Luckily I had an old copy of service source 1.0 which happily ran on my G4 Powerbook under Classic. I safely navigated the CRT discharge procedure and reassembled it back to working order. I kept one hand behind my back just to be sure (keeping one hand behind your back minimises the chance of any electric shock passing through your heart).

I also swapped out the ethernet card in the LC PDS slot for the //e emulation card from my parent's old LC and now have a real (almost) hardware Apple //. It's actually even better than a real one because I can share some hard disk partitions under ProDOS for easy file transfer.

I have a UniDisk 5.25 drive as well, but I left the adapter cable for the drive at my parent's (hopefully they still have it).

So much fun :) Now I can get stuck into learning assembly programming the 6502 (it may have a 65C02 - I'm not quite sure).

The only downside is that my Color Classic has no ethernet card now, so I'm having to ferry files via a PowerBook 3400 that has ethernet and localtalk. If the person I lent my localtalk/Ethernet adapter to a few years ago reads this, can I have it back?!

Update:

Guess who forgot to put the self-termination jumper on the hard drive before re-assembling the Colour Classic...

I guess I'll just have to leave the long (and thus high-resistance) SCSI cable attached until I could be bothered fixing it.

On the plus side, I found the adapter cable, and so now I have an external platinum 5.25 floppy drive attached :) Pity I threw out all the disks years ago. Still, it sounds nice on the startup scan =)

A year is such a big thing, but so much can happen right at the end.

The tsunami in asia is well on it's way to being the second worst natural disaster this century (overtaking the 1/4 million deaths caused by an earthquake in China).

But good things can happen too, and I am very excited to be engaged to my best friend Kath :-)