Worth the read if for no other reason than to see the disk ejected in zero gravity.

Oh my. Yeap, definitely check polarity and voltages on used stuff.

At least it wasn't as bad as someone at my high school (c. 1995) who plugged a Centronics printer into a Mac SE external SCSI connector and released the magic smoke™ of both.

Thank goodness I gave up physical retrocomputing as a hobby ages back. Oh, I've held on to my display piece IIe, and framed the motherboard of my high-school 486, the first machine I ever built myself. Past that, though, these days everything is emulated or virtualized. Leaded solder fans and museumists are welcome to the rest!

"Bad magic number" brings back some PTSD of trying to get a Sun Server working in like 2001. My friend and I futzed with that thing for hundreds of hours.

Good memories from uni working with those (and other Sun) machines. I still have many of them and last I checked (during covid) they all still work.

I have mixed feelings about the openboot font, specifically that most times I saw it my life was actively sucking.

Other than that it's very nice for a console font. Why don't we have PC BIOSes with that font, eh?