29 May
2007
29 May
'07
11:05 a.m.
Roger Holmes wrote:
Actually I have a spare PSU, here in the UK, but sorry
I'm keeping it
for my own Apple ///s. These machines were so tightly engineered as
regards FCC requirements that there always seemed to be a problem with
getting the heat out and stopping the electronics shorting out against
the case.
Indeed - I used to run mine with the case off a lot of the time.
With museum hat on, we've seen precisely one /// in the last five or so years
(compared to six or seven Lisa 2 systems) - I tend to think that the
regularity with which certain systems are offered is a pretty good indication
of their scarcity, and that puts the /// in the "not many of them about" camp.
(I'm still not quite sure why they're not collectible though - i.e. people
don't seem to fall over themselves to acquire one. They're uncommon, quirky,
strangely-styled, and often as not a reputation for being a bit of a flop
makes something just as popular as something that's well-engineered)
By contrast the 5MB or 10MB Profile hard drive sits in
a box about five
times bigger than is needed. It was a real luxury after doing the floppy
shuffle for three quarters of an hour compiling Pascal programs, though
upgrading to three floppy drives saved most of the arm work.
I don't think I ever got mine to work with both my 5MB ProFiles at once; it'd
happily work with one or the other drive with either controller, but I get the
impression the software support just wasn't there to cope with two hard drives
in the same system.
Are logic diagrams available for the Apple /// now? If
I remember right,
even as dealers/service providers and hardware/software developers we
were not allowed logic diagrams for the A///.
Wasn't there a similar issue with the hard drive low-level formatter, in that
it was never released by Apple - so you couldn't take a Lisa ProFile and
format it for a ///, and nor could you do drive replacement in the field -
instead the whole faulty unit presumably got sent back to Apple for repair.
Must drag them out from my brother's loft some
time and see if either of
them still work. Hope they're OK, they are stored above the cold water
tank in their original boxes.
I don't think I've ever seen the original boxes - I have the one for the
ProFile manuals / media, but not for the machine (or ProFiles, or monitor) itself.
I really liked my ///... I'm just trying to thin the collection out a bit and
it's going to have to go... :-(
cheers
Jules