Close call cleaning a Slik Stik…

I’m posting this quick  as warning to anybody thinking about cleaning a Slik Stik joystick.

I bought one a while back and put it aside being a bit grungy until i could clean it (two months and counting and still suffering for the hurt right arm..)

 

I took it apart and gave it a good wash in the kitchen sink in dish soap..  Then went to dry it and decided to use contact cleaner (KLEENS-IT) to get the moisture out of the electrical parts.

 

BAD BAD VERY BAD IDEA!  It ATTACKED the plastic big time!  I could see it melting, the orange fire button was gooing to the black.. I ran with it to the sink again and flushed it with more hot soaking water and things settled down.  I’ve done this to other sticks with no problem, but the Slik Stik must use some soft plastic.  So Just wanted to post it fast.

 

The stick is drying now, and hopefully no harm done it will be helping me save the galaxy soon.

Forever Floppy

It’s been a while since my last post due to a injury and some other stressy stuff, but I’m still alive as far as I can tell…

About a month ago I bought an Atari 600XL and a floppy drive for it which resurrected the need for 5.25 inch floppy disks.  I still have a few Atari disks back from when I had my original 800 that I hung on to.  And 25 or 30 year later, they all still work! 🙂 And I reformatted some PC disks that had nothing useful on them to Atari also.

Recently I found about about telnet enabled BBS and having run on in the past, in fact when I found the old backups, I found that closed it 20 years ago last month.  So being a real geek, I had to give it a go.  And hunted out the old collection of floppies with the BBS and all the door games and stuff and started coping all the files to one of my PC’s that had a 5.25″ drive in it.  All of the disks worked except a few off brand disks  that really had nothing on them anyway.  They were branded “Steals”,  a short lived computer and office supply store that was like Staples of today, sold low end products under their own label.  (I’m no fan of Staples brand products either, in fact I refuse to shop there anymore.)

 

The brand name disks I normally bought were all good and read perfectly.  Yes floppies don’t hold much by today’s standards, we’ve become way to use to the bloat of modern software.  I wonder though if today’s USB flash drives will still be readable after 20 or 30 years sitting in a box…  Floppies may be old now, but have proven to me to be a reliable store media.  And there’s something fun about put then in an old drive again and seeing my old files still there waiting for me. 🙂

By the way, yes my BBS is run and running again as a telnet only system.  I’ll post more on it when I get a bit more work done on it.