When I restored my Apple II back in 2008, one of the things I did was to remove a modification I had made back in the late 1970s.

This was a change that I had made in order to work around a very annoying feature of the Apple II. The reset switch was located right next to the return key and was not gated by any other keys or logic. If you were typing on the keyboard and attempted to hit the return key and accidentally hit the reset key by mistake, you would reset your computer. My fix back in the day, was to put a toggle switch in series with the reset key that would disable or enable it. Here is a picture of the switch in 2008 after it was pulled and with the mounting hole filled with modeling putty.

Reset Switch Being Pulled

Over time, I realized that the reset mod was part of the history of the computer and should have been left in place. I came to this conclusion quite a number of years ago. This morning, I finally went ahead and put the toggle switch back in. This is same exact switch that I pulled out of the machine in 2008.

Sometimes being a pack rat, pays off. I was even able to find some of the same green wire that I had used to wire the switch back in the late 1970s.

Old Green Wire

The reinstallation wasn’t without difficultly, though. After reassembling the machine, I couldn’t get a reset to “take”, at all. Turns out that the reset key itself had decided it didn’t want to function. I disassembled the machine, and flooded the key with isopropyl alcohol. That did the trick and it came back to life. While I had the machine apart, I also flooded the control key, which has been giving me trouble for a number of years. Since the machine has been sitting for quite a while, a few other keys need some coaxing, but they all came back to life.

When I originally did the job, I didn’t label the switch, and often forgot which position was which. This time, I decided to label it. In retrospect, I should have used a normally open, momentary switch, which in effect, would have worked the same way as Apple’s control-reset solution. I didn’t think of that back in the day, so I decided to reinstall the same old switch with the addition of those descriptive labels.

Reset Enable Switch