My Second Apple Foray

Ebay. Love it or hate, it can be a source of some good stuff. In the past I've managed to get two CPCs and a Commodore Plus4 for less than £50 amongst other things. But recently, it's been hard to find anything that i would consider to be a 'decent' price.

Plenty of Amiga A500s but at £90 - £120? No thanks. What about an Amiga A1200? For three hundred quid?? That's almost back to it's original retail price (untested, worked when I put it away..)..

So imagine my surprise when I won an eBay auction for two iMac G3 computers from the late 90's for the princely sum of five of your English pounds. Yes, a fiver. Five knicker. The cost of a couple of large coffees. To be fair, they were collection only, as they are so heavy, and I was fortunate that they were located only about 25 minutes away.

A Right Pair of Beauties

Although the two models outwardly look the same, they are two different versions. There's a 'bondi blue' first generation model, and the next variation which is 'blueberry'. Outwardly there are a couple of more noticeable differences, starting with the CD drive. On the early model the CD drive has a drawer, similar to a drive you might find in any laptop from the early to mid 2000s (but not so much nowadays). The blueberry though, is a 'slot loader'.

My first investigation focused on the bondi blue model. This one is actually an early version of the first generation and I had a vain hope it may include an accelerator card. Sadly, it did not. However, it certainly contained a surprise - but I'm getting ahead of myself.

So, the first thing I did was plug it in and switch it on. I had half expected either nothing, or a loud bang. Fortunately, the only sound was a happy 'bong' that indicated a correct initial startup. The screen lit up and the machine proceeded to boot. Unfortunately, this one had Mac OSX installed which requires a password, long since forgotten by the previous owner. I googled how to sort this out but the method refused to work. In fact, on restarting the machine, it failed to boot, leaving me with a black screen. After a couple of hours of leaving it unplugged I tried again, and it booted!

But then I also noticed that the screen would 'tick' every now again and the screen would flicker slightly. This is bad news as it almost certainly means that the flyback transformer is on the way out, which is a major known issue with these things. There is a slight chance it could be capacitors on the analogue board but this is unlikely. In any case I decided to strip it down to have a look inside.

And then the horror began....

First, the rear cover was removed which revealed....a perfectly clean arrangement of CD and hard drive tray, power cables and monitor cable.

Nothing unusual here

OK. So next, remove the drive bay unit and see what's HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!

WHAT. THE. HELL.

Getting closer doesn't make it look any better..

Oh. My. Goodness.

Well, that was unexpected. The only hint that something might be wrong was that water dripped out of the rear shell. In hindsight, that should probably have given some clue as to the awfulness contained inside. Ok, I suppose I should take the lid off the drive bays and check the OH NO!!

Battery. Feckin' battery...

Graphic image. Discretion advised.

Well, I suppose I should not have been surprised. I suspect what has happened is that the unit has been stored underneath a water source. A leaky roof or something similar. With a heavy heart I started to clean up the board. The batter holder literally fell off in my hand.

The worst battery I've ever seen..

After a couple of hours of cleaning, I was stunned to find that, other than some slight lightening of the solder mask, there was no damage. Really.

Wow. It cleaned up OK.

After wiping and drying out everything that was wet, I decided to dig deeper and see if there was any obvious (!) issues on the analog board. This required me to discharge the CRT and dig much deeper into the guts and is a story for next time....