u/developstopfix

60+ years old and still going (and glowing) strong

A couple of weeks ago I came across a post in r/vintagecomputing in which someone had posted a stash of old computers that was in an abandoned hoarder house on some property they owned. I reached out and asked if they'd be willing to ship me the poor filthy C64 in the last photo, and here it is. I opened it up outside in case any unwanted stowaways were hiding in there, dead or alive, and luckily there were none. The bottom half of the case is cracked but I have spare cases so no big deal. I think it'll clean up just fine.

I got this scope along with 5 others from Marketplace a few months ago. A few of those were mostly working but this one was in pretty rough shape - it’d blow its fuse immediately when turned on and looked like it’d been stored in a dirty garage for the last few decades. After replacing the two main filter caps, another small electrolytic cap and diode on the inverter board, and a shorted tantalum on the horizontal amp board it sprung back to life. I don’t have the equipment necessary to do all 70+ steps of the calibration process but I did what I could with what I have and it seems to be working really well now.

Picked this up on Marketplace last weekend. It’s all original from what I can see and still works pretty well! I plan on replacing capacitors and any resistors that have drifted too far, and probably the non-polarized power cord, but won’t be doing a full restoration or repainting the case or anything like that. I would definitely like to replace these shrunken yellowed plastic dial covers though so if anyone has a link to a set of those please send it my way.