Repairing an Unreleased Prototype Mac...TABLET?! 

Regarding open drives and clean rooms. Back in the early 80s I was a repair tech for a computer manufacturer. I helped train new techs. We had a 10 meg hard drive from which we removed the cover to show new techs how these drives worked. This was a time when one could still smoke at their desks. We used to flick cigarette ashes onto the spinning platters of the disk and watch the heads fling the ashes off the platters. That disk ran for the entire 2 years I worked at the factory and never once had a failure. Those were the fun days of computer repair.

I've never seen anyone repair a flat flex cable before, this channel continues to be one of the very best on RU-vid.

PenMac. They built so few of these. Amazing that you got your hands on one. This project shutting down is what eventually led to Graphing Calculator, which has it's own amazing story.

I'm one of your Patrons and I watch almost every video. The cadence of your tone and camera work is great. Thanks for showing all the hardware from the past, I find them relaxing and informative.

This is exactly the kind and level of tinkering around I love.

This is the clearest, most concise old computer repair channel on RU-vid. It would have been easy to drag this out, but it’s just not his style. Respect.

It's rare that youtube recommends something new that is actually good. Today was one of those rare days.

I'm not even joking when I said I had a HDD in a 286 Samsung laptop that had the gasket fail and get sticky goo over the top platter. Deciding the drive was toast and I had nothing to loose I washed it...with water and soap...then blew dry it with compressed air. Put it back together and it literally booted up. Scandisk did show a few bad sectors but the drive worked enough to explore.

The sound of that Connor hard drive brought back some memories. I had the same drive in my MacSE.

For anyone wondering what this is, it is an early Apple PenLite prototype.

Hey, you don't need a whole clean room to do hard drive repair safely, a laminar flow hood will do just fine. Especially for older drives, you can cheaply DIY one with a Corsi-Rosenthal box.

When repairing a flex you should put a wire across, as a solder-only joint is extremely weak and will snap easily

Ooh, cliffhanger ending! Looking forward to learning more in a future video.

there were a couple of times when i thought "holy shit he's actually going to do that". Respect for doing everything possible to fix it.

I wonder why Apple doesn't have a gallery museum of all their products.

Oooh! I worked on software for that. We were trying to build an iPad out of 1992 technology. Good times!

I consider myself quite an Apple geek and am rarely surprised by stuff but WOW, I'd never seen anything like this! Keep up the amazing work!!

Great video - never seen anything like that before. Somehow I miss the sounds of hard drives but then I realise the speed and storage limitations from back then, and I'm happy we have SSDs now!

An old trick with stuck drives is, to put them in the freezer over night. The cold sort of deactivates the sticky mess and if heads stuck the thermal contraction loosens them up.

I really love how you are very delicate and procedural with repairs for vintage electronics and not just doing whatever might work! Awesome work!

This was absolutely fascinating, and I'm delighted you took the time to cover the repairs and solutions required. I'm eagerly awaiting part 2!

Amazing work. Clear that you are a professional. Seeing the mess when you opened it up would probably scare off 80-90% of people immediately. A delicate procedure putting humpty dumpty back together again for sure.

Amazing process restoring and documenting retro hardware.

😢 I wish I had this man's troubleshooting skills. Might actually be able to fix my U-Matic player.

In my opinion, this was a beautifully done video. Excellent story telling combined with excellent detective work. I very much look forward to the next installment.

Colin really demonstrated his knowledge with this one. Great video.

Around the same time Atari was working on the 'ST Pad'. Same external developer maybe?

You continue to make absolutely the most compelling and best edited repair videos I've seen on youtube.

I miss when Apple used to design brand new hardware and not just play it safe, like they’re doing now! So glad at least you got the prototype to turn on!

I do electronic repairs as a hobby on my channel, so I can’t tell you how many times projects like this go wrong, how time and labour intensive and nerve wracking they can be. Sourcing parts (especially for a freaking prototype tablet!!!), troubleshooting, brainstorming ideas… Very impressive, and the video itself is awesome! Respect! ❤

This was the most difficult repair and restoration I’ve ever seen. Amazing job!

I love this deep dive. Thank you for all the work you do. This is one of the best vintage channels on RU-vid and I get excited every time a new episode comes out. 🙏

One wow after another in this go-round, great show as always, Colin! Such an incredible find and ninja-level repair mastery, such a pleasure to watch you work!

