There's Life In The Old Mac Yet
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday July 12, 1992
MACINTOSH No. F641 17WM0001P may not be the oldest working Apple Mac in Australia, but it wouldn't be far off. It came off the automated production line at Apple's Fremont, California, factory - where robots were building them at the rate of one every 27 seconds - some time in the first half of 1985. (The Mac was launched in the United States on January 25, 1985, but first supplies for sale to the public didn't reach Australia till February.)
It was sold to me in July that year. It was the first computer I had ever owned and I was fiercely proud of it, though I secretly wondered if I would be up to dealing with the full potential of 128 kilobytes of random access memory. Today, I deal routinely with a Mac IIcx with 8 megabytes of RAM and Quadra 700 with 12 megs - almost 100 times the Mac's 128 processing power -but then it seemed awesome.
Old F64117WM0001P has seen good times and bad times in the ensuing seven years. It has bounced round Australia, been dragged in and out of offices, home, cars and aircraft, been sat on by cats and suffered many other indignities.
In 1987, it was upgraded to Mac Plus status, with new ROM chips and a full megabyte of RAM. Later it was replaced as my first working choice, first by a Mac SE, later by the CX.
For several years it went to live in Kings Cross - rented out to a fellow journalist - where it sat by an open window and sucked in the grime and cigarette smoke endemic to Cross life.
The other day it came back home again: like all of us, the fellow journalist had graduated to something better.
The Mac - again like most of us - was a little worse for wear. The screen display looked wonky, and the floppy disk drive sometimes emitted strange grating sounds and spat out its disks.
But it had been a good and faithful servant and this Apple Orchardist wasn't about to write it off, even though the original asking price of $3,445- about twice the price of today's nearest equivalent, the Mac Classic - had been well and truly amortised.
I reached for the phone and booked F64117WM0001P in to Xyber Service Centre's "Macintosh Fitness Program", a mid-life check-up for aging Macs.
Xyber does all kinds of repairs and upgrades, but specialises in breathing new life into tired or ailing Macintoshes. The charge is $88, plus parts. The Apple Orchard went along to observe precisely what happens, and whether the results are worth the cost.
"You'd be surprised what you find when you open up a Macintosh," says Xyber's Jim Katehos, casually cracking open the case of F64117WM0001P with the special tool required for this task. "I've found cigarette ash, biscuit crumbs, ant colonies - even a dead cockroach."
The unfortunate cocky, it seems, had wandered in through the floppy disk slot, explored the logic board, then tried to get beneath the Motorola 68000 chip that powers compact Macs.
There it got jammed, terminally, among the processor's myriad of small copper pins.
What happened? "He fried," says Katehos.
RIP, cocky. And RIP, Motorola 68000.
As part owner of Xyber Service Centre in Crows Nest, Katehos is in charge of the "Macintosh Fitness Program". There's a small staff, but this job he's doing in person.
Most problems with older Macintoshes involve the internal power-supply unit, the disk drives, or the soldered connections, says Katehos, so they are the first parts to be checked. Cockroaches aside, it's rare to have a problem with the Mac's logic board.
Despite its seven years of life, this Mac's power supply was working well.
Xyber trusts no seven-year-old solder connection. As a matter of course, under the Mac Fitness Program, all are undone with a solder sucker, a gun-like device that momentarily heats each joint and slurps up the blob of liquid lead.
Then each connection is patiently cleaned, coated with flux and resoldered. A short test is run to ensure that the circuits are responding. In most cases electrical signals flow much more freely than before.
In the case of F64117WM0001P, they were flowing fast and clear. But other problem areas were evident.
"Heat and dust, heat and dust," mutters Katehos. He's referring not to the movie about life in India under the Raj, but to the common enemies of the Mac Plus.
"Apple Computer, in its infinite wisdom, built early Macs, including the plus, without an interior fan," says Katehos. The Apple Orchard nods: it was always a big selling point - the early Macs ran in gorgeous, absolute silence, compared with IBM-compatibles and later fan-equipped Mac models like the SE, on which the fan howls like a banshee. That was just acceptable practice on the early 128K Macs, Katehos maintains. But it turned out a monstrous mistake on the one-meg Mac Plus.
Heat build-up inside the closed Mac case is quite horrendous, he says, causing power supplies to blow, and soldered connections to turn brittle and crack.
"Here's an example." Katehos swoops on the video connector that links the Mac's cathode ray tube display to the logic board. It's blackened where the joint has cracked and a spark has carried the electrical signal across the gap.
It's plainly the cause of our wonky display. Zip | Zip | with the solder sucker. Psst | Psst | with the soldering iron - and a problem of several years standing is fixed.
"If Apple had put a fan in these models from the start, the Macs would have run cool and most of them would never have had any problems." he said.
Dust is a special problem on disk drives, both floppies and hard disks, where the tolerances between read-write head and disk surface are very much less than a human hair.
At Xyber, they coax layers of dust from Mac logic boards with camel-hair paint brushes. It's gentler and more precise than vacuuming.
Dust also causes data to be lost. "A lot of people leap to the conclusion that their computer has been hit by a virus when, as often as not, it's a dust problem," says Katehos.
A test on our disk drive show there's nothing drastically wrong. Katehos cleans the tiny read-write heads patiently with a cotton bud. "Don't do this yourself," he warns. "It looks simple, but it's incredibly easy to move the heads out of alignment, and your disk drive is a write off."
The drive itself is removed, cleaned, lubricated, reassembled and tested. An adjustment or two and it's running perfectly.
Convinced by Katehos's demonstrations, I give the go-ahead to add a fan. Xyber has its own near-silent model, a neat little black-and-blue job, which is mounted to the inside of the drive casing with tough double-side adhesive tape.
It will see that the Mac runs much cooler in future. And it's directed to throw dust out, not draw it in. The extra cost: $68.
Meanwhile the logic board has been cleaned and reassembled. The screen is adjusted and aligned. Tests are run and fine adjustments made to ensure that a circle on the screen is perfectly circular, a square is a perfect square.
Mouse and keyboard are next to come under inspection. The mouse is running truly, but the keyboard's letter "O" is not working.
Each key on a keyboard is a mini electrical switch and spring. A dab of pressure on the key, contact is made, and the switch is turned.
While Apple does not supply new switches for keyboards, most service centres usually have a few old ones hanging round, taken from expired Macintoshes.
Sure enough, Katehos finds one in a back room to suit the original Mac's unusual little bouncy keyboard. Two minutes work, and it's typing the letter"O" to sweet perfection.
Piece by piece, the Mac is tested, cleaned and reassembled. Final action is a thorough workout with Sarx Wonder Soap on the casing; it comes up shining almost like new.
Test-driven, F64117WM0001P comes up performing near perfectly. The job has taken just on two hours. Xyber charges a standard $88 no matter how long the job takes.
And of course, you pay for any replacement parts. In the case of F64117WM0001P, that amounted to one resistor, price 22 cents. The keyboard key, they were kind enough to throw in for free.
Worth it? You bet. After seven years, old F64117WM0001P is back looking good for another five to seven years. It will never run Apple's latest System 7, which needs 4 megabytes of memory, but it will handle word processing tasks perfectly under System 6.
Who knows, it may even see us out.
Xyber Service Centre services Macintoshes for major enterprises including Johnson and Johnson, CSIRO, a group of North Shore hospitals and the TV show Beyond 2000. The centre can be contacted on (02) 906 7976.
© 1992 Sydney Morning Herald