Last evening, at the end of the work day, we had left Tim in the office thinking about how to raise the dead.

After receiving a cache of floppy disks pulled out of storage by our colleague Dolores, it became imperative to see if they could be read. Along with those, she also brought in a box containing an old SyQuest Drive and a number of disks for it. Those guys had to be read as well, and they required an old computer with a SCSI connector to do it.

So late afternoon yesterday, Tim burst into action and brought an old Apple SE/30- a machine that was used long ago by folks in the office- in from storage, along with a compatible external hard drive, and after he found some power cords and a SCSI cord, he powered the old computer up. And it powered up alright, but it apparently couldn’t read its hard drive.

He put a few system disks into the computer’s 1.44 inch floppy drive and tried to get the machine to boot off them. No go. The machine just flashed a question mark floppy icon at us, telling us it was still in a coma.

So he went back into the storage and pulled a second old SE/30 out, and corded it up and then turned it on. And this one tried to get going and made grindy sounds, but it could not give us anything on the screen.

The disk reading project was put on hold for the rest of the evening…

But today was a new day.

Fresh with ingenuity this morning, Tim decided to take the hard drive out of machine B and put it in machine A. Or as he put it, “give the first Mac the second Mac’s brains.”

It took him a little bit to see how to get the hard drive/floppy drive bundle off of the second Mac’s chassis, but soon, he had a freshly harvested dusty hard drive in hand. Now familiar with taking the SE/30 apart, he then got the first machine open quickly, and had the drive bundle out of it in no time.

Tim prepares machine A to receive a vital organ from machine B.

The transplant brain went into machine A well- the organ donation was an ideal match.

Tim then reassembled the machine A’s innards and put its shell back onto it. He attached the SCSI cord to the external drive, and then attached a power cord to the machine and to a power source.

And then he flipped the power switch on…

The machine booted- but a question mark floppy icon appeared, suggesting the machine could not find its hard drive- like when it had been powered up before. Undaunted, Tim turned it off, and then back on again. And the same thing happened.

Like a guy with great faith trying to start a car with a dead battery, Tim turned the machine off and on again another five times, each with the same empty result, until on the sixth try, something different happened on the SE’s screen…

It’s alive! “FrankenMac” was alive!

Tim took a chance and rebooted the Mac after he attached the SyQuest Drive to it, and the Mac powered up again nicely, and with a SyQuest disk in the drive, the disk’s icon showed up on the desktop. He then clicked on the disk icon and then looked at files on the drive. We then took some time to see what else was still present and accessible on the old time capsule computer.

Some would call it a miracle of science.

Or just a fun project for the morning.

Whatever you want to call it, at least-for today- we know FrankenMac is alive.