TRS-80 Fireworks

[Ethan O'Toole]

We were at this HOPE conference in NYC. We were helping with it in those 
days, so we had some equipment at the ops area. A whole bunch of commotion 
went down in the OPS area, including someone grabbing a fire extingisher 
and jumping.

Watching this from a-far, we chuckled and I said, "Good thing this doesn't 
involve us."

A few seconds later someone tells me that my TRS-80 model 4 started to let 
out a bunch of magic smoke.

I mention it to one of the VCF'ers that was there. I'm pretty sure it was 
Glitch. He is like, "Oh that's the rice paper capacitor at postiion C103 
or something. A noise filter."

"Do you work on these often?" I reply. I figured this was the ninja of 
TRS-80s or something. "No, pretty much never" he says.

Now I'm twice as confused. But whatever. We open the thing up and it is 
the exact capacitor he mentioned. We just rmeoved it. And I'm still 
confused as how he knew the exact capacitor that went off the top of his 
head.



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: Ethan O'Toole