When I was young, my parents purchased an Apple IIe. My sisters and I played some games on it, and I did classwork on it after I figured out what a word processor was (intuiting the need for such a thing, I had attempted to program my own in Apple Basic. Imagine my simultaneous delight and disappointment to discover Apple Writer II).

Last year, I found the old machine in my parents’ garage, along with its disc drives. The monitors and dot matrix printer had not survived. I did not want to buy a replacement “composite” monitor, and it was unclear to me which, if any, of the “VGAbox” type devices on the market might allow it to talk to one of my computer monitors, so the Apple IIe sat in the basement until I realized today that it could probably be attached to our television via the RCA jack on the front of the screen. Indeed —

Apple //e on a large high definition screen

Unfortunately, while the machine booted and the drives spun up, they would not load an operating system. I pulled the disk interface card and tried to reseat the chips, but this ended up frying the card entirely. Sigh.

A question you don’t want to hear from your wife when tinkering with old hardware —

“What’s that smell?”

A replacement card is coming, courtesy eBay. It would be nice to salvage some of the files on my old 5 1/4″ discs.