11/9 & 11/10 Workshop

[Tony Bogan]

Very productive workshop!

While others will chime in no doubt with they’re accomplishments, here’s my update from the workshop.

Saturday Andy Diller and I spent a lot of time on his Mac Classic and a couple SCSI hard drives. We used a few different Macs and peripherals to troubleshoot the Classic and confirm the hard drives are working (I forgot how much I love SCSI voodoo....yeah. Right.)

I also got to disinfect two hard drives that belong to Jason Perkins. Can’t remember the last time I used Disinfectant to remove the Wdef virus!!

Jason brought a bunch of HP i5 mini machines. A bunch of us picked up one or two and spent some time installing Windows 10 or Linux on them (not very retro, but it’s a workshop so who cares!?!)

Sunday I spent the better part of the day working on the Apple /// from the museum.
The computer was working but the drive was a bit wonky. After a good cleaning it worked fine. I ran the Apple /// confidence test and discovered some bad ram on the Memory Board. This is a first run Apple /// so it has the 12v memory board. A run to the warehouse revealed the other 3 Apple /// machines we have are all later models with the 5v memory board. Alex Jacocks used his new IC tester to determine which ram chips were bad. Now we know the ones we need to replace.

Meanwhile, as Adam Michlin and I went through the machines in the warehouse we discovered the in box Apple /// we have is actually a nice Apple /// plus!!

We brought it back to the workshop and with Ian’s help we got it running. It is now the Apple /// running in the museum.

Side notes: The museum Apple /// decided to let out the magic smoke from the RIFA caps during testing. While Adam and I were going through the warehouse machines Ian removed those caps from the PSU. He also preemptively removes the ones from the ///+ PSU.

I had brought my library of Apple /// software in anticipation of working on the museum machine, and Adam and I picked out a couple of dealer demo disks I had to run on the machine in the museum.

I also got to spend a little time with my newest acquisition, and Apple II J-Plus.

It was used to donate parts to Mike Rosens Apple II+ for troubleshooting and donated its 6502 to the Apple ///+ to get it working!

Not what I planned on doing with it, but it was fortuitous I brought it! Saved some trips to the warehouse for parts!

Tony 

Sent from my iPhone