rc2011sc

Well, we're at the end of the Retro Challenge Summer Challenge for 2011 and I've done sod all. It would be perhaps overly charitable to say I've done anything at all. Thinking back over the month I have:

It was another weekend busy with family and friends, and very little time for retro computing endeavours. I finally had an hour or so yesterday afternoon so I cleared my wife's partially disassembled tricycle awaty from the workbench and got to work.

First order of effort was to tidy up and put away an Apple IIe Platinum I had aquired a month or two ago that has been sitting on the workbench ever since. The exterior was dirty and the interior even more so. While giving the once over I noticed that the 5.25" drive had a cracked and damaged facia on the top front corners where the face plate joins with the drive body. I don't remember there being any damage when I bought it. Huh.

After packing away the IIe Platinum on a shelf with it's older siblings, a IIe and IIe Enhanced, I turned my attention to my MAc 512Ke. If you've been following my blog you may remember my repair effort on this machine a few months ago. I hadn't screwecd the case together after the repair as I'd intended to clean and retr0bright it first, but winter has not been kind and the retr0brighting will have to wait. I screwed it back togther and returned it to the shelf alongside the Mac Plus and Mac SE.

After two weeks of failing to do anything other than talk about old computers and pimp the Viva Amiga Documentary I pulled out the stops - the wallet stops that is - and have bought an Apple IIe card and an LC III to put it in. They're not going to arrive by the weekend, so here are the pictures the seller put up:

The peripherals with the LC III look like they'll go nicely with my IIGS, and I already have a fairly full assortment of Macintosh keyboards and mice, so the next steps are Apple monitors to go with the IIGS and LC III.

Between being sick, hosting visitors and the usual familial duties no retrograde progress (would that make it regression?) was achieved this weekend. On the bright side, it was good to see my friends and I did have a nice curry.

I am presenting a couple of two-day workshops next month, and need to prepare the course material for those before the end of July, so the Retro Challenge won't get its fair share of effort this time around. Sadly, unlike PrintStar's presentation, my workshop has nothing to do with retro computing!