it's ALIVE...!

Few things in this world give me more pleasure than resurrecting an old Mac from beyond the grave. I recently came across a Powerbook gathering dust in a drawer in the science lab... one of the old black curvy ones. First generation G3. I tried to turn it on... nothing... probably a dead battery... no surprise there. I rooted through the drawer and found the power cable, and its end was frayed and dangling from a thin thread of wire insulation. That would explain the dead battery. I asked someone about it and was told that a new power cord cost almost $100, and it was kind of an old computer, so nobody thought it was worth it to buy a new one.

Come ON, people...

One wire cutter, some half-assed splicing, and a foot of electrical tape later, and we have a nice 250 MHz G3 Powerbook with a 4 Gig HD running OS9 quite peppily. And my coworker who had given up a bunch of files for dead 2 years ago is going to get them back.... once I figure out how to get them off a computer with no USB port or CD-R... just an antiquated SCSI port with a weird square hole. (My coworker claims that there should be a SCSI Zip drive around somewhere, but methinks some clever AppleTalk networking will be a better solution.)

But man... when you find a dead Mac, fiddle with it for a few minutes and get rewarded by that... "PING!!" It's almost as good as sex. Not to mention it solidifies my reputation around the department as having nearly God-like computer powers.