Resurrected from the dead - Apple Newton MessagePad 120 - A flood story

Pickles von Brine · October 21, 2021

Hey everyone,
I got one hell of a tale for all of you. Back on September 4th Ida came through the Northeast. Where I live had 4 inches of ran per hour for about 2 hours during the storm. Our house flooded like we have never seen. My stepfather lived in our area for 50 years and never seen flooding like what we got. Final totals of rain were 10 inches or so.

This flood happened fast. We knew it was coming, but it didn't make it easier to get all the things we needed from our raised first level. By 10:30pm sept 3rd water in the first level. By 11, there was 5 feet. By midnight, the water was 8 feet deep
through the first story.

Here is a photo of me and the line above my head was how deep the water was.

Below shows the power of the water.

And the mess in our first story (raised structure).

This was the front of my house at about 1030-11pm at night.

In all of this mess we lost a lot of things but also managed to salvage some stuff.

One of the things we managed to salvage was my stepdad's old Newton MessagePad 120 PDA. This thing was caked in mud. I opened it, there was rust and corrosion in various parts. Under the board was bad.

After some minor soldering, complete disassembly, cleaning of some IPA a scrub brush and replacing some batteries (there were none when all of this happened. I have a working newton. Which is amazing.

For something almost 30 years old, it is amazing it even survived.

Pickles von Brine · October 21, 2021

Here is the PDA working. This thing was under 8 feet of water for 18 hours at least. Luckily, the coin cell battery in it had long gone bad and there were not other batteries in the device.

I didn't take more photos of me restoring it. I am just amazed the damn thing works. It sat in a box for 20 years.

Electronics with no power and have water exposure are surprisingly resilient.

da na · October 24, 2021

Very sorry to hear about your house.

However, the fact that the Newton survived is incredible! I have a similar story my dad told me. I was very young, but our whole city flooded while we were out of town and couldn't get back for days. Came back to find the basement under 2 ft of stagnant water that had been there for almost a week. Under the water was quite a lot of papers, etc, a VCR and a 2 week old PowerBook G4 Titanium. Water had gotten inside but the battery was luckily fully discharged. Apparently (can't confirm) but a person at a repair shop said there was rust on the board and he was amazed it powered on at all. The laptop still works to this day despite running very hot/loud, battery doesn't hold a charge and it shuts off after about 2 hours of operation.