Last week I was handed a business card from a person looking for an old 486 laptop. I watched and waited and nothing materialized.

Then, this Toshiba appeared. Good screen, good floppy drive and 200MB hard drive. 8MB of RAM, properly erased and handed a fresh install of DOS 6.22.

In literally a jiffy,  customer served. They’re on vacation, but have a message waiting on voicemail.

THAT’S Nextstep’s Re-Use In Action!

This week’s  Rescued Relic  is a  high-end Portable Workstation made by Jiwoo for Broadax Systems Inc. Made around the year 2001, it’s a PC tower with a handle and built-in 14 inch LCD screen, making it more of a “luggable” than a portable.

ideally suited for Point Of Sale,KIOSK, Banking, Medical, Factory Floor and Telecom (phone/internet) industries.

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It was a Pentium III 800mhz. machine with 128MB of RAM. I upgraded it to a 1000mhz. CPU with 768MB of RAM and added Ubuntu Linux as the operating system.

When new, this workhorse probably cost in the neighborhood of $2500.00.

Last week a customer was referred to me here in Receiving by a Eugene re-use store associate. She was looking for an older laptop that would run the vintage Apple operating system known as OS9.

There was lots of software at home  she couldn’t run, and she needed a computer that the kids could use that wouldn’t tie up the only other Mac in the house.

I knew there were Mac laptops slated to go into the store as parts machines. I also knew that the Wallstreet was a sturdy computer. I took a better looking, faster-of-the-lot one and refurbished it. And this one had a battery that held a charge for nearly an hour. Maybe more.

It has a bright, clear 14 inch color screen.  It has one of  the most-liked keyboards in the industry. It came with dial-up and networking capabilities built-in. It can run OS X, one of Apple’s most modern operating systems with the right RAM and hard drive size. Overall, given the price requirements and end-use needs, it was the perfect choice!

It went home with the delighted customer just two days later. And I was happy as well.  Another “save”.  Another  re-use opportunity fulfilled.  Another old Mac out in the wild again doing it’s duty nearly 12 years after being made.  Yeah. How it really oughtta be….

This is a photo of a working,  though modified Gateway Computer Handbook 486. This machine is only ten inches by 6 inches overall, and has a 120MB internal hard drive with 8MB of RAM.

There is one PCMCIA slot for a modem or ethernet card and this one, before being given to Nextstep for recycling, was in use up to just a few years ago by it’s owner.

The Handbook had 640 k of RAM, a standard 20 MB Hard Disk, and a monochrome blue-white CGA-compatible display. The unit could be powered by a rechargeable NiMH battery or six AA batteries in a special battery pack.

A floppy disk was attached through a proprietary parallel port connector.

We put it to re-use by removing the dead rechargeable battery pack and modifying  the AC adapter so it directly connected to the power in socket by soldering it on permanently.

There are ways on the internet to replace the battery pack with individual rechargeable batteries that you would remove from the specially-shaped pack to recharge.

Very unique link to the past showing that sometimes everything old is new again!

A Writer’s Work Restored, But The Writer….Vanished?

This is a story of a Vintage Macintosh Color Classic owned by a woman writer who first came to my Mac Museum in the Eugene Nextstep Recycling’s Receiving Department at the first of the week.

She needed a boot floppy disk because her Color Classic could no longer find its hard disk. I had one and gave it to her to take home and try to make it boot to fix that drive. It was important to her because her writings were on the hard drive.

She returned on Friday with her Mac and the sad news that the boot disk didn’t work for her. I told her to leave the Mac with me. I would try to salvage the data and save her writings.

I asked for contact information so I could get back to her if I succeeded in saving her Mac.

I discovered that her hard drive was not staying “spun-up”. I took a radical step I’d used before with my own old Macs, and took the top plate off the hard drive. I discovered that a plastic read-head parking device, I call a “sail” switch, was stuck and wouldn’t let the head move over the platters. That stressed out the motor and it shut the drive off.

Freeing the “sail switch” let the drive spin up and stay turning. I immediately hooked the hard drive to another drive and copied the contents. Then, I pulled a wiped drive out of my drawer and placed it into the Color Classic.

I fired up  the Mac and quickly re-copied her complete information to the new internal hard disk.  This worked. All of her data was safely recovered and reusable.

Then the mystery:   The contact information I was given was not correct.

I was stunned. I had hopes of giving her the great news so she could go on and finish the book,  manuscript or submission she had so long worked on.

Sadly a reunion may never come to pass.  The restored but now-orphaned Macintosh Color Classic may never see it’s loving owner again. I am using this combined Rescued Relic and Hall of Strange entry in an effort to get this lonely Mac back to the one who needs it. If you are reading this or listen to our show today,

Please….

Your Mac is well again. It misses you. Come back. It’s waiting for you here in the Mac Museum at Nextstep Recycling Eugene for the day when you walk through those receiving doors once again…….