A Major Hardware Restoration

People who were able to use Macintosh SE/30 computers have wound up to this day ready to praise them as the most powerful (stock) machines squeezed into “the original Mac form factor.” In a theoretical way I might have wound up among them; around the beginning of the 1990s my father was able to get one of those computers through his work, and he carried it home every so often. When years later, though, someone at the Apple users group that used to be set up in my area offered me a well-worn SE/30 CPU (with the red stripe alone all but worn off its Apple logo), I accepted the generous gift but was left wondering if I’d just welcomed trouble. I’d already seen a good many comments online about the modern necessity of replacing the surface-mount capacitors on the “logic board.” When I tried to start up the computer (with the “Floppy Emu” I ordered to use with a working Macintosh Plus I’d got my hands on some years earlier) to note a bare trickle of sound out of the headphone jack and a hard drive that didn’t respond to the basic formatting software, I could accept the truth of those comments. While I did buy a “learn to solder” kit and poked away at it for a while, the thought of doing that with anything valuable did continue to feel intimidating.
( Efforts at length and the help of others )