“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.
I remember my Apple //e, and lusting after an Apple IIgs when they came out. My first Mac was an SE/30, then a Performa 6300 (or something), then a PowerMac (Sawtooth). It died when I was upgrading its RAM, then I got one of the early 2006 Intel iMacs. Now the company where I work has an Xserve and Mac mini workstations, purchased on my recommendation.
Out of nostalgia I snagged an Apple //e from a local school when they were getting rid of them, and scored a IIgs on eBay. Now they’re in storage. Wow, what a long and wonderful ride it’s been!
(Yup, Zuney, you exposed yourself with the NuBus comment! You’re still my hero though!)
My first Mac was a Plus bought in 1989, I think…I bought with it a 30mb GCC external hard drive that cost $630. Actually used to back that thing up onto 800kb floppies…
Dealer threw in a copy of Symantec Utilities for Macintosh, or SAM.
$21 per megabyte for hard drive space. Later replaced the 30 mb with a 105 mb for about $400. Down to $4 per mb.
First printer was a GCC WriteImpact, a reworked 24-pin Panasonic that also ran about $600.
The Classic had a 20 MB hard drive and 1M ram – considered huge in 1990. My G4 sawtooth had 10 GB and 128 MB when I bought it in 2000. Now it has over 750GB space. My new MBP has 160 GB drive and 2GB ram. Things have really changed in such a short space of time.
“There was also a copy of RSG (Ready, Set, Go) DTP application for it (anyone here remembers that one).”
I loved RSG! My company actually published our first magazine using RSG. It worked wonderfully! BTW, I later learned that the makers kinda copied the Lotus 1, 2, 3 naming (1, 2, 3…ready, set, go).
Before that, my company ran entirely on an Apple IIc. Macs ever since!
Was a funky system to work on. First you had to have that giant stardriver to get it open. Then it was basically 2 boards, a drive, and a couple of switches.
Oh, if you’re opening one up and have a spare flyback transformer, mine is cracked
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@ tekriter:
Here’s hard drive cost for you: SuperMac Dataframe 20XP SCSI HDD, 20 MB. $1499 with UCLA discount!
And…here’s the fun. $500 to add the SCSI port to the battery compartment of my 512ke.
I didn’t realize that the Mac Classic was significantly different on the inside than a Mac SE (and SE/30).
“…then a Performa 6300 (or something), then a PowerMac (Sawtooth)……”
If the Performa model number had 4 numbers (ie: the 6300) — then it was a “Power Mac” ..
The models using 3 numbers (ie: Performa 400 ) were known as 68k Macs .. due to their 680xx processors ..
My first Mac was probably one of the last NuBus machines.
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I remember upgrading that beast with a Sonnett G3/250 card, a whopping 36 mgs of RAM (single slot-4mgs onboard) — and a hi tech NuBus video card which sported an unbelievable 4 mgs of VRAM !!
Still have it and it still boots up to OS 7.6 !!
Amazing !
What’s with all you whipper-snappers talkin’ about this new-fangled Mac stuff??
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Radio Shack TRS-80
Apple II Plus with cassette
Apple IIe with 80-column card & Disk II drives
Apple IIc with UniDisk 3.5 drive
etc…
There’s gotta be someone from the IBM punch-card era here to put me in my place.
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IIRC the SE/30 paired to a LaserWriter II was THE DTP bomb of its time. Not for the dollar-squeamish!
Great to hear the stories about these “old machines”.
They were the ones that created the wave that became the Mac faithful and convinced that computing could be fun for everyone.
Great machines that worked.
We learned a lot about what computing should be all about from them.
@ Tommy Boy
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I’d be happy to have your PowerBook 140!! Drop me a line @ 3 giraffes at gmail dot com
Great – it only took them 24 years, but they are *finally* starting to see the appeal of a Mac
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I recall that the early Macs buffered audio in the video refresh cycle to conserve / optimize memory. Talk about a study in efficiency. The SE/30 was quite the powerhouse back in the day.
Sky
I loved 6.08. It was absolutely stable and I did great things with it. Still have a classic. My original 128K Mac is long gone, however.
My first fully assembled computer was a 1MB Classic II bought for A$2500 or so in 1992 … I eventually upgraded it to 2MB (expensive). I was lusting after Amiga’s (multitasking GUI and a CLI) until then. My first machine was a 16K microbee kit(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBee) in 1982 (upgraded to 32K) which had BASIC and a Z80 Editor/Asssembler (which got old quick so I bought a Forth module). Before then I just had mainframe and midi-mainframe exposure (CDC Cyber, DEC-10). Now I feel I’ve used just about every major platform around … mostly via Unix … though I still have nightmares about the UNIVAC-1100 and IBM-3081/3080 “operating systems” (Arghhh!). DEC spoiled me for everything else – in at lot of ways DEC was the Apple (almost the Google … remember AltaVista) of it’s time … hopefully Apple will not go the same way (destroyed by a bunch of dumb accountant suits).