Terrarium ][+ powers on

After quite a while of having the terrarium ][+ disassembled, waiting for new standoffs, I decided that I'd just take the pretty similar standoffs out of a different ][+ and put them in. Two of my other ][+ machines had black standoffs instead of white ones, but one other machine had white ones (matching the ones that broke off in the terrarium ][+), so I moved them over. I only have five of the six in there, so the corner where the speaker plugs in isn't well supported, but I don't think that matters. If I can ever find any that match that I can buy new, maybe I'll take it apart again and add that one in.

But now I was finally ready to turn it on. First time ever that I've tried to power this machine up. And it worked, all keys function as well.

When I put a disk controller and drive in and attempted to boot a game disk, it crashed into the monitor, though. This could be just because the disk is bad, but it might also be that there is a RAM failure somewhere. I need to try to find a diagnostic disk if possible, just to see what it finds. The ][+ doesn't have a built-in self-test like the platinum //e does.

Before I put it together, I checked the case to see if it was stamped with a date like the Bell & Howell machine was. Looking under the keyboard revealed: no stamp.

Looking around a bit, though, I found the stamp on the side of the case:
Ex-Cell-O Paint Dept. OCT 31 1980 1 Shift.
So, now I know more or less when the case was made. And it was painted on Hallowe'en.

As I was leaving, I saw that somebody had added a HUGE television to the dumpster.

Because I could:

However, the TV is back in the dumpster again—there's absolutely no place I could keep such an enormous thing, and the video signal was also quite poor most of the time. But it was still kind of cool seeing the "APPLE ][" come up in something like inch-high letters.