For a little more than a year a YMUG special-interest group that calls itself the Dead Mac Society has been collecting broken Macintoshes, fixing them, and placing them in good homes. The program began when a few YMUG members who had some experience fixing their own dead Macs imagined that there might be broken Macs around the campus that were unwanted but not yet thrown out. Posters and public e-mail asking for these machines have generated a steady trickle of dead Macs which we have repaired or used as parts donors. Those that could be repaired have been placed in three schools, in a library, with a disabled person, and with several single-parent families.
The Macs YMUG has placed are not outright gifts. If one is no longer needed, then we want it back to recycle elsewhere. If one fails, as these old ones might at any moment (and have), we repair it if possible or, since we usually have more working machines on hand than mice and keyboards to go with them, provide another working one. We will also upgrade a recipient to a more capable model if appropriate.
Every Mac that is placed has a "sponsor," a YMUG member who is responsible for seeing that it has usable software and who can answer the user's questions. We are trying to provide the use of a computer, not just the hardware. Macs that have gone to schools have a YMUG member as the teacher, so we know they will be used well.
Though we have a fair amount of expertise, we don't do repairs as a user group activity, not even on YMUG members' machines, because we have no formal training at this and don't want the responsibility for working on someone else's Mac. We will only work on a machine that has been given up on.
Nor do we sell or buy old Macs. Except for a few minor expenses like printer cables or ribbons, we do all of this without any money being involved. We do retain a few machines to use as loaners, for disk copying, or for use at YMUG meetings, so we have gotten something material out of all this, but mostly we are having a lot of fun learning more about the Mac's innards and making new Mac users at the same time.
Right now we don't have enough ImageWriters to go with the Macs that are available for placement. We can also use 1 Mb memory modules that were replaced with larger ones, dead hard drives, manuals, and original disks and manuals for old software. Nothing is too trivial. We will gladly accept ANY broken or working but obsolete Mac-related equipment. We'll take it gratefully. Call Bill Sacco at 23734 to arrange pickup and get on the Dead Macs Honor Roll.