Andrew T.
Experienced Member
If it's any condolence, most of these things happened years ago...
Does anyone else have past mistakes and transgressions handling vintage computers that they regret today? Confess away!
- Letting a repair project fall victim to procrastination, leaving a case cover off for twelve months straight, and finding its contents faded and covered in a carpet of dust afterwards.
- Ruining a Type 1 IBM AT motherboard by pulling out all the socketed ICs and spilling glue on it.
- Using a CGA monitor as a footstool.
- Throwing away "broken" Apple II and III monitors without knowledge of proper CRT disposal.
- "Upgrading" an extremely crufty, unstable Windows 3.1 installation on a 486 by ironing the buggy first edition of Windows 95 over it. (I didn't even think that many illegal operations were possible at once.)
- Throwing away high-density floppies because they couldn't work in a 360k drive.
- Tearing 5¼" floppy drives apart and throwing them away because they couldn't read disks...aligning or cleaning the heads never occurred to me.
- Painting spare PC cards and turning them into art sculptures in boredom.
- Finding a dumpster with IBM Model F keyboards tossed inside, and leaving them there instead of diving and taking them home.
Does anyone else have past mistakes and transgressions handling vintage computers that they regret today? Confess away!