Some of the parts I ordered for the 8100 came in today, so it was time to take the machine apart…
To get to this part requires some careful fiddling as there are a lot of plastic tabs you need to carefully bend to remove board retainers and brackets. And as I mentioned previously, the plastics in this machine have reached an almost chalk-like consistency and are very fragile… But after some extremely careful bending I got everything disconnected without breaking anything and the board flipped out to do some work.
First up was the judicious use of some canned air to remove the lint buildup on the CPU heatsink, around the rom and L2 cache simm, and the power supply. Otherwise the system was really clean; someone took good care of it.
Next on the agenda was removing the 30 year old thermal paste and redoing it with Arctic Silver MX4… Which is overkill on a CPU that dissipates less than 10 watts worst-case – but I might as well take advantage of 21st century chemistry while I’m in here…
Next up was swapping out the ram… I gingerly pried out the two new(er) sticks of TechWorks FPM 32meg and four sticks of Motorola FPM 8meg ram, and replaced the lot with new (as in made in July of 2023) 32meg 60ns EDO ram.
I then pulled out the old pram battery in preparation for the new one that will arrive tomorrow.
Being as these batteries only last about 5 years and the computer currently forgets what day it is every time I turn it off, it was time for a new one. What was interesting is this is an aftermarket battery made by NewerTech (now owned by OWC), but NewerTech hasn’t made these batteries since mid-2015… At least it wasn’t the battery it came with in 1994 – which would have leaked motherboard destroying goo all over everything by now.
This is an all too common occurrence these days.
And that’s where I have to stop for now as the rest of the parts didn’t come in today, and I want to limit the manhandling the plastics receive… So I’ll install the battery tomorrow and then put the board back in the case.
In theory the vram for the video card will also arrive tomorrow and I’ll be able to install that before putting the card back in the system. Once that is done, the 8100 will be as maxed out as humanly possible system-wise. I still have the two BlueSCSI devices coming as well, but they won’t even ship until Saturday.
Oh, there is one more device that came in today…
Back in ’94 everyone was still working out what the One True Standard would be for computer networking, and each competing standard had a different media type and connector set – so it was kind of a mess… Because of this, Apple in their wisdom decided that the new PowerPC machines would just have an AUI (Attachment Unit Interface) on them, and the user could get a media converter for whatever network flavor they wanted… So Apple only needed one port instead of 2-3.
But! AUI ports used 15-pin D-Sub connectors, which is the exact same connector Apple used for their monitors… So to prevent confusion Apple came up with AAUI – a proprietary connector for proprietary network dongles.
Anyway, that’s the update for today – more tomorrow!
Listening to "The Equalizer (Not Alone)" by The Midnight