Advice from those who know the 4145A please.
I may have opportunity to pick one of these up, main cost would be time and effort. It's said to power up OK without errors but there are no disks and no test fixture.
My use case is partly for testing in vintage calculator and comp restoration, and partly to play with. My electronics is mostly self-taught so I would not mind to play around with curve tracing and so on. Also kinda like the HP gear of that era.
So:
- does it NEED the disk software? I have put floppy emulators on my 16500C and some other gear, I'm comfortable with disk emulation (but there do not seem to be images for the 4145A disks, and the format seems to be ...odd)
- is the test fixture necessary, I am happy to hack my own.
- any comments about longevity, ease of repair, unobtanium parts (I see that there are ROM images and the HP gear of that era still had pretty good service manuals)
- any other comments about using it nowadays
Thanks in advance!