Hello everyone, I thought I would offer a bit of an intro from a long time lurker..
So I'm a fellow collector, hoarder, serial ebayist... whatever you prefer to call me. I’ve been more active in recent years and have been collecting well before it was ‘cool’ or people made YouTube videos on the topic.. Much like a lot of you do!
I've been collecting 68K macs since around 1999 where I took possession of an old LCII from my old school. I took it, the monitor, a keyboard and mouse home from someone who was throwing it out. It ignited a spark of interest within. I was always a PC guy until that point. Those around me worked on Macs and I was always interested. I also had an interest from much earlier on where my school used apple computers in a bid to start to replace the BBC micros of the previous era so had Mac experience. This started a bit of a journey with me. I was that geeky IT kid who rode the PC wave because I loved hardware. I loved upgrades. I used to spend every last penny of money on hardware upgrades and spend all of my time on it. I loved it. I still do..
So there it started. Soon after, I met @Durosity in Glasgow where he owned and a number of other friends in common ran a Mac Authorised Reseller. I had soldering skills and helped out through the back repairing customer’s machines. I (very much later) transferred some of those skills to @Durosity showing him around recapping and so on.. He’s a good friend, I appreciate the time we spend together and we still nerd out over various sightings online and in person.
Anyway.. a number of different places offered their old apple machines to me. When I left school, I took my technical interests towards the schools IT department and used to go back time and time again after hours helping them out. We would upgrade ram, terminate cat 5, restore some rubbish old 486SX machine back to working order and so on. I remember a day where we put 32 Meg of EDO ram into a classroom full of really old PC’s on 10base2 to give them enough of a survival life to continue on a few years. That upgrade must have cost quite a bit at the time.
Anyway, In return I used to collect old kit that nobody wanted any more and I would tinker with other equipment that was kicking about. I had my first experiences with servers there too and learned a lot about networking and so on. After, I would go home with more Mac stuff. The school would retire a room full of SE’s and classics and I’d walk away with the Asante bridge or a Laserwriter NTR.. Some stuff I’d pull apart and some stuff I would keep running. There are a few items from that era that still live with me today..
Anyway, some time around 2003 I bought my first iBook. A daily driver. I’d gone fully Mac with a bit of PC on the side.. I sit somewhere between the two even today although for multiple reasons, I survive on a MacBook Pro but have a PC gaming system and stay up to date on both.
I never stopped collecting though. I met @Durosity around the same point I bought my iBook. Naturally I bought a Mac mini from him along with a monitor I still have and I would help out in the shop. Customers would e-waste a number of items that we would be interested in and rather than sending them to e-waste, I would go home with stuff.. Powerbook 1400’s.. Powerbook G3’s in various states of function. I would buy parts, fix them up and get them going again.
At some point, the day job took over. I started to earn enough to buy old machines from places like ebay, back when people didn’t care about them. A lot of the time it was parts. Sometimes more adventurous things. I ran a carputer with a Mac mini G4 for instance. Nothing like iTunes running your music while driving. I still have both the PSU and the Mac actually. Maybe I should re-visit the idea? My current car has HDMI In.. it’s almost meant to be!
In more recent years, I’ve been hunting down various pro tools systems. My day? Night.. job is in Audio Engineering and I’ve now the privilege that I can use the most up to date kit with a lot of sway over what’s in front of me, a luxury I didn’t have in 2005.. But I don’t find it interesting.. What I find interesting is a 68020 on a nubus card acting as a system accelerator in the early 90s to allow 16 channels of audio to be recorded in real time at 48K / 16 bit.. That’s cool to me.. Loading up pro tools in 2025 on a MacBook Pro is kind of just dull by comparison.
So I continue to collect systems, save them from e-waste and get excited over doing silly things with hardware that can be pushed to its limit at 50Mhz.. I continue to recap old Macs, reflow cold joints and spend, what some would consider an unhealthy amount of time in front of a Quadra 700 with a Pro Tools II card and an Nuverb playing with plugins that for all intents and purposes, do exactly the same thing today on a subscription model.. Trust me, I’ve measured them.
The pro tools search goes on. I’ve got Pro Tools II covered although could do with a Magma Nubus expansion chassis and ECI cards to complete it. Very recently I got a hold of a bunch of pro tools III nubus hardware. I’m probably 1 farm card away from that being functional. I also have a stash of digidesign software including a number of authorisation floppies which I’m in the process of archiving properly in flux format so they can be replicated easily.
Quadra 700 x 3 (2 x PPC Upgrades)
Quadra 840AV x 1
Quadra 950 (With an Ex Power Supply)
IICI with 40Mhz 040 Upgrade
IICX
IISI
LCII With 030 upgrade card
Various Powermac G4’s
Various Powermac G3’s
Colour Classic x 2
SE/30 (A cupboard full.. I got carried away in covid recapping dead ones from ebay)
SE
Classic
Classic II
170
Duo 230 + Dock
540C
Powermac 7100
Powerbook 1400 x 3 (One with a G3 Upgrade)
Powerbook G3 Kanga x 3
Powerbook G3 PDQ
Powerbook G4 Titanium (Various)
Powerbook G4 12”
Powerbook G4 17”
Various Mac Minis
Apple Network Server 700
I’ve definitely missed some..
