Replacing the RAM in My Trash-Picked Apple IIe! 

Literally "This does not compute"

That SYSTEM OK screen was instant joy!

This is a perfect reason why we need a right to repair! Access to schematics and documentation for these older devices is taken for granted.

I liked your excitement during the machine's "SYSTEM OK" boot. Thank you, This Does Not Compute!

Your F* yeah made me laugh so hard. Anyway, this diagnostic soft is kinda tricky then. Reverse labeling of chips... I didin't expect that.

the "oh (quack) yeah!" was so satisfying haha

100% in favor of non-destructive quality of life improvements to old tech, such as adding sockets to a MoBo and CF cards in place of hard disks. Such mods can easily be reversed back to stock for authenticity if need be. About "inauthentic" RAM chips, I think we can all agree there is quite a bit of gate-keeping in the retro community, be it cars, electronics, etc. Often times the gate keeping is unrealistic given the modern circumstances. Sure, if you can find a NOS OEM replacement from 1982...go for it...but often there isn't. In that case, I'd argue it's infinitely more important to get a machine working for the experience of using it than moth-ball it because you can't locate the *exact* part. Get it working to share with the world, *then* keep your eyes peeled for the exact, period correct part. Just my 2 cents.

I have heard the same thing about those RAM chips being flaky - but people seem to forget that they are failing on 35+ year old machines that were probably rated for 3-5 years of useful life at best. Just the fact they have held up this long is impressive!

As a fellow RU-vidr, I can appreciate the frustration of wasting time while working on a video. I have a dozen or more I never completed and wasted many hours on. It's awesome to see you figured this one out and shared the experience with us all. Congrats on success and 200k subs!

It's so great to see someone who knows what they're doing fixing (now historic) old computers from the 1980s. I love that green text so much, oh the nostalgia.

You still learned, which is so important in life. Not necessarily about a computer, but learning, making mistakes and correcting are just as valuable in the end.

Man, between you and Adrian Black I feel like I'm getting a master course in fixing 8-bit machines!

When I saw the "SYSTEM OK", I jumped out of my chair and shouted!! So satisfying !!!

I am always amazed by your montage. It surely takes quite a lot of time to write, film and lay out the process. I am an early subscriber and you improved your skills a lot. Keep up the good work Colin.

Your videos make me wish I had kept my trays of floppy disks of real and pirated software for my Apple ii series. I love your care and expertise at fixing true classics!!!

The "oh f** yeah" literally broke me. I didn't compute it. hahahaha

Seeing this thing getting fixed and coming back to life makes me very happy! In a largely throwaway world, it's nice to see other people out there willing to at least attempt a DIY fix. Your assumption about the RAM chip location was completely valid and at least now you have two new chips in there. If it was surgery, it would be a big deal but thankfully, technology is more forgiving. Great work and awesome IIe! Great to see it found a new forever home!

Of all the "Tech" RU-vidrs I watch, you have by far the highest technical quality as far as your video picture quality goes. Lighting, Variable/Pull Focus effects. It's noticeable that it's quite a notch-above other similar channels in terms of production quality.

A great journey to be on. You and I are of the same age; I remember our "Computer Lab" was filled to the brim with Apple II, II+ and IIe machines with those wonderful green phosphor, tilting screens. Thanks.

I found your channel a couple months ago. Ever since then, I've been engrossed in learning about vintage computing. I recently took the leap and purchased a simasimac se/30. Luckily, the chips were fine and all it needed was a good motherboard clean and a recap. Next is an Osborne 1 and getting the se/30 an expansion card. Thank you for introducing me to a new hobby ❤️

You learned something......................we learned something, this is why we watch videos like this. Good show.

defiantly one of my favorite tech youtubers

"The repair manual lists the chips from left to right, but the diagnostic program lists them right to left". Yep, that sounds like something Apple would do. Glad to know some things haven't changed over the last 40 years.

For a guy my age this retro computer videos are a pleasure to watch

The 8 bit guy would love this!

I bought an Apple IIe back in '84 or '85. With the floppy drive the thing cost me $2,400. I remember the cost so well. I sold my Atari 1200XL in order to be able to afford it. I had one power supply failure, and had to replace it. They didn't mention that a power supply could be fixed so easily. I remember it set me back a little over $200. I wish I had known something about soldering and electronics. I was just a lame consumer back in the day, and sadly I haven't changed. There was one game I played every chance I got. I don't remember the name; perhaps you do. It was one of those Star Trek knock-off games. You had to go on successful missions across the universe in order to be promoted. When you located the enemy you took shots at it and hoped your shields could withstand the return fire. I spent many late night and early morning hours playing that game. I was 26 years old playing a silly game like that for hours on end instead of getting a decent career started. I doubt any adult could do something so frivolous and wasteful with their time today . . . or could they?

