22.Dec.2022
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Advent Calendar: Door 22 - Jacek Piszczek
Willkommen zum 22. Türchen, für das Jacek 'jacadcaps' Piszczek eine kleine Anekdote verfasst hat.
Even those who have never or only marginally dealt with the MorphOS operating system will have heard about Jacek's impressive work on his e-mail client Iris and web browser Wayfarer. As exciting as his projects are, the interview we conducted with him in the middle of this year is also worth reading and we would like to recommend it here.
We hope you will find as much time for your projects in the future, Jacek. We wish you much joy and continued positive feedback. He wrote the following hardware anecdote:
"It was 1998 and I finally managed to buy an A1200 with a PowerPC. Of course at that time it was already becoming a little hard to just get everything from one store, so it took a while to get the motherboard, the Infinitiv tower case and so on. Once everything was finally there, I was very eager to replace the A500 I’ve since outgrown.
I’ve known, of course, that the aging hardware was a little finicky and tried to be patient with it. Still, I didn’t expect smoke to come out of the computer on the first power on. Turned out it was the Micronik power adapter cable which was either soldered incorrectly or didn’t get a good enough fit. The result: the cables literally burst and I had to get the power adapter repaired. It’s bugged me several times since, before I was able to replace the whole tower for an Elbox one:
Another attempt. Got the cable repaired and assembled everything back again. Power on. Smoke comes out… OK… deep breath… Turns out that in my haste to get it all working I’ve managed to shift the IDE plug by 1 pin. Since Commodore cheaped out when building the Amiga and didn’t use a shrouded header it wasn’t exactly hard to do. Unfortunately, this fried the IDE chip on the A1200 motherboard, so now I’ve had a nice, working, A1200 with a PowerPC card and only a floppy drive to run software from. A much faster A500, ha ha.
In the end it was easier to just add an Elbox FastATA to the set than get the A1200 motherboard repaired. Think it all cost me over a month and way too much money. Still, that Amiga was what eventually let me start working on MorphOS and I’ve used it daily until about 2004." (dr)
[News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 11:29] [Comments: 0]
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