On Fri, 22 May 1998, Erik E. Fair wrote:

> [ I fried something in my SCSI chain and it appears to be on the ]
> [ motherboard.                                                   ]

I did this on my 3/80 only three weeks after I aquired it, back in 1993. 
I had opened the case to take a look at what was inside the and as part of
my inspection I had unplugged the data cables to the internal SCSI drives.
When I was done looking around I plugged the cables back in and powered
the unit back on, without replacing the cover in typical hacker fasion. 
To my dismay, a thin line of blue smoke drifted up from the motherboard.

I had accidentally plugged the SCSI cable just one row of pins to the left
of where it should have been.  This shorted out one of the power line PCB
traces on the underside of the motherboard and curdled it like sour milk. 
With some electrical tape and a wire that was a little too heavy for the
job I restored the electrical path without solder(!)  It worked great and
I didn't touch it until this year when I finally decided to replace it
with a much thinner gauged ``wire-wrap'' wire and a nice soldering job. 

-J