Shortly before COVID hit, I fired it up to see if it still worked, and within like a minute, a certain capacitor (that is a common and well-known failure point) fried, and it was dead. I brought it to a computer repair store to fix, and then COVID and its lockdowns hit.
When I returned months later to see what was up after my phone calls weren't returned, turns out the whole place had shut down and I to this day have no idea where my Mac Plus went. :/
This usually happened due mostly as a result of federal policy of paying out extra money for hospitals based on the number of covid patients, thus creating an incentive of diagnosing anyone with a positive PCR test as sick from covid, whether they presented actual clinical symptoms of the disease or not.
In many places in the United States it was unusual for COVID to be listed as a cause of death in paperwork. Often it was listed a something coronary or pulmonary. This isn't unique to COVID, but happened a lot more with that disease, especially before there were vaccines and the stigma was stronger.
The actual number of COVID deaths is estimated because policies varied so much among different political jurisdictions.
Source: Work in the healthcare industry, and had relatives die of COVID who ended up with something else listed on their death certificates.
There's still plenty of people who don't believe 1,100,000 Americans died of COVID. These same people also wonder why it suddenly became harder to find workers.
Close, they wired the Reset button!
But, no Programmer switch.
It's very hard to contain my disappointment. Bridge too far I guess.
It's already 25 years or so ago but in the early 20-teens I fixed up a Mac Classic II and got it online on the Internet, running both System 6 and MacOS 7.6.1, both fully tricked out with every possible enhancement. A great learning and revision exercise, and still a lovely OS to work with in the 21st century.
But the most fun I had on it was playing CQ...
I kinda wished it had a panoply of external SCSI devices like a floppy drive, a CD ROM, and a ZIP drive (needs driver v.4.2 ) for good measure.
Difficulty: College was in a town without a Radio Shack, and none of us had cars.
There was also a "shucked" 1541 PCB and drive fitted in the top section of a tower case and IIRC in the post I've read they have served all power demands either from a standard PSU or an off-the-shelf power supply module.
https://bsky.app/profile/nanoraptor.danamania.com/post/3k47g...
Better still... someone built it for real:
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/1iqth0...
drob518•4mo ago
burnt-resistor•4mo ago
Caps are easy fixes if you can get the board out. Use quality electrolytic caps if bothering to go through the trouble, or I'd see if modern ceramic alternatives exist that will essentially last forever. (Don't get me started on how (vintage) tantalums suck.)
accrual•4mo ago
drob518•4mo ago
burnt-resistor•4mo ago