{"id":4592,"date":"2020-05-22T18:04:03","date_gmt":"2020-05-23T01:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/?p=4592"},"modified":"2020-05-22T18:04:03","modified_gmt":"2020-05-23T01:04:03","slug":"refurbishing-my-macintosh-plus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/22\/refurbishing-my-macintosh-plus\/","title":{"rendered":"Refurbishing my Macintosh Plus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Somewhere in the mid to late 1990s I picked myself up a Macintosh Plus for the sum of $60AUD. At that time there were still computer Swap Meets where old and interesting equipment was around, so I headed over to one at some point (at the St Kilda Town Hall if memory serves) and picked myself up four 1MB SIMMs to boost the RAM of it from the standard 1MB to the insane amount of 4MB. Why? Umm… because I could? The RAM was pretty cheap, and somewhere in the house to this day, I sometimes stumble over the 256KB SIMMs as I just can’t bring myself to get rid of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This upgrade probably would have cost close to $2,000 at the system’s release. If the Macintosh system software were better at disk caching you could have easily held the whole 800k of the floppy disk in memory and still run useful software!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the annoying things that started with the Macintosh was odd screws and Apple gear being hard to get into. Compare to say, the Apple ][ which had handy clips to jump inside whenever. In fitting my massive FOUR MEGABYTES of RAM back in the day, I recall using a couple of allen keys sticky-taped together to be able to reach in and get the recessed Torx screws. These days, I can just order a torx bit off Amazon and have it arrive pretty quickly. Well, two torx bits, one of which is just<\/em> too short for the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My (dusty) Macintosh Plus<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

One thing had always struck me about it, it never really looked like the photos of the Macintosh Plus I saw in books. In what is an embarrassing number of years later, I learned that a lot can be gotten from the serial number printed on the underside of the front of the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So heading over to the My Old Mac Serial Number Decoder<\/a> I can find out:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manufactured in: F => Fremont, California, USA
Year of production: 1985
Week of production: 14
Production number: 3V3 => 4457
Model ID: M0001WP => Macintosh 512K (European Macintosh ED)<\/p>

Your Macintosh 512K (European Macintosh ED) was the 4457th Mac manufactured during the 14th week of 1985 in Fremont, California, USA.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Pretty cool! So it is certainly a Plus as the logic board says that, but it’s actually an upgraded 512k! If you think it was madness to have a GUI with only 128k of RAM in the original Macintosh, you’d be right. I do not envy anybody who had one of those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some time a decent (but not too many, less than 10) years ago, I turn on the Mac Plus to see if it still worked. It did! But then… some magic smoke started to come out (which isn’t so good), but the computer kept working<\/strong>! There’s something utterly bizarre about looking at a computer with smoke coming out of it that continues to function perfectly fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, as the smoke was coming out, I decided that it would be an opportune time to turn it off, open doors and windows, and put it away until I was ready to deal with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One Global Pandemic Later, and now was the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I suspected it was going to be a capacitor somewhere that blew, and figured that I should replace it, and probably preemptively replace all the other electrolytic capacitors that could likely leak and cause problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First thing’s first though: dismantle it and clean everything<\/strong>. First, taking the case off. Apple is not new to the game of annoying screws to get into things. I ended up spending $12 on this set <\/a>on Amazon, as the T10 bit can actually reach the screws holding the case on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n