No. No I did not. But I thought I did just for a moment.

OK, let’s recap. What happened, why did I feel the need to ask the question? This of course relates to the latest project, the Olivetti PCS 44/C. I dropped the mouse while struggling to move the cursor around. The cable caught on something and it fell off the desk. For a brief moment, it sounded as if something had broken inside and the buttons ceased to ‘click’.

It’s a simple design and frankly all the better for it, being pretty comfortable in the hand and offering an ambidextrous layout. It’s also a little bit rubbish. Even though, like the rest of the computer, this is a pretty clean example, the tracking is dreadful. This is likely exacerbated by modern expectations – even the cheapest optical mouse seems to be hands down better than quality roller ball mouses. So naturally a certain flailing was involved when it caught, fell to the floor and apparently would click no more.

It was easy to open up, two screws underneath came out easily enough, then just pull the top shell back and lift away.

Inside we can see a pretty simple circuit, with the positional rollers for identifying motion, and two simple switches. No clips were broken and nothing was untoward. A quick clean with some isopropynal alcohol on the plastics (not on the rubberised ball though) and put it all together, we were good to go.

And go we most certainly can. Last night I worked on the hard drive and it is apparent that a certain portion of the BIOS sits on a very much hidden sector of the hard drive. Thankfully this is not necessarily a huge issue. The disk images dowloaded from a Vogons forum for the PCS 46/C work perfectly with this machine, allowing the option to boot off a floppy and configure the CMOS. The dead battery means these settings are not permanent, but Olivetti at least allow you to save the configuration for easy restore. As such, a boot from the utility floppy first allows smooth operation – smooth enough to fit this.

At 850MB this would be a huge drive for 1993, but appropriate as a later upgrade. It’s a little faster and a little quieter and allows me to keep the original drive stored away in its original state. It also gives me plenty of room for software to put this machine thoroughly through its paces.

There was a small casualty though – a piece of foam located by the screw holes for the drive inside the case utterly disintegrated. I am not even sure what the foam was for, other than perhaps an attempt at noise dampening, but it highlights the increasing fragility of these old machines.

So my biggest challenge here will be finding somewhere that sells exactly the right type of foam that I need to replace this. Still, progress has been made for now. The real fun will begin when I can replace the tap welded battery with a new coin cell holder and fresh battery – I hope.