Oh my. Yeap, definitely check polarity and voltages on used stuff.

At least it wasn't as bad as someone at my high school (c. 1995) who plugged a Centronics printer into a Mac SE external SCSI connector and released the magic smoke™ of both.

Worth the read if for no other reason than to see the disk ejected in zero gravity.

"Bad magic number" brings back some PTSD of trying to get a Sun Server working in like 2001. My friend and I futzed with that thing for hundreds of hours.

Good memories from uni working with those (and other Sun) machines. I still have many of them and last I checked (during covid) they all still work.

I have mixed feelings about the openboot font, specifically that most times I saw it my life was actively sucking.

Other than that it's very nice for a console font. Why don't we have PC BIOSes with that font, eh?

Thank goodness I gave up physical retrocomputing as a hobby ages back. Oh, I've held on to my display piece IIe, and framed the motherboard of my high-school 486, the first machine I ever built myself. Past that, though, these days everything is emulated or virtualized. Leaded solder fans and museumists are welcome to the rest!