3 ms·
I remeber when my dad retired from building computers in the late nineties. We were installing a new part (I think it was a Voodoo card) (well, he was, I was in
by orthoxerox 1y ago
I remeber when my dad retired from building computers in the late nineties. We were installing a new part (I think it was a Voodoo card) (well, he was, I was in the "watch and learn" phase), he connected everything back to the PSU, turned the power on and the magic smoke escaped.
That was the moment when he hung up his hat and told me I was in charge of the home PC now.
He found the problem by the following morning, actually: he plugged the FDD molex connector back in with too much force at an angle and shorted two pins. But he would never look inside the case again.
- ghaff 1y agoIt was really easy to fry/break stuff with a lot of the big old parallel connectors especially if you were fiddling around under a desk. I switched to Macs about 15 years ago and, other than repurposing an old Windows homebuild for Linux at one point (for reasons that became largely irrelevant), I pretty much got away from doing that sort of thing.
- bcrl 1y agoThe Amiga 500 I had made that even more awesome: there was +/- 12VDC on a couple of the pins of the serial port, and the parallel port had +5VDC. Hot plugging was very dangerous as a result. The crazy part is that the Amiga 1000 had power on different pins. Modern systems would have PTC fuses on those power pins to reduce the likelihood of damage, but not 1980s computers!