I still remember drooling over compact macs like the Macintosh Classic or the SE in my early years on the internet. When I rediscovered the hard drive from my first computer a little while back, I found (along with a shitton of malware) a good bit of pictures and MacOS “simulators” and multiple copies of Mini vMac.
…Which reminds me – if me from two years ago saw my collections now, he’d probably be pretty excited for the future. I forget to appreciate my belongings sometimes.
As promised, here’s my first update in a series of updates on my sizeable collection of vintage and not-so-vintage Macintosh computers. Feels good to finally get this out.
What you’ll be seeing today was all bought from a friend of mine named Lucanis. Take a look at his website when you can.
Now, on to the Macs!
Macintosh Classic
Before I say anything else about this: this thing is fucking crisp, dude. It’s incredibly clean, has minimal yellowing, the floppy drive works perfectly and the hard drive still functions.
It’s running System 6.0.7, has 2kb ram and a plethora of programs such as Clarisworks, Word 4.0 and… The Playroom. Reminds me of Millie’s Math House and some other educational PC games I used to play in grade school.
This machine looks like it was purchased sometime in the early 90’s and never really used. Some kid named Georgie tried to write a report on it but didn’t get very far. What a shame…
But not everything about this machine is perfect. In fact – it’s got one horrible, terrible, no-good issue that prevents me from using it. What’s that? You want to know what this issue is? Well, let me let you in on a little secret…
I have no fucking idea!
This thing randomly restarts, freezes, doesn’t discharge the CRT properly, throws a doesn’t boot some days and does boot others… When I first got this thing I remember I turned if off, left it alone, turned it on the next day and saw that it was somehow still on the “It’s now safe to switch off your mac” screen. And for these reasons I do not use it and will not use it until I can afford to repair it.
It’s probably some sort of capacitor issue but I don’t have the foot-long screwdriver needed to crack this thing open, so I can’t check out what’s going on under the hood at the moment.
Performa 635CD
Next up, we’ve got a Performa 635CD paired with an AppleColor High-Resolution RGB Monitor – which has a very mildly distracting weird distortion line at the top. Doesn’t bother me, though.
As far as problems the machine itself has, it’s really next to nothing. One of the clips for the back plastic part of the machine broke off but I could easily glue it back on if I wanted to. Sure, it’s got a dead clock battery, but that’s real easy to replace.
As far as the history of this machine goes? Well, thanks to the fact whoever sold this or gave it away didn’t format the hard drive, apparently this mac was passed around a few times – first being used as a machine to keep logs at a place that taught karate and women’s personal safety classes, then being passed off to a family and being used for… Well, mid 90’s family computer things. Like printing out lame invitations to Christmas parties and fucking around in word. Also email.
I also found Zip Drive drivers pre-installed which was a nice surprise. (More on those later, keep your eyes peeled~)
And the rest…
This is only two of the tons of other macs I’ve got to cover, but these are the ones I’m focusing on fixing up at the moment. The Powerbook needs a working hard drive slapped into it before I can do anything with it and the Performa apparently needs a clock battery to power on, as does a lot of other macs (weirdly enough.)
You’ll be hearing from me again soon enough. I wish everyone reading a good morning, noon and night. :3
