Recapping an Epson HX-20 Slabtop

(This was originally a Twitter thread from March 24, 2020)

March 24, 2020

The Epson HX-20 is on the bench for some TLC like a new battery, new capacitors, cassette tape belt, and possibly more. Maybe I’ll eventually dial a BBS with it.

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Recapping the Apple PowerBook 160 LCD Display

(This was originally a Twitter thread from May 26, 2022)

May 26, 2022

Today I’m going to recap the LCD display on this PowerBook 160. It has a passive matrix LCD display capable of displaying 4-bit grayscale (16 shades of gray). The display was dim before with some severe artifacts (after adjusting the contrast slider) but now it will only show a black screen.

@mac84tv has an excellent page that lists the capacitors needed for this recap along with the links to Mouser to purchase.

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Sony PS-F9 “Flamingo” Turntable Repair

(This was originally a Twitter post from September 4, 2021)

September 4, 2021

On the bench today: I’ve had this Sony PS-F9 turntable for a few years but haven’t been able to fix it. Power LED lights in button held down. Otherwise, nothing. Any ideas?

Note: Own a Sony PS-F5 or Sony PS-F9 and missing the dust cover? You can purchase new 3D printed reproductions!

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Welcoming (back) a LaserWriter II

July 31, 2022

Welcoming a new (old) printer (back) into my fleet: a LaserWriter II. It’s a workhorse of a printer from 1988 dressed in Snow White design language. #RetroComputing

(This is an experimental post to attempt to convert a Twitter thread into a WordPress post).

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Hayes InterBridge

The Hayes InterBridge is “an inter-connecting ‘bridge’ that allows users of an AppleTalk network to tie into other AppleTalk networks.” This niche product was sold by Hayes in 1987 for $799 retail. There’s not a lot of information about this device left around so this page is an attempt to collect what I can find.

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Making DOS and CP/M 5.25″ Boot Disks with Commodore 128 and 1571 Floppy Drive

Did you recently get a new MS-DOS, KayPro IV, or Osborne 1 computer but no boot floppies?

If you have a Commodore 128 and a 1571 floppy drive, you might already know that you can read and write certain CP/M floppy formats while in CP/M mode. This is because the 1571 floppy drive can read and write two types of disk encoding schemes. GCR (Commodore, Apple, etc.) and MFM (common on CP/M and DOS platforms).

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