entertain one's followers, but some youtubers will do damn near anything for that ad revenue. I assume Dave's financial means are such that he doesn't need to stoop to such grotesque tactics. ? Besides, brushes with death is a niche already being filled by Mehdi Sadaghdar on ElectroBOOM.

[TomXP411]

I think I probably would have done more checking on the power switch (including probing the center pin to figure out what that did, but the Dremel thing is way overblown. 

Keep in mind that while this was a prototype, it also already didn't work. Using a paper clip to bridge the power switch pins was a risk, but I also expected it to work if the monitor really was showing 0 (or nearly 0) ohms when switched on.

And, honestly, we've all let the magic smoke from time to time. My first time was in high school, when I connected a speaker to a running amplifier, blowing up the power amp IC, and the last time was plugging a DC power plug with the wrong polarity (damn the person who thought center-negative on barrel connectors was a good idea..)

Personally, I think blowing up a piece of gear is a rite of passage. If you haven't blown something up, yet - you aren't trying hard enough.

[StephenHorn]

28 minutes ago, TomXP411 said:

If you haven't blown something up, yet - you aren't trying hard enough.

Hear hear!

I have an uncle who's literally named "Spark" within the family. I imagine you only need one guess why.

Today, he works as a contractor for a NASA project to develop batteries for fully-electric airplanes.

[Jeff Pare]

Eh, all we learned is that David like everyone else is human and sometimes screws up; I don't see this having any significant impact on X16. In fact, it bolsters the case for making a new "retro" computer as we'll be able to fiddle with it without worrying we might be damaging vintage hardware.

[Cyber]

If you haven't blown something up, yet - you aren't trying hard enough.

True. The only ones who never blow anything are the ones who are never doing repairs in first place.

[Perifractic]

Right, as I think David said, the only people who get nothing wrong are the people who do nothing. Whilst I can see the perspective of some people about some of the things, with nearly a million people having lost their lives from this terrible pandemic, abusing somebody because of an old metal screw is frankly preposterous. Some people need a reality check.   

[picosecond]

19 hours ago, Perifractic said:

Fair enough. Did you watch his response video?

I did.  Are you suggesting that some people comment on videos without watching them? ?

All of this is hindsight of course, but it seems easier to start by focusing on the monitor.  It appears, at least superficially to be completely standard for the era.  It has a video cable, a switch and a 3-conductor power connection.  If we assume it really is just a standard monitor what it the probable wiring of the power connector?

As for the rest of his response, I am setting that to one side and looking forward to his next video.

[Doigt]

I'll be honest, I cringed a bit when I saw him do the paperclip thing because I've always been told to never to that, but I thought there wasn't much anything else he could try and that thing wasn't working anyway. Besides, if this is the normal procedure and other experts are baffled as to why it didn't work, the fault lies in the complexity of the system being repaired, not the one attempting the repairs. In retrospect, of course what David did seems dumb, because we know what happened. Armed with the foreknowledge, it's easy to get angry and blame him. But I think no one would have questioned it if the computer didn't blow, even if it still didn't work.

Now, the only real controversy in my book is that he doesn't show if he tried what seemed to be the boot disk. That's all and no need to be salty or toxic about it. The comment section of that video was a mess and just not very fun to look at. I'm more disappointed by the youtube community than by David's damaging a rare, albeit stubborn, prototype which nobody knew anything about anyway. David could have easily decided not to do the video at all and that computer would have remained largely unknown by most. Isn't anyone glad to know this exist? You know, the first thing that went to my mind was "gosh, what other prototypes do we not know about which are stored somewhere ready to be discovered?".

I don't think the X16 will suffer from this. The Commander X16 will succeed or fail on its own, though I don't see how it could fail at this point in time. Most people I've seen are reasonable and can make the difference between an honest mistake and incompetence/negligence. They can also see the difference between two distinct projects. Why should the 8-Bit Guy's ignorance of how that rare prototype computer works be the downfall of an unrelated project? I don't believe there is any reason supporting that line of thought that can't be easily debunked.

[Strider]

Maybe I am too old, but I don't see the big deal. I see tech videos all the time (modern and retro) that do things differently than I would. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, we all live and learn.

As far using a paperclip to power up a PSU or jump a connection, that's common, even today on modern hardware. Similar to firing up a build outside of a case with no switch, just shorting the power switch pins on the MB with a screwdriver.

Cutting proprietary or uncommon screw heads off, I have done that as well on old hardware. Eventually, all hardware needs servicing, one way or the other.

Personally, none of this changes how I feel about the X16 or David. He had nothing to go on with that computer, other than his experience, and as he said, he's done that sort of thing many times with no problems at all. As have many of us.

I didn't even know this was an "issue" until I seen this post. ?

 

[Kilian Hekhuis]

It was a nice response video, thanks @Perifractic for putting the link here. It gives a bit of insight in David's reasoning, and from his point of view, I can fully understand why he did what he did. The one thing he probably didn't anticipate, him being a Commodore person, is that there are people who feel as passionate about old, rare IBM hardware as he feels about old, rare Commodore equipment like the C65 he mentioned. To them, it's like he held a brand new rare C65-like prototype and used that paperclip and dremmel on it. Not saying this warrants any hate speech or other types of abuse, but at least I can someone understand the passion someone can feel when encountering such a rare IBM device.

As for some of the other points he made, I think he misses the point. Even if someone's YouTube channel is 100% politics-free, when you know that YouTuber is, say, virulant anti-abortion and women's rights, thinks gays are sick and need to be cured and whatnot, you would 100% "cancel" them if you're pro-choice and pro-lgbtq rights, since watching videos generates revenue, and you wouldn't want to support someone with believes completely opposite yours. The second point he misses is the Morgan Freeman comparison. This is definitely not the same as comparing a white person to Sylvester Stallone, as the "all black people look alike" (and the variant "all asian people look alike") meme does have racist connotations, so as a white person comparing a black person to another black person, even if they do look alike even to other black people, is somewhat tricky. David's remark is not racist per se, but him not understanding what could be racist about it, is a bit short-sighted.

Anyway, I for one think that all those haters wouldn't by a CX16 anyway, so I don't see this project being in any kind of danger because of this.