Unavoidable bombing on startup on my baby Mac Plus

I am a longtime PC user, but started out on Apple IIe's back in elementary school, which I loved. So I was excited to find a Mac Plus at a garage sale recently. I bought it and obtained system disks (not sure what OS) from a coworker, and eagerly put them in today to test.

Too eagerly! It booted up fine at first, so I started playing around with some system files (all I have at this point). I made a RAMDrive of about 450k (it maxed at 800k something) and told it to make the drive every time on startup.

I think that was my mistake. I mean, my true mistake was not realizing the respect one has to have for these machines. But soon afterwards, as I ran some random program, I got a bomb with error ID = 14, and now every time the thing starts up, I get the same error. I've tried pushing all kinds of buttons, and holding down option, shift, and control when the thing boots. Nothing works!

Am I totally hosed? Any ideas?

Thanks!

Errors between 04 and 14 are likely due to bugs in application software. 15 and
31 are often corrupted system file. Hold down shift on start up and turn extensions off. Throw away the finder preferences folder. Run the system on the hard drive not the ram dics.

Thanks for the advice. I've tried holding shift on startup, but it doesn't seem to do anything. Is there a particular time you have to start pressing them, or one or the other shift button that I should push? I've tried a lot of combinations but nothing seems to do anything.

I suppose it's possible that the keyboard or keyboard cord is broken.

In any case I can't get to the OS to throw out any folders, and there is nothing on the hard drive (I should have installed the OS when I had the chance!).

When I made changes to the startup sequence (telling it to install the RAMDisk automatically), did it save those changes to some kind of RAM/ROM in the computer, or did it change my startup disk? If the former, maybe this flashing of the PRAM that I've read about would help? If the latter, maybe I should look into getting new startup disks.

Thanks again!

Check out lowendmac.com, and run a search there for Mac Plus, and anything else you might think of, such as system, system disks, booting, that sort of thing.

The site has a wealth of info on old Macs.

I think older Mac's will not save the contents of Ram Disks,later power macs will. So theres nothing on the hard drive. Use the install floppy to reformat the drive and reinstall the OS. Did you get the OS floppies with the machine,should be about 12 of them. Use the first floppy to
boot the machine.