The Absolutely Apple Macintosh IIfx

[CelGen]

After a year of hard work, some fluke chances and a lot of patience, I finally have a dream Macintosh II system assembled. The reason I call it Absolutely Apple is because, well take a look for yourself.

















-Macintosh IIfx
--Apple CD SC
--Apple HD160 SC
--Apple Tape Backup 40 SC
--Apple One Scanner (Monochrome)
--Apple MIDI Interface
--Apple LocalTalk Interface
--Apple Extended Keyboard
--Apple ADB Mouse
--Apple Data Modem 2400
--Apple High Resolution RGB Display (640x480, 66.7hz)
--Apple 5.25" PC Floppy Drive (with Controller in the IIfx)
--Apple LaserWriter IIg

Behind closed doors, here is where we differ from all the components being completely Apple, mainly because third party parts were better or faster.

Hard Drive: IBM 0663-E12 1043mb SCSI Disk Drive (FWB Toolkit formatted, running System 7.1)
Video: RasterOps 24 XLi
Capture: Supermac VideoSpigot II (I believe that is the name. Still researching this beast)
Floppy: Apple 5.25" PC Floppy Drive Controller
Network: Farallon Nubus Ethernet Adapter (sporting rear connections for thin Net, AUI, and Category 5)
Acceleration: Radius PhotoEngine (DSP acceleration for Adobe Photoshop)

This all leaves one NuBus slot and the PDS slot as the last expansion point besides the addition of a second 1.44mb SuperDrive.



The only big letdown about the system however is the ram. Only 8mb. That's more the fault that IIfx ram is non-standard and expensive. I would love to load the system up with even 4mb SIMMs and run 7.5 but man, those prices even used.....

[mcdermd]

Sweet! I'm glad you finally got it all completed. It looks really great!

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Absolutely fabulous!

Is your CD SC working now or do you still need parts for it?

I've always been a Microtek ScanMaker guy, but that AppleOneScanner looks da bomb sitting alongside the rest of your beautiful system!

8MB is fine, get yourself a Radius Rocket for that last slot and max that out with PC RAM to run in accelerator mode. Inside a Mac, the Rocket is a ROM Licensed Macintosh and your 7.1 setup is the last OS supported by it. Radius was Apple's first & primary OEM. When the clone age began, they were the first , and only, licensee at the rollout of the licensing announcement.

To help keep you ALL Apple, PM me about an Apple NIC!

[CelGen]

Yeah, I got the CD SC sorted out. The IIfx plays Myst rather well.
So a Rocket will work in a IIfx? Cool. I always thought there was some other odd hardware incompatibility.

Ooh! an Apple branded Nubus ethernet card? Handy. Does it have just Cat 5 or does it have AAUI? I guess I could be tempted to go with an Apple NIC at the loss of AUI or ThinNet. Not like I'll need either anymore but it feels cool knowing you can plug into pretty much any network.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

AAUI, I think, whichever one had that Dumb@$$ Dongle instead of a 10baseT connector built into it.

What was up with Apple and the foot from the wall cables and the humongous chunks of entrails hanging out of the Macs of the era?

Ask IIfx about his IIfx RocketPad.

[Unknown_K]

Very nice , especially the scanner and external tape drive.

If you found all that then 8 x 4MB SIMMs should not bet that expensive (unless they turned unobtanium in the last few years). OS 7.1 rocks on 32MB of RAM.

I have external DAT, CDROM, CDRW, MO drives for my II units but not in matching cases.

[Bunsen]

Wow, I haven't seen that much snow white since Scarface came out.

[CelGen]

If you found all that then 8 x 4MB SIMMs should not bet that expensive

Depends on what you mean by "expensive". Everything you see above cost me less than $100 total.

[beachycove]

That is indeed an "absolutely" setup, and a thing of beauty.

If I may ask, what are you able to do concretely with the 5.25" IBM disk drive? Is it purely a matter of accessing storage, or do you have a DOS emulator installed? I have idly wondered about trying to find one of these.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Since this could have been very close to the ultimate "Service Bureau" workstation of the era, just having the ability to access 5.25" DOS media would have been be a big plus.

If you can find an Apple (Radius with a fruity logo) TPD to go with this system it'd be nearly the Apex of Absolutely Apple.

[trag]

Beautiful!

[IIfx]

That is beautiful. I feel ashamed that my IIfx has 80mb RAM....yet has no apple accessories besides KB and Mouse.

It does have 2 40mhz Rockets though

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I do have THREE of those Apple AAUI NICs to go around . . . for some kind of token trade goods!

Besides . . . you should have an Apple Display Card 24AC in there with the Stage IIs as well!

[TheIanMan85]

That's an awesome setup. I love all the accessories...dunno where to start. I've got a 20 SC HD...haven't seen a 160 in a while. Haven't touched my CD SCs in a while. Haven't seen an Apple Tape Drive in a long time. Those original OneScanners are tougher to find too. I've only got the newer models. I do have one of those modems around somewhere but never tried to use it. Not sure if I have all the cables for it. You've got too many goodies to keep going! I do not have a IIfx, jealous. I love the big box IIs. I have an upgraded II in storage I need to play with sometime, it doesn't boot. Hopefully fresh batteries will fix that.

I think the only thing that could make it more awesome would be more monitors. As Trash80 said, a TPD would be sweet, or a Portrait Display. Even more 13" RGBs would be sweet. (Or any combination...) That's really all I can think of to make it sweeter besides more RAM.

