Macintosh 512K hints

[Neon_WA]

I'm still amazed what I find in my local verge (kerb) rubbish collections
Picked up a very clean Macintosh 512K, but alas.. no keyboard

Seeing it may have been sitting out over night I decided it best to open before plugging into the power. After making a tool to undo the screws in the handle recess I did a quick inspection.

Looked very clean inside, but there was some moisture buildup inside.
So have it sitting in a warm place drying out at the moment.

Once I'm happy it is dry... is there anything I need to aware of?

Does it require a keyboard connected to boot? (been a while since I played with older Apple puters)

thx in advance :D

 

[mark66j]

I don't have a 512K Mac, but I'm pretty sure I've booted the Plus without a keyboard, so that should be OK. Unfortunately it can be hard to find pre-ADB Mac keyboards.

If you have the case open still I would inspect the top of the CRT neck for any damage -- I've had several machines where the tip of the glass (I think where it was sealed off after being evacuated) was broken, so the CRT lost vacuum.

As always be careful inside the unit for high voltage (not a big risk before you plug it in if it has been offline a long time).

 

[dorkbert]

local WeirdStuff warehouse had a lot of them, but alas shipping from USA to the land down under might get expensive.

 

[Neon_WA]

local WeirdStuff warehouse had a lot of them, but alas shipping from USA to the land down under might get expensive.

Thx I will check it out
I have a friend in the US I ship stuff to & he combines my purchases into one package to Oz.

Tried the beast this morning.. only get one beep tone and nothing on the screen

 

[NeXT]

a single and long beep means that at the least they system is okay. To confirm it's at least in a state that it will try to boot from a floppy, feed it an unformatted disk and if it tries to read it, then spit it out you should be okay.
As for the display, try the brightness knob and failing that, check for high voltage going to the tube.
A mac does not need a keyboard or mouse to be connected in order to boot or display something on the screen. The only classic apple system I know that would not work properly if no keyboard was connectred was the Lisa.

 

[james1095]

A very common problem with these, the same thing that's wrong with mine, is that the high voltage transformer fails. Before you condemn that though, there are a bunch of other things that can go wrong. As someone else said, brightness knob is the first thing to check, then look to see if the heater is glowing in the neck of the CRT. I've also seen lots of cracked solder joints on the analog boards.