TI 59 Diagnostic Card Listing

[Dave Britten]

(02-09-2022 02:05 AM)voltaage Wrote:  

(02-08-2022 09:51 PM)Sylvain Cote Wrote:  To cleanup my magnetic cards used in HP calculators (65/67/97/41/71/75), I use a:

1) Staedtler Mars Plastic Premium Eraser to remove the oxidation

Yeah I agree. Plastic Erasers would have avoided the stickiness of bread.

I use one of the white Pentel Hi-Polymer erasers - which looks to be about the same as the Staedtler - with good results. Generally you won't be able to recover the data on a card that has become unreadable, since cleaning the card with the eraser likely destroys the recorded data further, but it works wonders for deoxidizing the card and making it usable again.

These cards generally seem to hold up well over time as long as they've been recorded from a good machine and the cards aren't already oxidized when recording. I bought a pack of 40 or so used TI-59 cards that contained all the programs from the EE module, and I think all but one side of one card still read just fine on the first try. I'm assuming these were written back in the '80s.