Dear sir .... thank you for another GREAT video. Like you, I sorta grew up with the Apple II (Mine was an Apple II+ I purchased while I was in the navy) .... I would gladly own another if I would be lucky enough to find one in a discard pile as you did! What a great teaching device. I spent all I had on that Apple, so when the time came for a printer, I had to use a Teletype Model 33 with Woz' diagram on how to hook it up to the game port. A little patience (printing was at 300 bauds) and a lot of canary paper, and I was in business! Wonderful times for sure and your video brought back a flood of great memories! :)

It's aight' man we all screw up at times. I recently tried to do quad channel memory on my brothers laptop that had an downgraded i5 that only supported dual and it did not work. I was panicked until I remembered it had an different chip.

Thank you for your content Colin and I hope you're having a great day sir God bless you and your family God bless you and Jeremy Scruggs

Love that you showed your mistake and how you went about solving the mystery. Kudos to you. 💙

History will thank you dude, Keep up the good work

Nice job Colin, there's no shame in getting things wrong. We're all on a learning journey fixing these old devices and as long as you learn, it can't be a bad thing :) Great result!

that self test beep brings me back...

Great video and I always appreciate your lessons learned/insights on what the project taught you.

I'm not even gon pretend I know anything when it comes to fixing computers like you do but my first thought was it's another RAM chip. Great video, thank you

I appreciate the additional commentary on everything instead of just doing the repairs. Its very interesting. Thank you!

I learned how to type in 5th grade in 1990 on one of these. They would tape a sheet of paper towel over the keyboard to cover our hands so we would have to remember the layout of the keyboard. I would LOVE to get one of these again. Really wish I would have asked my high school in 1994 to 1998, which still had a bunch of them, if I could buy one. I love the tiltable monitor. When I was little, we had a II Plus...

This is quite a piece of computing history. Great to see it rescued from becoming e-waste.

That shout of excitement after a successful fix!! Congratulations once again on this awesome find!

Wonderful channel! I am a collector of ThinkPads, of which I got some 130 machines, and PowerPC Macs and earlier, as well as a tinkerer of all things electronic through the past 3 decades and I really love your videos! What a satisfying ending to the Apple IIe saga! Great job!

I admire your persistence.

I can’t tell you how much I love this video. It’s so much of what I’ve been through in my time fixing computers. I think I celebrated as much as you did when it finally worked! Thank you, again for another fantastic job on these kind of videos. You really do an amazing job. I only wish I knew where to start with my own. I enjoy tinkering just as much. Do you have any advice for someone who doesn’t have the audio and video equipment to deliver great content? If you have one of those I’d love a link to watch that video! :D

I played these games in school as well and brought back memories of me being excited to hear that our class was going to the computer lab to learn but for I wanted to play the games .

Colin's video does a great job of showing a CRT display monitor on camera without a visible refresh bar. Adding sockets will not detract from the vintage-ness of the machine. My Apple //e has all chips socketed, but it is a slightly earlier board than Colin's. Desoldering chips can be a very frustrating experience and potentially board damaging experience, especially without a motorized heated desoldering gun.

Excellent video. Going the long way round to fix something can be very educational. Your exclamation off screen when it worked said it all! Cheers

I love these videos! Love from The Faroe Isles and Iceland ❤️🇫🇴🇮🇸

this brings back memories , i used to play Oregon trail and do digital art on a apple 2

The Apple 2 was a beloved computer of my youth as well. I had so many games and actually never owned my own Apple 2 C,E, Or GS. Thanks for the video!

I do love renovating old tech😊👍👍

I just signed up to your Patreon! Keep up the good work!

Again a great video ... being an ekectronics enguneer I appreciate seeing retro hardware being kept operational

Excellent video! Its so important to collect and share info. Excellent!!

Congrats on getting your computer fixed!! Thanks for posting the video!

Excellent video and conclusion to this repair!

Very nice video. I worked with those Apple //e's when I was starting my college days. I never really know the electronics part of the computer then, but nice to see how simple circuitry was back then.

This is why usenet posts are still handy. I've used them a lot over the past few years

I was skeptical about the whole “Micron chips are crap!” theory until I troubleshot my latest Apple IIe (bought non-working off of eBay), where I found 2 bad Micron RAM chips, plus I could see that a 3rd had been replaced by a previous owner. 3 bad chips out of 8!?? That’s appalling! That being said, I noticed that the Micron replacement you got is 2 years newer than the original chip (8704 vs 8504), so it has benefited from 2 years of factory improvements!

Nice find on Ram sys check orientation vs board layout!

Hi, I'm Alexandre and I'm from Brazil. His work is fantastic. I am a teacher and I would like to provide my students with this knowledge.

Excellent. Love the reaction when it worked.

This is how you do it properly. You don't rush just to get a video done like a certain "guy". You take your time, do multiple parts, people will be happy to see it when it's done correctly.

3:51 If only it were so easy. You'd revolutionize a whole industry.

Quack yeah! Well done figuring it out, Colin. ☺️

I think every one of us in the retro community has screwed up something at some time or another. At least you DID do research, and found the solution easy, and got it up and running again! Glad you were able to save it and all it cost was two ram chips and some time.

Your "error" of replacing the wrong chip is totally understandable. Love how you had a good reaction to it. Honestly, when I first saw the error message, I thought it was chip in slot 10, as in 0000 10. So if I would have been in your shoes, I might have had to replace 3 chips before getting it right.

