Won't Boot

I was recently reminded of an old computer that I had saved from near death.  I did a brief stint circa 1981 in a computer repair facility as a repair tech.  I hadn’t thought of that job in a long time but some enjoyable memories came wandering back as I reached deeper into this not-too-often visited part of my past.  The rescued computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer (fondly called CoCo) that ran off a Motorola 6809 processor. The 6809 had some nice graphics functions built in compared to its predecessor the Motorola 6502 that was used in the original Apples.  As I recall, this computer had been next to a Christmas tree when said tree went up in flames (and the living room for that matter).  The customer brought in this creosote covered, foul smelling and partially melted computer in the hopes we could do something with it.  The shop manager looked it over carefully for about 30 seconds and then flung it in the trash.  “Nope, nothing we can do.”

 I thought of that poor little Coco all day and decided to take it as a little project for myself.  The only criterion for the repair was that I would use no out of pocket money.  As other computers came in and had components replaced I would scavenge usable parts off of the removed bits and pieces. Eventually, I was able to get it fully functional and I had that little computer for years.  When the kids were little, I even remember writing some video games for them in 6809 Assembly.  Ahh, coding was so simple and fun then…

Radio Shack didn’t want their repair techs to actually find bad components and replace them.  Instead, whole circuit boards or power supplies were swapped out.  Not only did this make repairs expensive, it wasn’t particularly challenging either. Despite company policy, Dave the shop manager and I always tried to do component level repair when possible.  This saved the customers some money and made the job much more satisfying as well.  Parts were often slow or expensive to come by so Dave and I would scavenge components from already known bad boards.  At the time, “The Shack’s” top of the line business oriented system was the Model II. This was a large oafish unit with an integrated monitor and an eight inch Floppy drive. Internally, there was a power supply, motherboard, CRT components and five circuit cards:  CPU, Memory, Disk controller, video, and serial/ parallel I/O.  Each card had dozens of chips, transistors and other valuable components that we would pull off as needed.  The bad components were always soldered carefully back on the donor board as we couldn’t get credit from the main office if we sent back boards that we had obviously performed such shenanigans on.  Another technique that was often used to isolate a bad component was to cut the copper traces leading to or from it with an X-acto blade in.  Again, we dutifully repaired the cut traces with bit of wire and some solder.  It was rather obvious on casual inspection that a lot of um… “work” had been done on the boards.

When a tech wasn’t able to repair a computer by swapping out boards, the next step was to ship the whole computer back to the factory repair center in Fort Worth.  If factory repair couldn’t fix it, you would get back a brand new computer.  Well, after months of scavenging parts, we decided it was time to send a whole computer back to Texas and see if we couldn’t get a new one in return.  We grabbed a power supply and CRT controller that were blackened from a lightning strike.  The Floppy drive had a cracked read/write head and  both motors were seized up. All five circuit boards had multiple cut (but repaired!) traces and innumerable bad components.  A detailed repair tag was supposed to be taped to the unit outlining what had been tried and what the results were.  For this project, we skipped the repair form and impishly stuck a little post-it note on the monitor that read simply:  “Won’t Boot”.  We did get our new computer back - along with a grumbly note.  Dave eventually was offered a job to move to Texas and became VP of the factory repair center.  When he first arrived and met the President of the division, there sat the CPU card out of that computer - replete with dozens of trace cuts.  The president had mounted it on a little oak stand with a brass plate stamped “Won’t Boot”.  Turns out, that system is what got Dave noticed for the big promotion.  Sometimes it does pay to break the rules.