Olivetti/Programma 101/Revive/LetterThorkilNaur 20130607 0125

Olivetti P101: Circuit diagrams?

2013-Jun-07 00.07

To: sandro.graciotti..., Cc: garzinet..., ... museotecnologicamente.it

Dear Mr. Graciotti,

It has been a while since we last wrote and in the meantime, I have progressed with our P101 to a stage where I feel relatively comfortable with at least some of the mechanics. You may get some impression of what is happening by looking at

 http://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Olivetti/Programma_101/Revive

Last Sunday, I tried to apply full power to the P101 for a short while and observed smoke rising from what I believe is the electronics mostly related to the power supply. At the time, the ECU (Eletronic Computing Unit) was not connected, that is, everything happened in the motor-side of the machine.

You may recall that I am not an eletronics expert, but other members of our society help me along. And they indicated that in order to figure out what was happening, it would be much easier if diagrams of the electric circuits were available.

You mentioned at some point that you had some documentation, the result of a reverse engineering effort. If this material includes some circuit diagrams and you are willing to let us use this information we would be extremely grateful.

Another possibility that I am unsure about concerns the relatively detailed information contained in the patent

 http://www.google.com/patents/US3495222

This is clearly a description of some (early?) version of the P101, but it would be nice to have some indication of how far the information contained in the patent actually applies and is useful to understand an actual P101 like ours.

We also have some diagrams in the technical manual that we got from http://www.officemachinemanuals.com/, but to my inexpert eyes, they appear to lack some detail to make them really useful.

Failing all of the above, we would embark on creating our own diagrams, from direct observation of the P101 itself.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Best regards Thorkil