Whenever an early Apple is opened, I'm always surprised how clean everything is structured. No cable mess, everything is accessible and easy to replace.

The self-diagnostic program lists the ram chips the wrong way round, my brain suddenly kicked in and said 'well what do you expect, apple do everything backward they don't want consumers doing their own repairs' and that's why I refuse to buy anything made by apple. Enjoyed the video and I laughed when you shouted out after getting the system ok message.

I also don't like manual desolder pumps like you showed. About 15 years ago I dropped a couple of hundred bucks solder desolder station sold as "ZD-987". It's got a desolder gun which has an electric pump built in, it works perfectly. Definitely one of my favourite tool investments. Recommend!

Also, absolutely stunning video quality and cinematography! :D

Well done! Glad to hear you stuck with it. I'm the original owner of an Apple ][ Plus, //e Platinum, and IIGS, and these memory issues will haunt me some day.

Be on the lookout for a Kensington System Saver for that Apple IIe if you intend to use it for more than just an occasional game. The IIe ran hot enough during extended use that socketed RAM chips could work themselves loose (which is why they were soldered instead of socketed). Apple learned that lesson the hard way with the Apple /// (the memory was socketed and the system ran hot enough that the chips would work loose enough to generate errors).

When i was at University i used this one! Lot of memories....and fun!

Heck you got 2 ram chip socketed I would do the rest of them as well to make it more uniform and give a better ease of replacement in the future.

that level of relief towards the end, nice

Colin, thank you for taking the time for proper troubleshooting and fixing the problem, and not making a big thing of the fact that you would have finished much sooner had you known about the diagnostic toolkit's little, ahem, idiosyncrasy. Think different indeed.

It's important not jumping into (wrong) conclussions; these days we're oversaturated with info from myriad sources (social networks, forums, etc) but reasoning and experimenting should always get us in the right path (and yes, trial and error is a fundamental part of the scientific approach while at it)

Thank you for showing your fans that you are a human being like the rest of us. I'm in the middle of restoring an Apple IIc from my childhood. It's the exact unit I played with 32 years ago. Perhaps I can play super munchers on it along with Pac-Man again soon.

That's the same problem I have when it comes to fixing CRT TVs. No one makes videos explaining the problems they encounter. They only show the end results. I started making my own videos showing the problems. I next video will be a complete DIY calibration of a Sony Trinitron KD-27FS170 CRT TV that can be applied to almost all CRT TVs. Thanks for the great videos. I ordered the funnygames screen mod for my gameboy. It should be here Monday.

Wow. This 'System OK' was awesome!

Ingenious hand crafted machinery.

Wow that was a surprise! More repair videos, i like them.

We should definitely document these things, awesome video 👌🏼🙏🏻

I would have replaced all of the RAM sockets at the beginning. It would have made troubleshooting much easier and you probably would have discovered the left to right issue right away. It also would have made the motherboard look more "stock" than it does with 2 out of the 8 chips in sockets.

Man, I've never felt so much better when the display said "system ok"!! I also guffawed when he said 64 KB RAM. Plus it also brought back memories of me playing carmen sandiego on my pc 30 years ago!! I have the biggest grin ony face now!!! 😁

Congrats amazing Job. Also a reminder of never assume but check everything. Nice that you got the ram and you fix it. Maybe for paranoia I would socket the rest of the ram so it could be easily change. Awesome job.

@8:39 The sound of a happy, happy man!

I feel your pain. Mine wasn't booting at all (so I had no diagnostic output), so I replaced four of them one by one (reassembling and testing every time) before getting pissed off and decide to replace all of them. Now I have a brand new (socketed) memory bank on my Apple //e :D

Great episode!

The Duck Quacking Is So Funny. *Quack*8:40

I repaired 8 bit machines back in the 80's and early 90's, so I knew instantly what mistake you were making. Commodore 64's and their disk drives made up most of my repair time. Atari's almost always had memory issues and commodore's usually had a MOS chip burn out. I couldn't keep VICII chips stocked.

Thank you for saving these awesome Pcs Fellow Minnesotan! :D

Amazing system thanks for sharing 💯👍💯 very cool

I just want to say I love your wave background

That reverse labeling of the chips is stupid on a lot of levels.

you are not alone, I spent a good part of the 1980s repairing telecumications equipment to component level. This and similar mislabeling issues were commonplace, usualy in service manuals that were the opposite way around to reality. you do feel good when you figure it out however.

I had these in my computer lab at high school for a time along with Mac Classic machines. There were a few other one off models in the lab like at least one IIc as well. I didn't think much of them at the time but did like the color capabilities. I have a bit more fondness for these now adays and wouldn't mine owning one, and especially after seeing videos like these and those on Action Retro :) thanks for the great videos :)

That was incredible!

Good lord.. this video was gripping. When you yelled **** yeah! So did I. Lol. Great video. :-)

@08:40 "Oh **quack** yeah!" Man, I just couldn't stop laughing...! My head did not compute this...!

That was an awesome restoration i was surprised its still alive