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aluminum boxed orphan
Tuesday, September 3 2002
I was out putting up flyers down on one of those east-west streets north of Union when I came upon an old Compaq computer out on the sidewalk. It had been partially stripped of components, leaving behind a Socket 7 ATX motherboard, a CDROM drive, a floppy drive, and an elegant little power supply, all wrapped up in a beautiful undersized semi-proprietary aluminum case. Normally computers I find abandoned on the sidewalk also have considerable accumulated damage from passersby venting their pent-up computational frustrations, but for some reason this box had escaped all such gratuitous damage. I've been looking to downsize some of my computers, and this case seemed like the perfect means of accomplishing this objective, so I took it with me. First I'd have to clean it up; it had been out in the rain and was full of dirt and sand.
While I busied myself at this impromptu multi-hour project, I gave the motherboard a rinse and set it aside to dry. Amazingly, the CDROM drive and floppy drive seemed to have survived their outdoor experience mostly unscathed. Both still contained dust from their operational lives and this dust had never become wet, not even while the computer was abandoned in the rain.
In an effort to dry out the motherboard, I figured out how to disassemble the zero-insertion-force processor socket. The mechanism inside those sockets is amazingly simple and it's a wonder it's as reliable as it seems to be, particularly when you consider the fact that it has to make an independent, solid, and absolutely reversible connection with each of 321 processor pins every time a processor is inserted.
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