Hi Peter!
Thanks for the post and your stories. Like you I've never come across any original 128Ks in the wilds of Australia until now - 512K, Pluses and SEs have always been common as muck. The sad thing being that most would have been destroyed, or upgraded as you noted. I'm holding onto the spare 512K board I have for parts, with the assumption that more RAM failure may be on the cards in future. I'd keep looking though, certainly mine popped up when i was least expecting it.
So far, so good - the 400K floppy was completely seized, so I ran the metal eject mechanism through my ultrasonic cleaner at work, which freed up some parts but still needed lots of brute force and lubrication to get things moving smoothly after so many years. The drive now works, and I'm surprised at how quick things are - unless you needed heaps of disk space, running everything off a floppy with System 1.1 is amazingly quick. Next job is to clean up the Imagewriter I printer it came with, and to find/make a printer cable for it. Amusingly, someone got to it before me and cut all the cables off (they did the same with a lampshade iMac G4 - silly, why leave what is such a amazing looking computer for $0.02c of cable?).
JB
Thanks for the post and your stories. Like you I've never come across any original 128Ks in the wilds of Australia until now - 512K, Pluses and SEs have always been common as muck. The sad thing being that most would have been destroyed, or upgraded as you noted. I'm holding onto the spare 512K board I have for parts, with the assumption that more RAM failure may be on the cards in future. I'd keep looking though, certainly mine popped up when i was least expecting it.
So far, so good - the 400K floppy was completely seized, so I ran the metal eject mechanism through my ultrasonic cleaner at work, which freed up some parts but still needed lots of brute force and lubrication to get things moving smoothly after so many years. The drive now works, and I'm surprised at how quick things are - unless you needed heaps of disk space, running everything off a floppy with System 1.1 is amazingly quick. Next job is to clean up the Imagewriter I printer it came with, and to find/make a printer cable for it. Amusingly, someone got to it before me and cut all the cables off (they did the same with a lampshade iMac G4 - silly, why leave what is such a amazing looking computer for $0.02c of cable?).
JB