In alt.home.repair, on Sun, 16 Aug 2015 14:19:44 -0400, J Burns
wrote:

On 8/16/15 1:23 PM, micky wrote:
In alt.home.repair, on Sun, 16 Aug 2015 12:16:17 -0400, J Burns
wrote:

The OP said his Mac II worked with a dead battery. One respondent said

There may well have been more than one rendition of the Mac II.

I'm 99% sure it was a Mac ii. It had two 5 1/4" drives although I don't
know if that was the basis of its name.

Well, all right...
http://www.everymac.com/systems/appl...cs/mac_ii.html

If you replaced them with AAA batteries, the lithium batteries must have
been in parallel.

Why parallel? FWIW, maybe it was AA.

The only reason to do that would be to get a big
current surge. They must have been needed for the startup sequence,
which wasn't usual.

This site indicates that the pop-in battery is right for all Mac II's.
http://www.newertech.com/products/pram_3_6v.php

I don't care what it says. It wasn't there. I was.

See why I'm mixed up?

Yes. ;-)

It also says the symptom of a dead battery is
clock trouble. That seems to be true of most Macs, but not yours or my
StarMax. (I think a StarMax could be started without a battery if you
knew what you were doing, but I replaced mine twice without waiting for
it to die, to be on the safe side.)

I had expected to get an old free Apple monitor some day, and I let the
computer sit on its side for a year or two, and eventually something
leaked, and dripped on one of the empty slots. Given all this, I threw
it away. which is pretty rare for me, but it's why I can't check any of
the details now. .


Well I'm glad they improved their design. My story goes back almost
20 years, so the machine was only about 10 years old or less.

It sounds like an anomaly. Sculley came in from Pepsi in 1983. He
wanted to make Macs more like PCs. Jobs quit in 1985. The original Mac
II may have been Sculley's dream computer.