I had noticed an offer on the web, a box with two Atari STs, power supplies, a book, cables and floppy drives for 99 Euro. Since I felt like tinkering again, I bought the box.
It was kind of a grab bag. The salesman had connected one of the Atari STs and booted it, with the other one he said the lights went on after all. The latter has no operating system ROMs, so of course nothing can boot there.
So I first of all dedicated myself to one of the two, the Atari 260ST, unscrewed it and:
Also the keyboard could be overhauled:
Retrobrighting would be translated into German as de-yellowing. So after I carefully cleaned the Ataris with the vacuum cleaner from years of dust deposits, I realized that I had to treat them somehow regarding the yellowing as well.
So far, I was relatively unfamiliar with the subject, so I watched quite a few videos on the web and got the necessary bleach, a hair bleach cream from Wella with a small amount of hydrogen peroxide. I then painted all the case parts with it and laid them out in our garden on a beautiful sunny day.
Something also had to happen to the keyboard. The keys were extremely yellowed. So I took off all the keycaps and exposed them to the sun in a solution of half water, half bleach for a day as well. They became much less yellow, but unfortunately I couldn't get rid of the yellowing completely.
Now that the cases were much nicer again, I took a look at the 260ST and tried if it still gives something. But more about that in another blog article.