My Macintosh Museum
The above photo was shot at 12:01 a.m. (PST) on January 1, 2000;
happy Y2K! (Of course, if there had been Y2K-related power
outages, the picture would have been dark except for the
battery-equipped PowerBook asking "Y2K?")
The PowerBook was the first computer I ever bought, in 1998, when
I decided I couldn't take one of the machines from work with me when
I drove Clean Across
America And Back (a journey from Los Angeles to Maine and back in
my natural-gas-powered Dodge van) and I couldn't get my digital
camera to communicate with the LC II that my parents had given me
(yes, I had been planning to lug the LC II and a 15" monitor across
the country; it's a big van!). Since then, I have learned a lot more
about older Macs, mostly from the Low
End Mac website; I ended up donating the LC II to a school in
Hayward, CA, that I found on that site's Schools
Needing Macs page. I have always had a soft spot in my heart (or
maybe in my head!) for the old all-in-one compact Macs, though, and
since then I have picked up a few. My collection as of Y2K comprised,
from left to right in the photo:
- An SE with two 800 kB floppy drives (no hard drive, though I
can use and even boot from my 100 MB Zip drive!), circa 1987-1989.
This was the most recent addition as of Y2K, purchased from
MacOnline because I wanted
to see what it was like to run solely off floppies. (Actually, I
ordered a Mac Plus, but they ran out of those and so they sent me
the SE as a free upgrade!) I can boot anything up to System 7.5.5
(off the Zip disk), but usually use 6.0.8 because it fits
comfortably on an 800 kB floppy and in 4 MB of RAM. This and the
SE/30 (see below) have Asante
Ethernet cards installed,
which I got from Galaxy
Hardware Publishing.
- An SE/30, circa 1989-1990, maxed out with 32 MB of RAM (until
February 2000, that's as much as you got with a brand-new iBook!).
This was my first black-and-white Mac; I bought it from Computer
Classics mostly to experiment with operating systems. Its
internal hard drive boots System 7.5.5 or Debian
Linux; I have used an external drive to try (unsuccessfully)
to fool it into running
MacOS 8.1 using Pseud040 and to experiment with NetBSD.
I have a Beehive
Technologies ADB I/O box for controlling sensors and circuits,
and I have some projects I want to try next using that...
- A Color Classic, circa 1993-1994, bought from MicroMac
with their resolution upgrade installed (640 x 480 pixels, instead
of the original 512 x 384). On 28 February 2000 I installed
a Sonnet Presto Plus
upgrade card, so I now have a 68040 processor, 32 MB of RAM in
addition to the 10 MB ceiling for the stock machine, and Ethernet!
This allows me to boot MacOS 8.1, but I usually run System 7.5.5.
I actually find the sharp little color screen of this machine
easier to look at than the passive-matrix LCD of my PowerBook, and
use it for most of my letter-writing, plus playing games like
WarCraft and SimCity
Classic; it's the one that sits on my desk hooked up to the
printer.
- A PowerBook G3 Series ("Wallstreet I"), bought from ClubMac
in June 1998 as a 233 MHz machine with no Level 2 cache. This is
my only "modern" machine; I have installed the usual RAM and hard
drive upgrades, and in September 1999 I boosted its speed about
130% by swapping in a 292 MHz daughtercard with 1 MB of L2 cache
from The PowerBook Guy.
This was top-of-the-line (and unaffordable!) when my machine was
new and was, even fifteen months later, faster than the
then-current 333 MHz iMac and 300 MHz iBook and about even with
the 333 MHz "Lombard" PowerBook G3 (their 512 kB caches slowed
them down, though not as badly as the zero-MB cache I originally
had). I can boot four operating systems on this machine: MacOS
(8.1 to X) and LinuxPPC, or
Windows 98 and Red Hat Linux
using Connectix Virtual
PC. (I also test-drove the free version of BeOS
when it was released, loading it into Virtual PC, but BeOS didn't
have drivers for some of the hardware emulated by that program and
it didn't work too well.) Using the PowerBook as a "training
level," I have become comfortable enough with Linux to install
LinuxPPC on my Power Mac G4/450 at work, in order to run the
GEANT4
radiation-transport code; I guess this is not just a hobby any
more!
Reading the above, I discern a distinct Frankensteinian streak!
I've been lucky so far, though, and haven't electrocuted myself with
a CRT or turned the PowerBook into a $2000 doorstop, though I did
have to recycle one nonfunctional 64 MB RAM module that I still can't
figure out how I broke...
Since I took the photo at top, I have acquired a Power Computing
PowerCurve "Mac-clone" low-profile desktop box, circa 1995-1996, from
Nexcomp; this is even more of a
Frankenstein's monster than my other machines now, as I have added a
Ratoc FireWire/USB
card, an ATI XCLAIM VR 128
graphics/video-capture card, and a Sonnet
500 MHz G3 processor daughtercard to replace the original 120 MHz 601
card! (A note of interest to other "Reanimators": the PowerCurve had
a 40 MHz system bus stock, in order to run the processor at 120 MHz
with a 3x multiple; however, the motherboard was designed to run at
50 MHz, and it pops right back up to that speed when you install a
processor that can deal with that, which is how I can run a 500 MHz
G3 with a 10x multiple! Sonnet now makes cards for some computers
with a whole separate bus to sidestep the problem; this is also the
only way one can currently run a G4 on machines with this "Catalyst"
motherboard.) With a 17" monitor, this setup cost me less than an
iMac DV/SE, and for anything except watching a DVD movie or capturing
video from a digital camcorder (neither of which I own anyway), it's
better-performing and certainly more expandable!
And, most recently, I have added a Duo 230, circa 1992-1994, from
Power Mac Pac and a Duo Dock II
from Refurb Madness; in
true Frankensteinian tradition, I have used Born
Again to persuade that to boot MacOS
8.1! Of course, I've also got my own ideas
about what I'd like for my next computer. No rest for the
wicked...
new 1 January 2000, revised 24 March 2001
