

System Description: The Apple-II by Stephen Wozniak (1977) - acak
http://www.informationweek.com/byte/reviews/personal-tech/desktop-pc/240000361

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dmfdmf
True story. I was at UCB in the early 80'S and a friend of mine borrowed his
father's Apple II and we had a lot of fun learning how to program it and play
games, etc. My friend found a fun article in a hobby mag on building a heat
(infrared) detecting device for the computer that could track and display
objects in the room based on their temperature. We bought the parts (at
significant expense for a couple of college students) and proceeded to follow
the instructions in the article. As a Mechanical Engineering student I did not
understand a lot of steps but my Electrical Engineering friend felt he could
build this device. One of the steps involved opening the computer and tapping
into a power or data bus or something (I have no idea why it had to be done
hot, or maybe we missed a step). Anyway, my friend slipped and shorted out
some pins on one of the ICs on the motherboard and the computer crashed. After
that the computer was DOA and would not boot. My friend was distraught as he
promised his father that he would take extra good care of the Apple computer
(I think he was already in the doghouse for wrecking the family car).

Luckily, I remembered that Woz was in town to get his Master's degree so I
called 411 and got a phone number for Steve Wozniak in Berkeley, CA. I call
and a man answers and I ask "Is this Steve Wozniak that designed the Apple
computer" and he said "Yes" and I said "Hold on, my friend has a question for
you" and quickly hand the phone to my friend... saying "Its Steve Wozniak,
tell him what you did and then ask him how to fix it". My friend was very
skeptical but plays along and tells the guy on the phone he's toasted his
dad's Apple II and it won't boot. Woz asks him a few yes or no questions and
then my friend says something like "I shorted pin abc of IC def to line ghi on
the motherboard". Woz thinks it over for a few minutes and then says, well,
you probably fried chip jkl on the main board or chip mno on keyboard, so
replace those chips and see if it will boot". We replaced those chips and the
computer booted and was fine!

