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Haven’t had a lot of time recently to attend to VMM tasks, dealing with issues on other fronts: home repairs, car repairs, Thanksgiving weekend, and (fortunately) a busy consulting schedule. Just a few vintage odds and ends between other projects.

I have enough classic Macs now (512k/Plus/SE variants) that when I get new ones I tear them down for useable parts – logic board, power supply, screens, etc.. Once emptied the iconic Macintosh case remains. If its in good condition I clean things up, reassemble the shell and pass them on to folks who might enjoy them. Gave one recently to my friend Bill T Miller, who send me this great picture of ET jamming in his new Mac TV Studio!

For those following the Lisa Saga, we last left our protagonist in the Valley of Unrecognized Keyboards. Since then some contact cleaner and a vigorous cleaning of the cable plug and Lisa jacks seems to have fixed the missing keyboard error at startup. Alas, I still can’t get the keyboard to do anything. My suspicion is the Apple Key is dead or has worn foam, and hence I can’t press APPLE-2 or APPLE-3 when prompted.

In order to proceed further without having a second keyboard, I need to boot the Lisa off a MacWorks floppy disk (the Mac Plus emulator for Lisa), then try the Notepad program to see if any keys work. This requires a working 400k floppy drive, which my Lisas don’t have. In fact I have a box full of frozen similar drives from old Macs, slowly growing over several years. It’s a common problem with old floppy drives. Frankly I’ve just been too unmotivated to disassemble and re-lubricate them – last weekend, raking leaves seemed preferable! I’ll probably pull a working drive from a 512k sometime and swap that in, I can get those apart pretty quicky.

Meanwhile, I did find some time to finish organizing spare parts in the “VMM Back Room” (storage closet). There are now lots of nice labelled boxes for different models of Macs. Also found that a closet shoe rack makes a great organizer for expansion cards and old hard drives, much better than the big plastic recycling bin I was using earlier. Old NuBus cards never die, they just get dustier and multiply in dark closets…