Found an old Apple IIe at a thrift store in Tulsa and the CRT gave me a flash

I was digging through a dusty back corner at a Goodwill off Route 66 last weekend and spotted an Apple IIe with the green monitor still attached. Plugged it in at the store and the CRT flickered to life with that classic amber glow, but I noticed the floppy drive was jammed with a crumpled up receipt from 1992. Has anyone else run into old paper jams in retro drives and found a way to gently clean them out without wrecking the read heads?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_thomas28d ago

Take it easy on the panic, a crumpled receipt isn't gonna wreck the heads unless you go digging with a screwdriver. Just pop the drive door open and use a pair of plastic tweezers to slowly pull the paper out, don't scrape anything. If the drive was running fine before the jam, it's probably just a piece of old trash, not a death sentence for the floppy drive.

valthomas28d ago

Funny you mention that, reminds me of this old Amiga 500 I picked up at a garage sale years ago. The previous owner had stuffed a bunch of business cards in the drive slot as some kind of cleaning method, I guess. Took me a solid hour with a pair of tweezers and a flashlight to fish out all the little bits of cardboard. Drive worked fine after that though, actually lasted a few more years before the belt finally gave out. So yeah, if the drive was spinning disks alright before the jam, you're probably safe to just gently pull that receipt out and move on with your day.