This and That
Everyone seems to be busy at this time of the year, so it always seems that not much is going on in the world, but that is a misconception.
People in the US and Canada around the Great Lakes are still without power. Ice storms are even worse than hurricanes for taking out the electrical grid, and it is harder to work in freezing temperatures.
I’ve also discovered a great time-killer – Internet Archive puts classic 70s and 80s games online. You load their emulator and play the original Space Invaders to totally waste time. We actually paid money to do this back in the day. I never bought a game console, but my Dad had one [for visiting grandkids, of course 😉 ].
It is nice to take a break, now and again.
5 comments
We still have the original Pong game and all the Intellivision cassettes… I don’t throw anything away…
After about 20 years ‘junk’ becomes ‘collectables’. The original Pong is probably worth big bucks on the auction circuit. An Apple I sold for hundreds of thousands recently, so hang on to the stuff and keep an inventory.
If you decide you want to actually play it again, be careful. The electrolytic capacitors used in these things have a rated lifespan of about 10 years and after that, they can explode and/or catch fire. The safest thing to do with any older electronics that you want to put back into service is to swap out the electrolytic capacitors with tantalum capacitors.
Oh holy cow. I had no idea. We’ll be careful.
Btw, we still play with an old Apple computer. Are they … flammable as well?
The *usual* failure mode is that the caustic electrolyte leaks out of the capacitors. This generally isn’t going to catch anything on fire unless the electrolyte leaks across power leads. The biggest use of electrolytics is in power supplies, since they are the cheapest way to achieve high capacitance. Fortunately your old Apple has a switching power supply rather than a linear power supply, and a switching power supply relies primarily on inductors, not capacitors, to provide its power filtering. Still, I’d be looking carefully at the motherboard for leaking electrolytic capacitors, and if the Apple has started acting erratically it’s probably because the electrolytic filtering capacitors have given up the ghost and lots of RF noise on chip power supply inputs that’s supposed to be grounded by the capacitors is instead getting into the chips.
The sad reality is that the electrolytic capacitors limit the reliable service life of most modern computers to around 10 years. Past that point the lack of filtering from failed electrolytic capacitors causes it to become unstable unless you engage in a concerted effort to replace all the electrolytic capacitors. For 30 year old hardware like Pong, I wouldn’t even try turning it on before replacing all electrolytic capacitors found within.