Help with vintage GCMS - 5972

[chronomag]

As our 5977 has undergone a major board failure, I am trying to get the old gcms working. It's been in mothballs for 20 years.

It is a 6890/5972 system with HPIB running on windows NT...lol
Everything powers up ok so far, but I can't find out how to get the comm settings right. Is there an online manual that shows how to do this?

There are some jumpers on the board that have to be set, and the old HPIB program needs very specific addresses.

Thanks!

[TCCrab]

Here's a few links that may (or may not) prove useful.
Good luck.
Sadly, I'm old enough to remember when these systems were NEW and very much in high demand.
https://www.agilent.com/cs/library/supp ... a10676.pdf
https://support.waters.com/KB_Inst/Chro ... _installed
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/57829 ... 1369c.html

Good luck!!

'Crabs

[chronomag]

Many thanks, that will be very helpful !

[James_Ball]

Should be DIP switches on the boards to set the address. It is binary so you turn all off for 0, one on for 1, one off and two on for 2, one on and two on for 3, ect, there should be a table in the manuals linked that shows the combinations needed.

As long as the computer, GC and MS all have different addresses set you should be good to go (plus autosampler if it has the external control box). You just have to input those addresses into the setup program when you create the instrument for MSDChemstation.

Be glad you are not resurrecting a 5995 using an RTE-A computer. Teaching someone younger to use the text interface these days would be worth seeing

[Consumer Products Guy]

Sadly, I'm old enough to remember when these systems were NEW and very much in high demand.

We got the very first 5971 system in our state. We had no idea what "Windows 386" was, or what a mouse was. two departments had to chip in $10K each to add to our capital budget amount available. The autosampler was able to be ordered a month or so later, as it was a new calendar/fiscal year. HP (not Agilent then) engineer put it all together in a couple of hours, said to experiment with it and let him know if there were questions; question #1 was "what's that, pointing to the mouse...

Good thing it had a built-in tutorial !!!

The wooden crate for the MSD with the tilt indicators became by dog's doghouse.

[James_Ball]

Sadly, I'm old enough to remember when these systems were NEW and very much in high demand.

We got the very first 5971 system in our state. We had no idea what "Windows 386" was, or what a mouse was. two departments had to chip in $10K each to add to our capital budget amount available. The autosampler was able to be ordered a month or so later, as it was a new calendar/fiscal year. HP (not Agilent then) engineer put it all together in a couple of hours, said to experiment with it and let him know if there were questions; question #1 was "what's that, pointing to the mouse...

Good thing it had a built-in tutorial !!!

The wooden crate for the MSD with the tilt indicators became by dog's doghouse.

Sounds like my experience with the 5971. Our first one arrived a week before I began work here and was still in the crate 3 months later. They were still trying to figure out if they could interface it with the RTE-A. Finally they had it installed just with Windows 3.0 and I worked through the tutorials as I was working second shift and had time between loading samples on the Tekmar 2016 for EPA8260 samples. Building the first method from scratch was a pain as the computer tended to crash just before you saved the changes to the analyte table. How much things change in 30 years

[Consumer Products Guy]

For some reason our nutty CEO had declared that year that all capital equipment ordered that year be on site by end of the year. A 100% order. I remember speaking with HP several times by phone and requesting that if they could not have on our site by Dec. 31, that could they ship an empty box to us instead?

Well HP said they could hit the deadline, and the 5971 boxes arrived on Dec. 31 !!