Thanks for having us along on your adventure. This must have taken months to plan, acquire the hardware, execute, shoot, write, and edit. I'm amazed at your level of detail and storytelling ability, and the subject matter is just enthralling. I'm glad this prototype found its way to you and I can't wait for the next video!

AYO NO WAY. YOU HAVE ONE OF THEESE?! Edit: (NAH, SCREW THAT, HE HAS MORE THAN ONE!!!!) I thought theese were all just.. concepts!! I never knew they actually existed! Dude you matermind! How did you get this?!

*Bows down to your classic PowerBook logic board and spinner hard drive knowledge* Absolutely loved this! I was on the edge of my seat watching the flex cable repair, but figured if you had attempted it, you knew what you were doing. :)

I don't think I've ever been so invested in old hardware! Thank you so much for putting this all together

This reminds me a lot of the Modbook. For those who don't recall, a little over a decade ago, a company called Axiotron offered a kit (or service) to convert stock Core2Duo MacBooks into reversed touchscreen models just like this. They were fairly popular for a time.

That was great! I’d forgotten about those awesome old Powebooks! I had owned several of them including a Duo. I was so proud of that thing. Those were great days!!

Great work! I had a drive from an Amiga fail in the way you described, throwing sticky goop all over the platter and drive internals. It spun up, but there was no saving it as a working drive, never got a good read from it after that. What an amazing opportunity to work on such a machine!

Thanks for the ride down memory lane when I worked for Apple in Australia. I do remember this prototype being talked about too.

Been watching you for years. I love every video and topic. This though, this was my favorite to date! I would have never seen this had you not done this work and jumped head first. Thanks for sharing with us all!

Hahaha the alliteration at the end!

That is simply amazing. I've repaired flat flex cable before, but I had never heard of the trick with the hard drive. Something to add to my toolbox!

I hope you at least put some oil on the shield after removing the rust. It will rapidly rust again if you didn't. A proper solution would be to tin the shield so rust can't reform at all.

I love these repairs. This is exactly what I like to do in my free time. Just did similar on a G3 Clamshell

It's nice to see a flat flex cable repair be *successful* for once, seems that more often than not they go awry. Awesome episode, can't wait for next week's! And congrats on 400K 🥳

A spinning hard drive in a handheld device sounds crazy, especially with hard drive of this size! I've known that some ipods have miniature hard drives instead of anything solid-state, but this thing just looks like a beheaded laptop.

Dude. You are good at this stuff, it's honestly impressive.

“If you like the video, I’d appreciate a thumbs up.” Oh, you got the thumbs up BEFORE I watched the video. Your content is awesome.

I recall seeing this tablet which is called PenLite on a website that had a bunch of Apple prototypes.

What a crazy mechanical issue. I've never seen a hard drive repair like that.

Your work continues to amaze.

Dude your hd fix is absolutely insane. Wow!

Whenever you open a drive, always determine the torque the screws are currently screwed down to. Then, when reassembling, use a criss-cross pattern (like a cylinder head or car wheel) and torque it to the same spec.

This is one of the most interesting videos about prototypes I've seen, you made an incredible work fixing it and archive all that you can, so great!

Dang, leaving us on a cliffhanger! I can't wait! I loved the hard drive segment. Joining patreon because of this one.

your repair videos are absolute golden. keep up the good work, man

That’s how the pre-iPad works.

When I saw this, I was immediately reminded of a mystery device on Nedry's desk in Jurassic Park that looks kind of like this thing... Probably isn't the same, but I have no idea what it actually is. :P

Wow! Wow! Wow! What an incredible piece of Apple history. My thanks to Colin and the lucky owner that we could get to see this. 🙂

So what is this? Some sort of Powerbook Duo that's a tablet? The date codes do line up to other experiments at the time from Dauphin and Samsung. The 16mhz 68030 is also a dead giveaway considering that aforementioned examples used similar speced 386's.

I have a Powerbook Duo 2300c of which I was recently able to get the original hard drive backed up for personal archival. It once belonged to a long time Motorola employee.

Excellent use of ancient product knowledge to glean design clues to restore functionality.

This was such a welcome respite from all the computex coverage.

This is a really well made video. Thanks for it. You could do a short on taking apart the HDD and blur the disks out cause that part was pretty interesting. So much work and problem solving done. I look forward to the next one.

I hope this video gets you to 1M. I love this.

You are a bold man, trying to power on a one of a kind prototype like that without checking the system board for bad capacitors!

