When I first began selling hardware to other vintage computer collectors, I never gave tech support much thought. I imagined I could design something, build it, sell it to somebody, and they’d happily go use it. End of story. Reality has proven different. Today I spend more time answering tech support questions from customers and potential customers than on any other aspect of the business. I get large amounts of mail, often with questions that are long and complex and need considerable time to answer properly. It’s a challenge for which I’ve yet to find any good solution.

A portion of the tech support is really sales support – questions about ordering and shipping. If you’ve been through the BMOW store in the past six months, you may have seen there’s a new person helping with these kinds of inquiries, which has been a huge help. But even after these are filtered out, the tech support load remains high.

 
RTFM?

Can I solve the tech support problem with more documentation? I’ve put a lot of time into the BMOW product documentation, particularly for the Floppy Emu. Every customer receives a printed one-page quickstart guide covering the basics, with a link to the full instruction manual on the web. Whenever the same question gets asked two or three times, I add the answer to the instructions or the quickstart. At least in theory, everything anyone would ever want to know should be covered in the documentation.

Yet I can’t escape the basic fact that there’s a lot of inherent complexity with these old computer systems and the products designed for them. In the case of the Floppy Emu, there’s a ton of ground to cover in the instructions between three different computer families, a dozen different drive emulation modes, different types of disk images, different operating systems, different ways of connecting to the computer, interactions with other drives, and much more.

The wall of documentation can be daunting. Even with the one-page quickstart that’s bundled in the box, it can be too much for some people. They throw up their hands and reach out to tech support (me) for assistance. In many cases I’m able to gently point people back to the relevant section of the manual: “It sounds like you may need to select a different disk emulation mode. Please see section 3.2 of the instruction manual for details.” But sometimes people get upset or offended if I refer them to the manual. I had one angry customer send me a video message in which he outright refused to read the instructions, insisting the he didn’t want to learn Computer Nerd 101 or get a history lesson in Apple computer models.

 
Whose Problem Is It?

A second challenge is simply identifying who or what is responsible when something doesn’t work as expected. The line between questions about BMOW hardware and questions about general usage of the Apple II or Macintosh is often blurry. For many customers, they’ve hauled an old computer out of their dusty attic, purchased a bit of BMOW hardware to run with it, and are using the machine for the first time in thirty years. If a questions arises, it will often come to me first, regardless of the source or the issue. I’ll get general questions about the Apple IIc, or about Macintosh System 7, or StuffIt. Some requests ask how to use particular software programs, or how to eject a disk, or reboot the computer. Much of this is now covered in the Floppy Emu instruction manual, since they’re common questions even if they’re not features of BMOW hardware.

What’s more puzzling are the questions about unrelated third-party products. If someone contacted me once with a BMOW tech support question and found my answer helpful, sometimes they’ll contact me again later even when their question has nothing to do with BMOW. I get a surprising number of tech support requests about the SCSI2SD. I’ve also had support requests asking about RAM upgrades, joysticks, and other peripherals. Sometimes I know the answer, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’ll decline to answer even if I know it, which makes me feel like a jerk, but I need to politely discourage this kind of tech support usage. Usually I’ll point people to another suggested information source instead.

This challenge isn’t limited to the Floppy Emu. The original Mac ROM-inator kit for the Mac 128K, Mac 512K, and Mac Plus was also a big source of general questions about classic Macintosh usage and problems. As a low-cost kit generating a high level of tech support, it just didn’t make sense, and this was one of the primary reasons the original ROM-inator kit was eventually discontinued.

 
Solutions?

I’m unsure how other small businesses solve this problem. Some of them may sell products that are so simple, they don’t need much tech support. Or their tech support is just weak, and they willingly suffer the reputational hit, choosing it as the least bad option compared to hours and hours of support time.

Documentation can always be improved, so that’s another area I can work on. I’m discovering that technical writing is a critical skill, and it’s not enough to simply have the necessary information in there somewhere – it needs to be presented clearly, and in a logical order. And even if the documentation is perfect, some people simply don’t want to read it.

Many companies now have support forums where customers answer questions from other customers, and the business itself is mostly or entirely absent from the conversation. This is certainly one way of reducing a company’s tech support requirements, but from my personal experience the customer experience is almost universally poor. Discussions often devolve into angry denouncements of the business, like “why isn’t (company) saying anything about this???” At worst, it can create the impression that customers have been cast out into the wilderness to fend for themselves. That’s not good.

I’ll keep searching for better solutions. Until then, I’m off to visit the tech support queue…

The world of international shipping continues to grow more difficult. As of October 1, the US Postal Service has halted acceptance of international package shipments to New Zeleand, due to COVID-19-related service disruptions at the destination. The same suspension was applied to Australia on September 3, so BMOW is now unable to make direct shipments to customers in either country. I had hoped this would be only a brief disruption while the countries’ post offices worked on mitigating COVID-19 impacts. But with Australia’s suspension already stretching to more than a month, my hopes for a quick resolution are dimming.

One bit of good news is that Australia Post’s ShopMate service is still working. It’s a package-forwarding service for Australian residents who are buying products from vendors in the USA. ShopMate provides you with a USA address, so BMOW and other vendors in the USA can make a regular domestic shipment and you pay them the domestic shipping rate. Then ShopMate repackages the shipment and dispatches it to your home in Australia, in return for an additional fee. A few BMOW customers have already tried buying through ShopMate during the past month, and reported that it worked. I’m not aware of a similar forwarding service for New Zealand, but if I find one, I’ll report it here.

The mess on my work desk has gotten out of hand. I think there might be a few square inches of free space in there somewhere, maybe. If I dig far enough into that pile I might even find a working pen, or a loose resistor with exactly the value I need.

