“TechRepublic acquired an Apple Macintosh Classic for sole purpose of cracking it open to see what secrets it held inside. “Cracking Open the Apple Macintosh Classic” is available now under the TechRepublic Photo Gallery tab,” Mark Kaelin blogs for TechRepublic.
“Consistent with Apple Computer Company’s reputation for design innovation and engineering skill, the Mac Classic is a study in efficiency, both in terms of space and power utilization,” Kaelin reports. “With a 9-inch CRT display built right in the case, you have to cram some powerful and dangerous amounts of power into a very compact space without interfering with the flow of data through the silicon components of the computer. The Mac Classic handles this balancing act with aplomb.”
Full article here.
to Mr. Reeee:
Takes one to know one, right…?
$4 grand in the 80’s would be close to $10 grand today. How much Mac could you get for that? If it were to be one single Mac, it would have to be one souped-up, tricked out Mac Pro with dual 30″ studio displays!
We sure spent hell of a lot of cash on those old computing machines back then…
these old machines are great for nostalgia. i didn’t get into macs until about six years ago, but i have and love an old SE. it’s my favorite machine for playing infocom text adventures on, because there isn’t much else going on with that computer to distract me. great times.
Mm… I can still remember turning on my dad’s Classic II for the first time… beautiful memories…
please excuse me while I enjoy the trip to memory lane…
The only thing that didn’t fly out of the cracked case was hope.
@Mr. Reeee
Don’t forget LocalTalk. What Rabic PeeCee enthusiast would know about that. Only Die hard Macheads know about NuBus and LocalTalk Zuney.
You may as well give up trying to spoof us Zune Tang dude. You’re out of the closet now
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Still have my first Mac Plus!
Good old day!?! You can have them. Remember the boot floppy and then put in the application disk to do your work and then the file floppy?
Give me Mac OS X anytime.
Everybody just settle down. I’m just zapping your PRAM.
Your potential. Our passion.™
MacTracker/My Models shows:
Macintosh 128k (sold at a garage sale about 15 years ago)
Macintosh 512k (In storage. Still runs)
Macintosh SE/30 (Fate unknown, but I learned Multicalc on that one)
PowerBook 140 (Sold at a garage sale in 2004. Still ran)
PowerBook G3 Series (Failed screen hinge. In attic. Still runs)
PowerBook G4 (Gigabit Ethernet) (In daily use)
iMac G5 17-inch (Ambient Light Sensor) (ditto)
MacBook Pro (15-inch Core 2 Duo) (In for DVD burner replacement, but otherwise fine.)
Like so many other things, the first ones made the biggest difference in my life.
Hey “old timer”!
I still have my Mac 128K — the original Mac — in its blue nylon carrying case too (so called “Mac Classic” actually came later). I got rid of the original Imagewriter printer some time ago, but will never part with this gem. I recently found the original sales receipt, and I have the original System 1.0 floppies too. They were full system *and* applications on a single 400K floppy disk. Hey, I’m not that much of a pack rat.
My grandmother bought it for me for my undergrad college graduation present in fall of 1984 (do the math and that will date me quite accurately).
I’ve always wanted to connect it up to my current home network but never knew how. Any resources out there for that info?
At least I could use it as a lamp in my home office and run Flying Toasters screen saver on it.
nOObs.
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Unless you made an AppleTalk network using PhoneNet™ connectors and lots of RJ-11, you are modern kids
I hauled my 512ke home and back every day to UCLA.
I then built a small lab with one Mac and a LaserWriter printer.
The 30-seat IBM lab – donated (free) sat empty while my little Mac setup had a sign-in sheet.
Those were the days when it was Apple vs Big Blue – IBM.
What ever happened to them?
> I’m just zapping your PRAM.
Man, it’s been a looong, long time since I had to do Cmd-Opt-P-R.
There were a bunch of other startup key combos. The coolest was Cmd-Opt-Shift-Del, which would cause the Mac to bypass the internal SCSI drive and boot from an external drive.
I used to have a “Maintenance” external hard disk that I’d plug in to a user’s Mac when it was having problems. Boot from the Maintenance drive, fix the problem, and off they go. Simple! And nothing in the PC world even came close. Still doesn’t.
I had a Mac Plus and Imagewriter II printer from shortly after I started college in 1988 until around 1996 shortly after my mom bought a 7200 in 1995. Then I worked in a store where they used Color Classics for cash registers and I finally got my Power Tower Pro 225 in July 1997 right before I went to MacWorld and saw the Keynote where Steve Jobs said that Apple was done with clones. Alas, if I had just waited until the end of that Summer to buy my birthday present, I would have gotten an 8600 0r 9600. Over the next 4 years, I got my hands on various macs as they were being replaced at work. Also had a couple of Macinsteins ie – an 8600 Mobo in a 7600 box. Finally bought my Quicksilver 933 in 2002 which I used until last August when I replaced it with the 24 inch 2.8 GHz iMac that I am typing this on. As for my old Mac Plus, I gave that to an artist friend of mine to turn into an aquarium or a stereo speaker stand. I’m sure he will get to it eventually.
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NuBus was a breath of fresh air … an astounding example of connectivity during the dark days of computing.
And never in the history of desktop computing was the speed so different between ALL computers on the market and the Macintosh II Fx.
It was a frigging gorilla. And at the low, low price of about 18,000 bucks.
It reminds me of my first computer, a Mac Plus. That game Submarine absolutely rocked. Oh well I guess that’s one game I’ll never get to play again. Ah the memories of OS6.
Re: Smiley Face. Perhaps Apple should give people the choice of what image they see on start-up.
Personally, I want to see the scene from Jurassic Park where the T-Rex eats the lawyer!
Another old timer here. I got 128K original Mac as a graduation present (PhD) in 1984. It got an external floppy drive shortly, and I did the cut-the-chips-off-the-motherboard RAM upgrade. This was described in Dr. Dobbs Journal, and it worked like a charm. My friends and I upgraded over a dozen machines and never lost a patient.
@ Spark. “Still have my first Mac Plus!”
Ditto. And a Mac 512. Ah, memories. But I’ll stick to using my 24″ iMac.
They were a pain in arse to pack up, but I sold a couple of these oldies but goodies last year on eBay, along with a Color Classic, and made out like a bandit. I actually never wanted to sell the Color Classic, but the need for closet space superseded by need of a vintage Mac. And they all still work.
And, on the ol’ 512 (SE?) still have (somewhere in store room, along with the external floppy, 2 of them maybe, forget now) ran Microsoft Works 1.0 – which believe was the first ‘big time’ application Microsoft put out, and was only for the Mac.
Really was a helluva database program – and seems to be not that much different from the latest Appleworks (still chugging along) and combined with a dot matrix printer, made my life/work a LOT easier way back when in the ‘dark ages’
Wow, how far we’ve come in 20 years
Just imagine the next 20
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We going to Change the World™
BC
I had one of those — bought it in 1984.
Hmmm, actually I had the original Mac, not the classic.
I still get angry when I think about my old MacPlus. I got it my senior year in college. Several years later, after getting an LCIII, I gave the old MP to my sister when she was in college. She ended up taking it with her after graduating and moving to Texas. When I asked her about it a few years later, she said she had let ‘some guy’ borrow it. She didn’t remember who, when, where… so it was so long, Mac. 🙁
MW = decided (as in, I ‘decided’ never to let my sister borrow anything ever again!)
hell I made a lamp with my Macintosh SE http://www.ialex.es/El_iBlog/Blog/Entradas/2008/6/18_iLamp____.html and it looks just amazing perfect for my office