After cleaning my Amiga 1000s keyboard, which was almost worthy of a quarantine, I put the whole project aside for awhile. Partly to regain my stomach's stamina, and partly because I was really jonesing to play some Starflight, which is just freaking awesome.
This past weekend I took a deep breath (a really deep breath) and decided it was time to attack the 1000 itself. I knew I had two main issues: the machine's internals being filled with who knew what and the external disk drive port not working. When I'd tried using it originally it was never recognized. I'd pop a disk in and nothing ever happened.
From what I could tell my 1000 had never been opened before. It was completely virgin save for two memory expansions popped onto its exterior.
I soon discovered that the side RAM expansion needed to come off in order to remove the case.
So, this is what 512K of RAM used to look like, folks. Something the size of a very tall cheap romance paper back. Or maybe two Belgian waffles.
Incidentally, to simply remove the side RAM expansion required a screwdriver. It doesn't just pop in and out - it's screwed on.
You also need to remove some of the front plastic "caps", of which there are three. One covers an additional RAM expansion port, one covers the left side of the front case, and one covers the floppy disk drive. I removed all three. After taking the floppy disk cover off, I encountered a similar situation to what I found under the keyboard - total nasty. It truly is remarkable that this drive can read disks at all when a fluffy sweater surrounds the disk insertion bay.
The little LED lights for power and disk drive activity are really classy and clean. I wish more machines designed them like this.
To be quite frank, after removing all of the screws and RAM expansions and extra front plastic covers I was a bit flummoxed about how to open the case. I pulled and pried and the plastic bowed to an extreme curvature. And then, in a bit of frustration, I went for it and "pop!" it simply opened up on the right side of the case. But the left side worked like a hinge! Until I opened it even further and "pop!" that side disengaged as well.
I let out a huge sigh of relief that no tiny bits of plastic went flying.
And then, finally, I was rewarded with one of the absolutely coolest things about the 1000 machine (besides its obvious sex appeal): the engravings of the creators. Something 95% of the original owners of the 1000 never even saw. So so so SO cool! Even Miner's sweet old office dog's print was there for all the nerds to see. I cleaned the gold contacts for the 2 different expansion ports and any other surface or nook and cranny I could see.
At this stage, all I needed to remove was the heat shield.
After I removed the shield, the truth is the interior was nearly spotless! The main crud was around the front, which I'd already removed and the fan in the back. Well, and the power switch - it was keyboard nasty.
I pressed all of the chips into their slots firmly and sprayed some electronics cleaner into the external drive port. Then I buttoned it all back up.
I'm happy to report that the external drive port works now. More on that soon.
Oh, and the fluffy sweater found throughout the inside of the case has been carefully removed and sent to a better place - a place far, far away from this Amiga 1000.