Posts by SPindoctor

Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Early Spectrum Adoption

I was given some money by a family friend in the summer of 84 so immediately went on the waiting list for a Spectrum. My 16k with grey rubber keys arrived in early October, just before I went away for a school trip for a week. By the time I got back, my cousin had tested it thoroughly and verified that it was knackered. So back it went for a replacement. Sinclair then screwed up & sent us 2 in return - one for cousin, one for me. Result.

With hindsight, the 16k grey keys non-working version is now collectable & super-rare - would have been great if we'd been able to keep that. The 2 blue-grey ones are still in my Mum's loft with a selection of wobbly RAM Packs, Currah Microspeech and lots of cassette tapes. I did knock together a RetroPi setup a few years back to relive my manic miner days. Fun times.

Apple's backwards design mistake and the reversed capacitor

More Dodgy Capacitors and even dodgier LinkedIn snooping

Many years ago I picked up a very cheap eMac from the well-known online auction site for my then young kids to play around on. It crashed constantly and after a quick search on the Apple discussion boards, it was clear that there had been a rogue batch which had been recalled.Mine must have missed out and it was too old to go back to Apple. I got some excellent advice from one of the posters on there and bought the replacement parts online. I have a very technically capable pal who did the soldering stuff & we got a few good years of trouble free use out of the machine.

The creepy LinkedIn bit came later when they popped up a suggested contact to the guy who had helped me on the Apple discussions board. We had no other online connection whatsoever and work in unrelated industries. I binned LinkedIn shortly afterwards.