One of my desktops just died!

[Qqmike]

Heat issue. Connector issue (maybe made worse when it heats up). Hard drive issue (after pushing it awhile). Power supply (geez, complicated, who knows there!). Memory issue (made worse by heating up). Motherboard capacitor/resister issue? Or, maybe it IS OK! Does that help?

[DoYouKubuntu]

Oh, that helps A LOT, Qq! Really narrows it right down.

Whew! *wipes sweat off forehead*

[GreyGeek]

There was a time when Integrated Circuit chips were merely seated into their sockets. Every once and a while one would have to reseat the by pushing vigorously, or, extract them, blow out the dust and re-insert them. Then they started soldering the chips in. My first business was a partnership in an Apple store. I used to demo them by holding an Apple []+ over my head and then tossing it onto the floor. The lid would usually fly off and so would several of the keys. Ocassionally a chip would pop out too. I'd re-insert & reseat the chips, plug the keys back in and put the lid back on. Then I'd plug it in, attach the monitor, printer and Disk []s, and turn it on. Over three years I NEVER had an Apple fail to start right up.

Then the Lisa came along. I had to keep three machines in the shop as a parts source to keep the ones I sold running. That's when I got out of the Apple store business.

[Qqmike]

GreyGeek: There was a time when Integrated Circuit chips were merely seated into their sockets.

Interesting. At least you COULD fix those by re-inserting and pressing down!

[oshunluvr]

GG and I remember a time where that was the first step in trouble shooting: Re-seat all the chips! My first Apple ][ and later IBM PC required it about twice a year.

I was thinking about Jerry's "toss it" story. Can you imagine doing that now? Those old ][+'s had metal frames inside those beige plastic skins if I remember correctly.

[DoYouKubuntu]

GG and I remember a time where that was the first step in trouble shooting: Re-seat all the chips!

I remember that, too.

I was thinking about Jerry's "toss it" story. Can you imagine doing that now?

In a word: NO!

[GreyGeek]

GG and I remember a time where that was the first step in trouble shooting: Re-seat all the chips! My first Apple ][ and later IBM PC required it about twice a year.

I was thinking about Jerry's "toss it" story. Can you imagine doing that now? Those old ][+'s had metal frames inside those beige plastic skins if I remember correctly.

It amazes people then and would amaze them now! I believe, however, that the cases were injection molded with plastic which couldn't be remolded and was temperature resistant. The Apple guy who came out and trained me, Jeff Rankin, didn't say anything about metal being embedded in the case.

[oshunluvr]

You're probably right. However, my Apple ][c did have a metal frame inside the case, but it was designed as an all-in-one portable so maybe they beefed it up. I remember upgrading the CPU from 1 MHz (not a typo!) to a 16 MHz cpu! But back then - games were programmed on CPU timing. Try playing F15 Strike Eagle at 16 times speed!

You could set the CPU to 1 MHz by bending out pin 16 and soldering a wire to it and grounding it to the frame via a switch (I drilled a hole in the side of the plastic case for the switch). Then I only needed to flip the switch and reboot to change CPU speeds.

Ahhh, good times, good times...

[GreyGeek]

My Apple []+ was the first sold in Nebraska, in the summer of 1978. IIRC, its serial # was 1768. I sold it for more than what I paid for it. I wish I had kept it. I used UCSD Pascal to create Mandelbrot sets graphics application. It took 45 minutes to calculate one frame of the graphic. I spent hundreds of hours generating graphs. At the time I thought 1MHz was fast! A little while later a binary program using integer graphics came out that could generate about 5-10 frames per second.

We improved the speed of our Appke Basic programs by "poking" certain memory locations. To execute a clear screen command ("HOME") we'd "POKE 936". It was much faster. Perhaps by 10X. When the Apple ][c came out Apple had changed the entry points for the BIOS commands so that thousands of Apple [] BASIC programs would no longer run on the []c. When the Lisa came out it had a huge and heavy metal grill on the back. It looked all the world lie a heat sink but there was no thermal connection between the grill and the mobo or CPU. As you might suspect the Lisa had severe hearing problems. That was when I realized I'd be moving to another computer. The Macintosh convinced me.

[DoYouKubuntu]

I feel confident that I speak for many when I say that I LOVE reading GG's stories. They're always so interesting, and informative, too. Keep them coming, please!

My earliest home computer experience was with a Commodore VIC-20, which I swapped for a Commodore 64 in short order. I still remember that the store where I bought the VIC-20 graciously allowed me to exchange it for a C64 when those came out soon afterward; I paid the difference, and had a brand new shiny C64! Its monitor was the living room TV; its storage was a cassette drive. I remember spending hours meticulously typing in the program--from the manual or some other book that came with it--for the hot air balloons, and how SUPER COOL it was when I was done, and we got to watch colorful hot air balloons floating along on the TV screen. Ah, the good old days...