It’s ALIVE

After swapping the dead -12V 2A fuse, I powered it up and everything stayed on for about 30 minutes.

So I decided to attach the monitor, keyboard and alpha-numeric keyboard and see what happened and sure enough, we have life!

Super exciting! Keep in mind this Fairlight hasn’t been powered on for over 20 years!
So next the big step, let’s insert a system disk, now I’ve no idea if the disks still work or if the drives have died (I can hear a motor but that’s all), and as I say, it is 20 years old.

Yes! it booted much to my amazement, and what’s more I can even load samples from some of the floppy disks. Sadly some of the disks have disk errors, but being able to load “ARR” and “ORCH5” and play with it was just so much fun honestly it was epic. I lost a few hours playing around with various “dooo” , orchestra samples and other strange noises, including brass fall.

Next up is the light pen, sadly this is in quite a few pieces, but I’m really surprised how easy the Fairlight is to navigate without the pen.
Once the pen is working the display will go to a friend to have the tube rejuvenated.