Amiga A1000 Rejuvenator

I have a Rejuvenator tale to share, as long as the device has been brought up. My folks got me an Amiga 1000 right before I left for college in late 1986. Later on, I got a Rejuvenator for it. I had some reliability problems with it, and the manufacturer determined that there was a bug that needed to be fixed by replacing a PAL chip. So they mailed me the new chip, and for some reason that I don't recall, I had to go to the post office to pick up the package. When the clerk brought it out, I saw that they had simply dropped the naked DIP chip into an envelope. The pins had poked through the envelope and bent over. I asked the clerk whether I could refuse shipment of the obviously damaged part, and she said yes. I called up the manufacturer and tore them a new one over packing the chip so poorly, and demanded that they send me a new one. Well, they decided to make their own little statement... A week or so later, I got home to find a box left by UPS behind the bushes. A box about 12" x 12" x 36". With my new chip in an IC tube, wrapped in a 12" diameter log of pink bubble wrap. Needless to say, the chip was in fine condition. There was just one problem... they forgot to put the instructions in the box to tell me where to install it and what other mods to make to the board (I don't recall, but there might have been rework required besides just swapping the chip). So I called them from work (which was, incidentally, Las Vegas's local Amiga dealership, where I had a part-time job over a few summers), and asked them to FAX me the instructions. A few minutes later, the instructions started inching their way out of the FAX machine... complete with the distinctive 20 black dots where a DIP package poked through the original. Yup, they faxed the exact same instruction sheet that they had originally mailed me, and which had been returned by USPS, after being impaled by the first PAL that they sent me. That new chip fixed up my Rejuvenator, and I still have it in my old A1000. It's on my list to bring that machine back up again one of these days. I also had a Supra 4x4 hard drive on that machine. It originally had a 20M Miniscribe drive that was so crappy that it had a stepper motor actuator that simply buzzed against a hard stop at power-up since they didn't spend the extra couple of nickels on an optical track 0 sensor. I don't think it lasted much more than a year before I replaced it with a 100M Quantum drive that eventually died of stiction. I should still have the external case, and I know I still have the SCSI sidecar, so I'll probably rebuild it with some solid-state storage when I make time to resurrect my A1000. -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net> http://www.nf6x.net/