I was fully invested in this repair attempt

Dude this channel is great! the cinematography is crispy as hell and the quality of knowledge and content is of a high calibre, really good stuff dude!

That was very interesting and your skills are impressive!😮

When repairing foil cables (with copper traces), always solder a thin copper wire (single wire out of a wick cable) across the gap. It will be 10 times stronger than only solder (which tends to fall off after a year). Dismantling a harddrive without cleanroom is very risky. Any dust particle will cause a chain reaction of debris that kills the drive within hours to a month (but at least it lasted long enough to backup a binary copy). To free a stuck head arm, I read that it can help to rotate the drive itself causing a rotary impact to shake it loose. Also warming by hairdryer may help to soften sticky stuff, and cold (put into fridge) can help to break it loos either (like chewing gum stains in hair).

A tablet from '92? That's wild! Cool find 👍

Back in 1993 as a 15yo I attended an Apple info night at AppleCentre Darwin, launching the Mac Quadra 840av, the AV displays, and the original Newton. Certainly looks to me like this had to have come from those days of Newton development... Yes?? And don't think I missed the icon for "Casper"! Casper was Apple's early name for its voice recognition software - You used to be able to ask the early AV Macs "Who is Casper?" and ahhhh yeah, they said something that is gone from my memory right now.

that actually quite interesting for a '92 device, portable computing was barely a thing back then.

Such an interesting dive into all that could’ve been from Apple in the 90s. Another great video from an awesome channel!

i did not expect to see someone repairing a hard drive like that bravo

Ad Hoc is a term derived from Latin that means "For This" or "For This Situation." In the context of technology and computing, "Ad Hoc" refers to solutions that are developed specifically for a particular problem or task, without considering broader applications.

Reminds me of my Kyrocera QCP-6035. That thing was so advanced for its time.

Machine qui amène à l’inspiration 😄 (après un « sofa wine » ^^)… Un travail de qualité, une voix off nette sans superflu tout comme le travail effectué sur cette « drôle de bête »! Merci pour le partage et du temps consacré pour monter vos vidéos… 👍

Dude, dude...impressive work, simply amazing. I'm stunned. Thanks for sharing, the vids not over yet and I can't wait to see the end result but that flew cable fix was just insane. GAH a cliff hanger?!

This is genuinely one of the most interesting videos I've seen in a long time, thanks Colin!

As always Colin, great video, the nostalgia runs deep on this one too. Looking forward to the next one.

I'm very glad you used DD to create a copy! It makes a copy of every single byte on the disk so it is the perfect way to actually backup a hard drive. If a drive has hard bad sectors, ddrescue can create a copy despite I/O errors by skipping the bad sectors first instead of retrying and only trying to read them again after having the rest ofthe data copied. I was scared that you are letting the OS mount the hard drive without forcing it to mount new drives under read only mode because the OS might do some writes automatically when mounting a disk in read write.

That was the earliest possible Macintosh tablet which they never revisited ever again for possibly two decades before they finally gave it another go.

Incredible drive repair! Incredible work overall, but also that in particular

In the immortal word of Spock, "Fascinating."

Great save on this one! Such a cool piece of Apple's history, and now I CAN'T WAIT for the next instalment! :)

I remember seeing the concept designs from the 80's and one of them being a touch screen device, I'm not surprised apple actually tried to make one, but I am surprised it made it into the wild. Awesome to see another rare bit of history spinning up and doing its thing again.

Thank you for your work. One can learn a lot of about maintenance and repair from this video alone.

Awesome repairs. I respect that you had the courage to work on this prototype hardware.

I think it may have been displayed at Walt Disney world In the epcot future house they had a digital kitchen demo in 1996 along with an hd tv demo I believe they said it was for groceries and recapies

I remember seeing this, glad you got so far with it!

I AM SO excited to learn the history of this thing in your next video. This was a fantastic project thanks so much for sharing!!! Inspirational

Haha, "TIP of the iceberg" while showing us a tip of a stylus, nice!

Dang, great work!! And congrats on hitting 400K subs 🎉

Awesome video! You really did have plenty of tricks up your sleeve and got results!

Some sort of adventure dealing with HW being 3 decades old. Inspiring and entertaining!

Wow, nice easy drive save!

those bendy pcb cables crop up a lot in portable video gear from around that time, & I had to mend loads in sony vx-1000 dv camcorders. nice work. >looks at ipad< we've come a long way.