Projects

Apple III - March 1, 2026

This Apple III was recieved by me as a trade for my labor on a customer's Apple Lisa 2/10. This particular unit is far from perfect (with quite a bit of corrosion from a previous battery leak), but it is complete, and even has a Disk III external disk drive! When I got it, I started by tearing it apart and doing a full inspection/cleaning, and I was not surprised to find that someone had previously enjoyed a smoke show and blew up the safety capacitors in the power supply. I removed and replaced the two safety capacitors, as well as cleaned up some of the corrosion on the bottom pans, cleaned the disk drive heads, and attempted to power the machine up. To my surprise, the system turned right on, passed its memory diagnostic, and attempted to boot the operating system from the bad diskette I had inserted. I was quite impressed, as I have only heard terrible things about the Apple III's reliability, and this one was running with a very corroded section of the logic board and a previously untested power supply. Now that it is turning on and attempting to work, I need to do some future proofing to make sure the corrosion doesn't get worse, and the system will be reliable for years to come. I also need to write some new operating system diskettes so I can properly boot the system. I did replace the belt in the Disk III with one from a spare Disk II because the Disk III's belt was broken. I also have what seems to be a hard drive interface card, so I will be testing that out and will see if I can source a compatible hard drive so the machine can have mass storage. I will be keeping this updated as I go! Updated 03/04/2026