A long time ago, way back when I built my first PC, I experienced something that I have since wrote about will never happen. My computer blew up. Literally.
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\nIt was 1986. I had purchased an old IBM PC, the original model 5150, from my employer.<\/p>\n
The PC was barebones. It had a floppy drive, but no hard drive. I also had a cassette tape port, because that was the PC’s original storage device. In fact, I tested that computer using it’s cassette tape interface.<\/p>\n
The computer was sold with 64K of RAM, which wasn’t the bare minimum; you could buy a PC with only 16K of RAM installed.<\/p>\n
My first task with the new computer was to upgrade it.<\/p>\n
I bought a 384K memory expansion card, which included a clock battery, printer and serial ports, plus whatever else I forget.<\/p>\n
I also bought a whopping 20MB hard drive.<\/p>\n
For a monitor, I purchased a very nice Amdek Amber 13″ monitor. I was a thing of beauty. And I bought a Hercules Graphics card to do monochrome graphics.<\/p>\n
I was set.<\/p>\n
The one thing I didn’t upgrade was the PC’s power supply.<\/p>\n
The PC originally shipped with a puny 63W power supply. That was enough for the single floppy drive, the 64K of RAM, and perhaps a peripheral card or two. It was not enough for all the power I packed into my PC.<\/p>\n
Well, yeah: “power.” But back in the day, that was a pretty nice system.<\/p>\n
One night I was playing around and I heard a pop. It was loud, like a firecracker.<\/p>\n
Then I saw a puff of smoke rise up from behind the PC. I was blue, I swear! Blue smoke curling up behind the computer.<\/p>\n
I laughed.<\/p>\n
Instantly, I knew that I had blown the power supply. I phoned up a PC-savvy friend and described to him my PC’s hardware stats. Then I asked, “Can a 63W power supply handle all that?”<\/p>\n
He laughed. “Blue smoke?” he asked. I laughed and told him, Yes, I’d seen the blue smoke.<\/p>\n
My friend gave me the name of an outfit that sold PC power supplies. I drove by and picked up a 250W job the next day. Installed it. And my PC ran normally every since then.<\/p>\n
Eventually I added a second hard drive and a CGA graphics adapter so that I could play Load Runner<\/em> in beautiful four-bit color. The power supply never blew up again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A long time ago, way back when I built my first PC, I experienced something that I have since wrote about will never happen. My computer blew up. Literally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1931"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1935,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931\/revisions\/1935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}