Things are now starting to accumulate, though all of these things are going to have to be future projects. In my mind, I think of these as "spring break projects" though quite likely they'll turn out to be summer projects. First up in my efforts to reclaim my youth is the relatively beat-up Macintosh SE/30 that recently arrived. I bought an SE/30 in 1989 in preparation for going to college. Mine looked better. Even when I got rid of it. Which I'm kicking myself for now, of course. Honestly, I don't even remember how I got rid of it, I fear that I might have just left it out by a dumpster. Maybe I took a sad picture of that event, I have to go through my old photos to see.
But here is my "new" machine. The pictures don't seem to fully communicate how yellow the machine has become, which is a common problem with these old machines. I think this will probably also be a candidate for some careful cleanup and probably also retr0brighting to try to bring it back to a socially acceptable color.
The SE/30 suffers from bad capacitors, which manifests itself in a screen that doesn't display more than this:
In order to get it back in working order—which I am optimistic that I can do—I will need to open it up and replace 11 capacitors inside. So, I have purchased my first soldering iron, and one of the capacitors, but the others are going to need to be specially ordered because they are not common these days.
Just so I've recorded it somewhere, there's also a pretty helpful-looking page on repairing SE/30s that I expect to rely on as well in bringing this back to working order and keeping it there.
Along with the SE/30, I also got an ethernet card that I can install in it, which I will also try to do when I have the case open. I'm a bit nervous about attempting to do the soldering, I'll probably see if I can find some kind of non-mission-critical piece of spare circuit board to practice on first. But I'm looking forward to giving it a shot. I'll report back here on how it went.
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