by hliyan | 2025-04-14 12:19:53+00:00
The paragraph about capacitors brought back some strange memories: around 1989, my father, for reasons still unfathomable, decided to purchase an IBM XT clone. I say unfathomable because we (myself, my mother and two siblings) were in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where at the time there was virtually nothing useful we could do with a computer, while my father was stationed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he worked. Perhaps he just got a good deal (we weren't in any way rich) and decided to ship one back home.

I was 10, my brother was 15 and my sister was 7. For some reason, I ended up playing with the device the most -- playing the occasional game of Karateka and Digger, writing small amounts of BASIC to do math, draw shapes or make sounds over its very rudimentary speaker, and sometimes creating joke certificates using a program called Certificate Maker. There were other programs among the stack of 5 1/4 floppy disks my father sent home, but I couldn't figure out what they were for.

One day, the DOS prompt intermittently started spitting out an error when I tried to load a program from a disk: "Ready? Abort? Ignore?" (I know the common one goes "Abort? Retry? Fail?" but this version of DOS, whatever it was, had a different verbiage). This would happen on and off for a few weeks, until that fateful day when I sat in front of the computer, toggled the power switch at the back of the system unit as I always did, and instead of the familiar "A:\>", I was greeted with a blank screen, then a smell of expensive plastic burning, and finally a plume of white smoke out the back of the system unit. As a naturally anxiety prone 10-year old in charge of the most expensive device in the house, I froze in sheer panic for what felt like 5 minutes. I switched the thing off and told no one.

When my father finally returned, I sent word through my brother. I was not punished or admonished as anticipated. He (my father) opened up the device (I could have done it myself -- the metal casing opened up with a hinge, much like a hood/bonnet of a car), and discovered that a mouse was responsible. Not a pointing device -- the machine didn't have one -- but a rodent. It had squeezed in through an air vent and had chewed on a few cables. It was when it chewed through a grey data ribbon that the machine had started stuttering "Ready? Abort? Ignore?". But the day after the mouse chomped on a power cable, it exploded. Or rather, a capacitor inside the power unit had exploded.

The unit was never repaired. Sri Lanka did not have the parts or the personnel at the time.

My second computer, which again, my father brought down some years later, was a 386. This unit served me well for several years with only occasional hiccups that could be remedied by swapping out an expansion card or a hard disk. On one such occasion, I took the system unit (now a vertical tower instead of a bulky, horizontal slab) to be looked at by a technician in town (Sri Lanka now had the personnel). He dutifully plugged it in, connected a keyboard, monitor and a mouse (mice had arrived) and hit the power switch. And it exploded. Or rather, a capacitor inside the power unit exploded (I discovered it later, head blown open like some angry cartoon character, when I took it home and opened it up). My mind began to go into nightmarish flashbacks. Then I remembered: this unit, manufactured in the US, ran on 110 volts, where as Sri Lankan mains were 220 volts. It did have a voltage selector switch, but the voltage stabilizer at home (UPS units were not yet a thing -- we were still trying to protect our delicate machines from voltage fluctuations) was built to take in 220v and output 110v (will not go into this tangent). I had forgotten this fact when I took the thing to the shop.

But the technician, unperturbed, casually fanned away the white smoke with his palm, set the selector to 220V and hit the power switch again. The machine booted up perfectly (except, that is, for the original fault which I brought it in for). It seems the 220V circuit within the power unit was unaffected. The device continued to work on 220V.

Not sure why I shared this, but seeing capacitors in the context of computer circuitry always brings up this memory. It also brings up remnants of the computer-failure related PTSD that I grappled with for many years until laptops came along. Not sure whether it was the knowledge that the new devices primarily operated on DC battery power, or if the new clamshell shape broke some association my brain had created between large, cubic computing devices, and danger.