January has been a superb month for my collection, and it's not over. Tomorrow I'm making the ~60-mile journey over into Kansas to pick up a PowerBook Duo 270c, details to come tomorrow night when I return.
Earlier this month, I acquired an Apple ImageWriter II for my Macintosh Classic/SE to share.
However, today's "haul" includes something sentimental to me and something new. I haven't wrote a post on my blog for this yet, so y'all are getting the "sneak peek." (After posting this, I'm going to have to run to class. Post will be up later tonight, and I'll either edit this post or reply with a separate comment with a link to my post.
You can also follow me on Twitter to see updates with my collection - including a sneak peak to the 270c - and my blog.)
Anyways, here we go. A lot of Twitter embeds, as I don't want to consume too much server space here.
I'm going to start this first item off with a little backstory. As a junior in high school (in the middle of my first Apple craze, around the time I joined 68kMLA) I toured my current university. As we were walking through the library, I looked through the frosted glass windows of one of the offices to spot a computer in the shape of a compact Mac. I never saw that machine again, until late October 2019 when it was located in a display case. I posted a picture of it on my personal Twitter.
Fast forward to last week, when I reached out to a librarian about who owned this computer. She connected me with the owner, who seems to be an interesting guy as his computer programming skills all started with a Commodore 64. He used to run the computer commons in the library. I told him about my collection, and he told me about the two vintage Macs he owned - both of which he bought new back in graduate school in Texas. Later in the course of our discussions, he randomly asked me if I'd be interested in adding two computers to my collection. I said sure.
Yesterday he sent me an email telling me they were ready to pick up. I was excited and bewildered at the same time, but nonetheless went to pick them up. I had to wait to this morning to pick them up, waking up at 8:30 a.m.
(The only time I've ever been excited to wake up early.)
After getting back home, I was able to look closer at the machines. While the Macintosh SE isn't anything new to me (I already own one...) the System Saver interested me. On the back, there's an expansion port of some kind. The PowerBook 165 looks to be an excellent condition and appears to be rarely used, as even the port door is still intact. Unfortunately, he didn't have the power supply for the PB so I'm not able to test it until I find one.
Back to the SE, which was the computer that is sentimental to me. I took off the System Saver and programmer's switch to pop the bucket off and have a look inside before plugging it in. There's definitely an expansion card of some sort, which prevented me from pulling the logic board out. I have big, fat hands and this machine has a hard drive. I wasn't able to reach in to disconnect the main power supply connector, anyways. Any ideas on how to make that easier? I was able to get everything else unplugged.
Trusting that nothing was damaged, I plugged the SE and the System Saver in for testing. The System Saver works and while the fan was noisy at the beginning, it quoted down to the low hum that is only slightly louder than the fan in my SE.
Which brings me to the final part. This thing must have an upgraded processor, and it must be something powerful. This thing
FLIES. It has a password protection screen, which I was able to bypass by disabling extensions during startup. The Maxtor hard drive, while noisy, still seems to work perfectly. This thing is
much faster than the sluggish 68000 I know and love. And it has way more memory than the max 4 MB you'd find in the stock SE... it appears to have 16 MB installed. Lots of extensions installed. I'm super curious now to find out what processor/expansion port this thing has installed.
I'm calling this thing the "SuperSE." It's a 1988 just like my other SE, and was also made in Fremont, California. (Though it appears this SE was made in March/April 1988, while my other SE was made in May '88.)
Now my vintage Mac collection is at 4 machines... and hopefully will be at 5 tomorrow. This time last year, I had
0 vintage machines in my collection.