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Nightingale's finds

nightingale

Well-known member
So up to this point, I've only acquired macs via eBay, and spent waaaaay too much money on them.  It's really hard to find old computers where I live. Thrift stores will not accept computers, and our provincial electronic recycling program is very strict about not letting you have anything that has been dropped off.  Once it's in their doors, it gets recycled, no exceptions.  I've had an ad up on kijiji for about a year stating that I'm looking for old macs, and this week it finally paid off!  I got three emails from people this week saying they had old macs for me, but so far only 1 has worked out.

And what luck!  It was an LC580, something that has been on my list of machines that I want!

 

 
I didn't expect it to work, but to my surprise, it works flawlessly.  Very yellowed, as you can see from the spot where the sticker was on the front.  It fits in nicely between my Powermac 5400 and my SE/30.
 

 
Not much on the machine except for games, but there are some on here I haven't played before, so it should keep me busy for a few days.  The previous owner was clearly a Limp Bizkit fan.
 

Oh, and a Offspring fan, too!  There were several of their music videos on the machine.  They certainly do not play well on this machine!  The audio plays flawlessly, and I was surprised by the sound quality.

Curious if anyone can tell me how to remove AOL?  I could not find any extensions or control panels anywhere.  If I remember from back in the day, AOL was notoriously difficult to remove...

Now off to eBay to get an ethernet card.

 
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IPalindromeI

Well-known member
Nice, a Maritimer! It's hard to find anything vintage here as well. I got lucky and found two 701cses locally, but that was a fluke.

 

nightingale

Well-known member
I'm in Dartmouth. Dang! I just bid on a card yesterday. Oh well, if I don't win the auction I'll track you down!

 

olePigeon

Well-known member
That's a great find.  The LC 580 was often considered inferior to the 575 because it used lower quality parts for the time (non-trinitron CRT, IDE instead of SCSI, etc.)  However, this gives you lower cost upgrades, too.  It has an IDE hard drive that you can replace with a proper IDE SSD.  You can snag 32GB IDE SSDs for under $50 these days.  That thing will fly.

If it doesn't already, there's also an AV port in which you can add an AV card or TV tuner.

In addition, there're plenty of Power R Macintosh adapters on eBay and elsewhere that will give you an external VGA port so you can connect a second screen.

 

nightingale

Well-known member
Yeah, when I was making my list of macs I wanted to acquire, I flip-flopped back and forth between the 575 and the 580... but since this one fell into my lap...  580 it is!  I bid on a PDS ethernet card, partially because the same seller had a teardrop mouse and 5 phonenet adapters that I wanted...  so good opportunity to save on shipping.  Is there a performance difference between using a PDS ethernet card or a comm slot ethernet card?  Does using a PDS card cripple performance, like it did in earlier LCs?

 

mrpippy

Well-known member
I assume a CS card would have better performance since it's a higher-speed 32 bit bus only used on 040s and up, whereas LC PDS is 16-bit and clocked slower. I don't think a PDS card would hurt the rest of the system performance though, there's glue logic to adapt LC PDS to the faster processor bus

 

nightingale

Well-known member
Well, it's been a while since I've expanded my Mac collection, but I'm particularly proud of this latest acquisition. Not because the machine itself is anything particularly rare or special, but because of the journey it has been to get it up and running, and how well it demonstrates what keeps this hobby fun and interesting.

Due to the generosity of @LaPorta I became the proud owner of this nice Macintosh Plus last year:

IMG_1283.jpg

It's in excellent shape, not very yellowed at all, with only one small crack in a corner of the case. This Mac was generously donated to me over a year ago, and I am just now posting about it, because that's how long it took me to actually be able to use it! Part 2 of this story is that I bought a mouse on eBay for too much money that was listed as "untested" (read: not working). Turns out the mouse could move on the X but not the Y axis, and so I was unable to actually make use of this machine! I did much troubleshooting, and with the help of fellow forum members over on this thread, especially @cheesestraws, I was able to determine that one of the IR optical emitters was faulty. Once I had identified the new part that was needed, I attempted to order a replacement, only to find that these were on backorder from every electronics supplier. So I placed my order and patiently waited -- estimated ship date was June 2021, and I figured I could wait six months. Well June comes around, and the shipdate is updated once again to December 2021. Realizing that I was probably never getting this order from Mouser, I headed over to eBay and found a listing for two of these $0.25 IR emitors for $20 after shipping. Ouch. But it seemed like my last option, so I ordered, and yesterday they arrived in the mail. Breaking out my soldering iron, I popped the new emitter in, soldered it, and fired up the machine, with fingers crossed. And it worked! So today I finally got to use my new Mac Plus over a year after having it donated to me!

The thing that makes this project so special to me is that it highlights the community that we have in this hobby -- strangers on the internet willing to share their vintage macs, give advice, and help one each other troubleshoot and repair 30 year old electronics. This is also the first time I have ever actually repaired something like this. I mean I used to work in IT, so I fixed lots of computers, but that always just meant replacing parts. Bad caps on the motherboard? Replace the whole board. Mouse not working? Buy a new mouse. The cost of current electronics is so low that we don't repair anything. The thought of desoldering a component on a board and replacing it would never have occurred to me. Doing this now has given me an appreciation for just how fixable things really are, and how our current culture really pushes us to treat things as disposable when they can actually be repaired fairly easily. Last week I had a set of faulty headphones that normally I would have thrown in the garbage and replaced -- instead I opened them up, resoldered a wire that had come loose, and they were good as new! This hobby has helped me look very differently at how much waste we create with our lifestyle.

And working from home for the past year and half with this in the background of my Microsoft Teams calls has led to so many conversations with people who tell me all about what their favourite game was back in the day, or their fond memories of using one of these as their first computer. Something they probably haven't thought about in 30 years!

So while this find isn't particularly rare or special, the story of how I got it, the things that I learned while trying to get it running, and the people I met along the way are what make it special to me.

Now I still need a keyboard -- but that is going to have to wait. Enough money spent on this hobby for now!
 

Garrett B

Well-known member
Excellent work, and nice write up! I absolutely agree that doing component-level repair is something that doesn't occur as often as it could. Every once in a while I look through an original Apple service manual for these beige Macs and chuckle. It seems that at the end of every troubleshooting step is the same statement, "Replace component XYZ". I suppose even back then it wasn't economical to do board-level repair, but I suppose they also had an abundance of spare boards which could be swapped in! If only we had access to those same parts today.
 
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