So I'm a fellow collector, hoarder, serial ebayist... whatever you prefer to call me. I’ve been more active in recent years and have been collecting well before it was ‘cool’ or people made YouTube videos on the topic.. Much like a lot of you do!
I've been collecting 68K macs since around 1999 where I took possession of an old LCII from my old school. I took it, the monitor, a keyboard and mouse home from someone who was throwing it out. It ignited a spark of interest within. I was always a PC guy until that point. Those around me worked on Macs and I was always interested. I also had an interest from much earlier on where my school used apple computers in a bid to start to replace the BBC micros of the previous era so had Mac experience. This started a bit of a journey with me. I was that geeky IT kid who rode the PC wave because I loved hardware. I loved upgrades. I used to spend every last penny of money on hardware upgrades and spend all of my time on it. I loved it. I still do..
So there it started. Soon after, I met @Durosity in Glasgow where he owned and a number of other friends in common ran a Mac Authorised Reseller. I had soldering skills and helped out through the back repairing customer’s machines. I (very much later) transferred some of those skills to @Durosity showing him around recapping and so on.. He’s a good friend, I appreciate the time we spend together and we still nerd out over various sightings online and in person.
Anyway.. a number of different places offered their old apple machines to me. When I left school, I took my technical interests towards the schools IT department and used to go back time and time again after hours helping them out. We would upgrade ram, terminate cat 5, restore some rubbish old 486SX machine back to working order and so on. I remember a day where we put 32 Meg of EDO ram into a classroom full of really old PC’s on 10base2 to give them enough of a survival life to continue on a few years. That upgrade must have cost quite a bit at the time.
Anyway, In return I used to collect old kit that nobody wanted any more and I would tinker with other equipment that was kicking about. I had my first experiences with servers there too and learned a lot about networking and so on. After, I would go home with more Mac stuff. The school would retire a room full of SE’s and classics and I’d walk away with the Asante bridge or a Laserwriter NTR.. Some stuff I’d pull apart and some stuff I would keep running. There are a few items from that era that still live with me today..
Anyway, some time around 2003 I bought my first iBook. A daily driver. I’d gone fully Mac with a bit of PC on the side.. I sit somewhere between the two even today although for multiple reasons, I survive on a MacBook Pro but have a PC gaming system and stay up to date on both.
I never stopped collecting though. I met @Durosity around the same point I bought my iBook. Naturally I bought a Mac mini from him along with a monitor I still have and I would help out in the shop. Customers would e-waste a number of items that we would be interested in and rather than sending them to e-waste, I would go home with stuff.. Powerbook 1400’s.. Powerbook G3’s in various states of function. I would buy parts, fix them up and get them going again.
At some point, the day job took over. I started to earn enough to buy old machines from places like ebay, back when people didn’t care about them. A lot of the time it was parts. Sometimes more adventurous things. I ran a carputer with a Mac mini G4 for instance. Nothing like iTunes running your music while driving. I still have both the PSU and the Mac actually. Maybe I should re-visit the idea? My current car has HDMI In.. it’s almost meant to be!
In more recent years, I’ve been hunting down various pro tools systems. My day? Night.. job is in Audio Engineering and I’ve now the privilege that I can use the most up to date kit with a lot of sway over what’s in front of me, a luxury I didn’t have in 2005.. But I don’t find it interesting.. What I find interesting is a 68020 on a nubus card acting as a system accelerator in the early 90s to allow 16 channels of audio to be recorded in real time at 48K / 16 bit.. That’s cool to me.. Loading up pro tools in 2025 on a MacBook Pro is kind of just dull by comparison.
So I continue to collect systems, save them from e-waste and get excited over doing silly things with hardware that can be pushed to its limit at 50Mhz.. I continue to recap old Macs, reflow cold joints and spend, what some would consider an unhealthy amount of time in front of a Quadra 700 with a Pro Tools II card and an Nuverb playing with plugins that for all intents and purposes, do exactly the same thing today on a subscription model.. Trust me, I’ve measured them.
The pro tools search goes on. I’ve got Pro Tools II covered although could do with a Magma Nubus expansion chassis and ECI cards to complete it. Very recently I got a hold of a bunch of pro tools III nubus hardware. I’m probably 1 farm card away from that being functional. I also have a stash of digidesign software including a number of authorisation floppies which I’m in the process of archiving properly in flux format so they can be replicated easily.
Quadra 700 x 3 (2 x PPC Upgrades)
Quadra 840AV x 1
Quadra 950 (With an Ex Power Supply)
IICI with 40Mhz 040 Upgrade
IICX
IISI
LCII With 030 upgrade card
Various Powermac G4’s
Various Powermac G3’s
Colour Classic x 2
SE/30 (A cupboard full.. I got carried away in covid recapping dead ones from ebay)
SE
Classic
Classic II
170
Duo 230 + Dock
540C
Powermac 7100
Powerbook 1400 x 3 (One with a G3 Upgrade)
Powerbook G3 Kanga x 3
Powerbook G3 PDQ
Powerbook G4 Titanium (Various)
Powerbook G4 12”
Powerbook G4 17”
Various Mac Minis
Apple Network Server 700
I’ve definitely missed some..
