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Peak engineering (lemmy.world)
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[-] aeronmelon@lemmy.world 108 points 8 months ago

Right up there with the classic Macintoshes with unshielded speakers nested right up against the hard drive and would periodically emit a tone that would reboot the computer.

[-] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 36 points 8 months ago

My personal favorite was the early-90s Macs that didn't have an eject button for the floppy drive, but did have a pushbutton power switch ... directly above the floppy drive. It took me weeks to stop powering off the computer every time I wanted to eject the floppy. Silly me, not picking up on the oh-so-very-intuitive practice of dragging the floppy icon over to the trash can in order to eject it.

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 9 points 8 months ago

Also extra fun was if the computer was non-functional and had a floppy disk in it, since it required working software in order to eject the disk, you had to do some disassembly in order to retrieve the disk.

[-] smort@lemmy.world 8 points 8 months ago

Which computer was that? I had a bunch of early apples and Macs, and they all had a little paper clip hole to manually eject the floppy

[-] neidu2@feddit.nl 18 points 8 months ago

Was that the same mac that had an officially sanctioned maintenance drop of 5cm to combat socket creep?

[-] fury@lemmy.world 11 points 8 months ago
[-] Thermal_shocked@lemmy.world 10 points 8 months ago

Wait you had to drop it 5 cm so it would knock something back into place?

[-] neidu2@feddit.nl 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I don't remember all the details, but that's the gist of it, yes.

A common problem with 80's computer designs was socket creep - thermal expansions and contractions would cause chips and cards to gradually climb out of their sockets and slots over time, and this was very prevalent on one of the macs of ye olden days.

The official response when asked about this issue was to lift the computer a few cm off the desk and drop it back down to let everything reseat properly.

EDIT: Thanks to @fury@lemmy.world for providing additional info. See his response for more detail

[-] Inucune@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago

Hard drive pin that needed to return to home position for the machine to boot would stick. A small drop would allow the spring to push it back home, and the drive would return to function.

[-] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 2 points 8 months ago

Got the same energy as "wrap your Xbox in a towel to let the heat resolder the broken connections".

We should really just let people open their own hardware to easily fix this stuff.

[-] SHOW_ME_YOUR_ASSHOLE@lemm.ee 2 points 8 months ago

I know what all of those words are but I don't understand what this is referring to and I can't find anything in a web search. Can you elaborate?

[-] Pretzilla@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

That sounds like planned obsolescence as the speaker slowly rots the bits spinning nearby

this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
1011 points (97.8% liked)

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