Compact Mac questions

[Maconthemove]

I have a dozen Compact Macs and am deciding what to keep. They are Mac Pluses, SE, SE/30s, Classic s, and Classic IIs. Can any or all boot from a external scsi hd, cdrom or zip drive without a floppy boot disk?

Can 040 PDS cards fit any of these?

 

[tomlee59]

I can answer some of those; others will very soon.

All can boot from an external scsi drive. I've booted all of those machines from external hard drives and zips, and many from CDROMs (I've not had any failures; I'm just saying that I haven't tried all of them).

One caveat: the Plus is a bit of an oddity wrt SCSI, because it implemented SCSI a bit ahead of the final standards. Faster HDs won't boot the Plus, unfortunately (and since faster drives tend to be larger drives, this basically means that you're limited in practice to booting from a drive whose capacity is south of 1GB or so, give or take a factor of two here and there).

There is no card slot in a Plus, Classic, or Classic II (the latter has an expansion connector, but it's not PDS). The SE and SE/30 both have expansion slots, but they differ from each other. The SE/30's PDS slot is the same as, eg., that in a IIsi, if that helps you at all. And '040 expansion cards for the SE/30 were made (although they are not easy to find these days).

 

[equill]

tomlee59 has succinctly summed up the possibilities, and it were de trop to paint his lily except to record that the Classic II's PDS slot is different again from other AIO compact PDS slots, and there was never anything made for it but a 68882 (FPU) card, which is rare.

If you have a suitable disk utility (program) it is possible to account during setup for the slow SCSI of Plus and SE, which have 'interleave ratios' of 3:1 and 2:1 respectively, that is, how many platter revolutions are needed to read a complete track.

de

 

[MultiFinder]

I'd personally keep one of each. I'd gladly take a Classic II or two off your hands if the parental units wouldn't kill me

 

[MultiFinder]

I'd personally keep one of each. I'd gladly take a Classic II or two off your hands if the parental units wouldn't kill me

One can never have too many Classic II's :beige:

 

[Maconthemove]

Thanks for the replies. Going to downsize my 128+ Mac collection to about 30 Macs. I hate floppies because they go bad. So the Compacts stay. The Powerbooks stay. Mac IIx/xx are going. Most of the Performa/PMs are going. G3Beige/B&W staying. All but one Quadra/ Centris. I need the garage back.

Do all the Mac Compacts from Mac Plus use Mac OS 7.1. I have the cd and hope to be able to load it from the cdrom?

 

[equill]

Nominally, yes. But the Plus is a little light on RAM, and with Classic and SE, also has a 68000 CPU. If you are prepared to make the necessary concessions, they will work.

de

 

[Scott Baret]

A CD-ROM will not boot a 68000-based machine (Plus, Classic, SE). I'm not sure on the SE/30 off the top of my head but I think it works fine on a Classic II. If there's other programs I'm not aware of that enable CD booting on those older Macs let me know so I can add it to my knowledge database.

An original Classic can boot from its ROM. Hold down COMMAND-OPTION-X-O before you get to the Happy Mac. You'll get System 6.0.3 with network functions. There are also hidden credits in here if you use a program like ResEdit or DiskTop to poke around the folders of this disk. (You also get the brightness CDEV, but it's actually from System 6.0.6 and the icon looks a little different from 6.0.7/6.0. 8) .

As far as RAM is concerned, you're going to need a minimum of 2MB for System 7. I don't recommend 2MB if you're going to actually do decent work on it, you'll want at least 2.5MB or preferably 4MB. If you absolutely must run System 7 under 2MB or even 2.5MB, be sure you strip out unnecessary extensions, control panels, fonts, and other addons.

Any 68000 based Plus, SE, or Classic can accept as much as 4MB of RAM. Don't go by what is written on the back of the machine if you're looking to see how much RAM is in there--many Pluses were marked "Macintosh Plus 1MB" but some were upgraded. SEs are the same way.

You're more likely to find extra RAM in a Classic than any 68000 due to the RAM card that most Classic owners purchased. Most often you'll find Classics with 2MB or 4MB. SEs are hit or miss but there are a good deal that have been upgraded. The majority of Pluses still seem to be stuck at 1MB unless they used an external hard drive at some point or used to run System 7.

There's also the external hard drive factor. Most external enclosures are fine, but the drives often are not. If you need a good drive, pull a Quantum ProDrive LPS (more reliable than the EPS) from an early 1990s Mac. They were commonly seen in the LC and LCII in either 40MB or 80MB capacities.

(I use an 80MB LPS that I took out of an LCII in an Apple 20SC enclosure on my Plus and it works great--it's pretty fast as far as Plus SCSI drives go and has more than enough space even for my decked out copy of System 6).

 

[funkytoad]

One can never have too many Classic II's :beige:

I Couldn't agree more! I myself have two!

 

[Maconthemove]

These boards that I got may come in handy.

"It says Apple Computer 1983-84.

128k 512k

630-0101 630-0118

The white pads were blank.

There is a Mac's a million card from Sophisticated Circuts Inc mounted

at the front about a inch above the m/b.

What will it go into?"

They can put 3megs of ram into the early machines. Will have to watchout

for 128-512k machines.