Absolute, for sure. Just think how much all that would have cost when it was all new!

[Byrd]

I really like what you've done here, putting together your "ultimate" 68K setup for all to see. I must do the same - probably a Q950 with Newon 2100 running alongside

JB

[beachycove]

One of the things that leaps to mind on looking at this again is that the "thing of beauty" approach represents a different way to go about collecting vintage hardware: rather than amass 47 systems that seldom, if ever, get hauled off the storage shelves, it would be possible instead to build one representative system, with absolutely all period bells and whistles, and simply spend time perfecting that one system.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

. . . or two, four, eight or even sixteen, as those are nice round binary figures, but the next step is . . .
. . . erm . . . never mind!

[Strimkind]

One of the things that leaps to mind on looking at this again is that the "thing of beauty" approach represents a different way to go about collecting vintage hardware: rather than amass 47 systems that seldom, if ever, get hauled off the storage shelves, it would be possible instead to build one representative system, with absolutely all period bells and whistles, and simply spend time perfecting that one system.

This is the approach I have taken when it comes to my G4 Cube. Right now I have the Cube, matching 17" Studio Display, HK USB Soundsticks/Sub, FW CD Burner, and a Superdisk USB floppy drive.

I may eventually do something similar to the 8600 I have but that is a long term project.

As for the IIfx shown above I have one word...Awesome!

If only half my stuff looked as good as that unit does.

[CelGen]

Man.
While on the outside it's a nice system, on the inside there's still a lot to do.
I'm struggling to find drivers for the scanner and the Supermac VideoSpigot II (the latter card I can't even get Snooper to detect is plugged into a slot. ) and this SCSI bus is absolute hell. I already replaced the IBM 0663 with a 1.2gb Quantum Fireball because the 0663 lacked internal termination and if the IBM and the external 160SC was on, the system would ignore the 0663 and always try to boot from the 160SC which was a channel up on the bus (pure voodoo). In the process of switching drives and reinstalling I somehow broke Myst (type 1 error when running millions of colors and a total system crash if you run at 256 colors) and HyperCard simply crashes the system. THEN all the sudden after two days of no SCSI problems the 160SC came back more angry than ever and if it's on when you power the IIfx on, the quantum will not spin up (TOTAL F**KING SCSI VOODOO).
Kind of need that 160SC there too both for completeness and also for A/UX.

[slomacuser]

Nice pics, anyway the driver for scanner could be found here: http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Su ... l/Scanner/

[spiceyokooko]

It's well worth having a read (or re-read) through Apple's documentation on IIfx SCSI termination (as I had to do recently for my own IIfx) as the IIfx handles internal and external SCSI termination slightly differently to most other Apple desktops. The lack of or incorrect installation of the internal SCSI termination block and/or filter within the fx is the primary cause of 'SCSI voodoo' people often associate with this machine.

https://support.apple.com/kb/TA42169

Very impressive collection of vintage Apple!

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The VideoSpigot doesn't show up as being present in a slot either, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. IDK if it has a DeclROM on it at all, strange card.

My guess is that they didn't follow Apple's guidelines for the PseudoSlot/Declaration ROM model at all for some reason or other. I figure this is most likely because it was available for several platforms and too much of a pain to revamp the software and board design to meet a guideline, since it wasn't actually a requirement.

I need to re-iterate this, I LOVE what you've done, it's positively gorgeous. It's so it reminds me of one of my favorite FROGDESIGN Prototypes:



Add a fitted version of . . .


. . . these peripherals to the left side, move the scanner to one side of a U-Shaped workstation on the left with a tombstone shaped co-worker/client interface peninsula on the rightt and it would almost match what you've put together in terms of function.

[beachycove]

Presumably you've been benchmarking, etc.

Do you have anything to add to what's usually said about the Rasterops 24xli? I find it hard to believe that a card that cost nearly $3000 when new is as bad as LEM suggests.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

It's hard to believe the performance of a $10k+ computer system would be eclipsed by the lowliest of the first Quadras as well.

Product cycles were longer back in the day, but basic technological changes came about at a quicker pace than today, or so it would seem to me. Heck, SOFTWARE advanced by leaps and bounds back then, as did operating systems. Today there are thousands of apps available for myriad platforms that nobody saw coming back then, but few of them make any real difference to the average computer user.

< hyperbole mode >

90% of computer users could STILL get 90% of anything they really NEED to do on a computer done with Microsoft Works for DOS and a browser!

< /hyperbole mode >

We waste more computer cycles, transistor counts, computer hardware, telecom equipment, polygons and pixels on the WWW doing absolutely nothing PRODUCTIVE with our time than would have been conceivable when that card was developed and marketed.

The IIfx and that VidCard were a High End Tools for a fast paced, High End Market doing revolutionary development on CAD systems, changing the face of the publishing industry and then annihilating it while torquing the InterNet into the WWW. Cost was relative, high dollar DTP/Lino and CAD "seats" dwarfed the cost of a IIfx, a Color TPD or three and the VidCards to run them.

But there weren't that many "seats" to go around for amortization of R&D costs for the relatively low production runs of High End VidCards. Hence, the price penalties that seem ludicrous today for such equipment.

Ubiquitous computing, however trivial, still adds up to incredible economies of scale . . . something Apple has only (fairly) recently learned to leverage.

[Brooklyn]

Awesome collection!