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Peak engineering
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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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.
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.
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.
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
Was that the same mac that had an officially sanctioned maintenance drop of 5cm to combat socket creep?
That would be the Apple III
Wait you had to drop it 5 cm so it would knock something back into place?
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
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.
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.
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?
The Apple III
https://www.techjunkie.com/apple-iii-drop/
That sounds like planned obsolescence as the speaker slowly rots the bits spinning nearby