Got a messy desk? Let’s see a photo!

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been developing an automated tester for Yellowstone. My goal is to streamline the program and test process for Yellowstone beta cards, and eventually for the first production run. The ugly tangle of wires shown here may not look like much, but I’ve used it to successfully program a card with a blank FPGA, and to simulate 6502 bus cycles for reading and writing from the card’s memory. I was surprised to discover that those looping crisscrossed wires still work reliably even at speeds as high as 10 MHz. I was also able to measure the current consumption of a Yellowstone card at idle, plus the test hardware itself, which is about 80 mA. That’s lower than I’d guessed.

I think I’ve stretched this breadboard prototype about as far as it will go, even though many things remain incomplete. There’s still no testing of the disk drive interfaces, nor have I implemented any of the short-circuit detection that I discussed here previously. Those pieces will have to wait for the final version of the tester, when it’s built into a nice PCB instead of a snarl of loose wires. My next task is to take what I’ve built on the breadboard here, and convert it into a PCB, and add the missing elements for testing drive interfaces and short circuits. There’s still a lot of software to write as well. I’m guessing the whole process may take about four weeks, including the PCB manufacturing time.

Once that’s done, I can hand-assemble a few Yellowstone beta cards and use the finished tester to program and verify them. If all goes well, I may be able to wrap up Yellowstone development by Halloween.

With apologies to BMOW readers Down Under, international deliveries to Australia from the BMOW Store have been temporarily suspended. A few weeks ago, Australia Post paused its processing of inbound international mail shipments due to COVID-19-related service impacts, and on September 3 the US Postal Service halted acceptance of Australia-bound international mail. I had hoped this would be only a brief interruption, but after sixteen days there have been no further updates, and there’s no current timeline for when normal operations will resume.

At the moment there are 21 international destinations for which USPS has halted mail delivery “due to impacts related to the COVID-19 pandemic and other unrelated service disruptions.” Australia is the only large country on that list, and the only one where BMOW has customers. The other countries are Afghanistan, Bhutan, Brunei, Cuba, French Guiana, Guadalupe, Laos, Libya, Martinique, Mayotte, Mongolia, Reunion, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Samoa, South Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, and Yemen.

International shipping is hot mess across much of the world right now, and this is just the latest incident. Thank you for your patience through all of this, and I hope to see Australia deliveries resuming soon.

A couple of weeks ago I shared some thoughts about an automated tester for Yellowstone boards, including how to test for short circuits. One of the questions that grew out of the resulting discussion was whether short circuits could only be detected by functional test failures (test results don’t match expected results) or if they could also be directly detected by measuring the supply current. A second question was how large the short circuit currents would typically be. I’ve recently done some tests to help answer these questions.

There are several different kinds of shorts that we need to think about:

• shorts between power supplies, where short circuit current flows whenever the power is on
• shorts between a signal and a power supply, where short circuit current only flows for certain signal values
• shorts between two signals, where short circuit current only flows for certain pairs of signal values
• shorts where the current source comes from the device being tested
• shorts where the current source comes from the equipment that’s connected to the device

Most of Yellowstone’s external IOs pass through 74LVC245 buffers. All of the tester’s IOs will pass through MCP23S17 port expanders. So I intentionally short-circuited some samples of both chips, alone and then together, to see what would happen. Here’s what I found.

• 74LVC245 with a 3.3V supply, and one logical high output short-circuited to ground: 70 mA short-circuit current
• 74LVC245 with one logical low output short-circuited to 3.3V: 110 mA
• MCP23S17 with a 5V supply, and one logical high output short-circuited to ground: 30 mA short-circuit current
• MCP23S17 with one logical low output short-circuited to 5V: 50 mA
• 74LVC245 logical high output short-circuited to MCP23S17 logical low output: 50 mA
• 74LVC245 logical low output short-circuited to MCP23S17 logical high output: 30 mA

These currents are all large enough that it should be possible to reliably measure and detect them as deviations from the normal supply current (expected to be something in the range of 100 to 200 mA). So is this a good approach? Will it work? I’m going to try it and see, and if it’s successful then the tester will be that much more useful. If it’s not successful, I won’t have lost anything but some time and a few dollars worth of parts.

Why do this at all? Isn’t functional testing enough, with the assumption that any short circuit will cause a test failure somewhere? I say… maybe. In a perfect world, any short circuit would result in a functional test failure, but I don’t live in a perfect world. If I can do something to help detect shorts that functional tests missed, or that don’t result in test failures 100 percent of the time, I think that’s a good thing.

For how long do I need to measure the current? If the tester changes some IO values, waits a microsecond, and then measures the new supply current, is that enough? Or will capacitors on the voltage supplies smooth out the current from short circuits, so that microsecond-level measurements aren’t useful and I need to wait milliseconds or longer to get useful data? I’ll just have to try it and see.

If I measure the current, which current should I be measuring? I’m not quite sure. It might seem that I should measure the 5V supply current for the Yellowstone board (the device being tested). That would catch problems where there’s a short circuit between two elements on the Yellowstone board, whether they’re signals or supplies. It would also catch problems where a Yellowstone input signal was shorted to 3.3V or 5V, creating short-circuit currents whenever the connected equipment tries to drive a logical low to the input. But it wouldn’t catch problems where a Yellowstone input was shorted to ground.

In a case like that, short circuit current would flow whenever the connected equipment tries to drive a logical high value to the input. But since the current would be coming from the connected equipment, and not the Yellowstone board, measuring the Yellowstone supply current wouldn’t help. Maybe this is a rare enough case that I shouldn’t worry about measuring these currents, and I can just assume any such problems will be caught by a functional test.