Original 128k - With a twist... (PIC INTENSE!)

[JoeCanada]

Long story short, I scored a 128k for my collection, which I've been wanting for awhile. $100, and local, so not a bad deal, but not great. I probably wouldn't have paid that much, but this one sparked my interest for a particular reason.

Sooo...Show and Tell time!!

Here it is...looking very 'monolith'-y. You'll immediately notice the strange label below the Apple logo...this is what caught my eye.

The back...looks like an early Mac alright...but there's a couple things that don't belong...(we'll get there)

If there was any doubt...Model #M0001

Close up of that label 'Micah Drive AT'. From what I've gleaned from the Google-machine, it's an internal HDD upgrade of some kind for early Macs.

Welp, time to tear it apart! The DB-25 connector comes off to reveal...the battery. No surprise there. A fairly reversible mod. I like that. (Even though I don't have a spare battery door.)

View inside the bucket. You'll notice the fan that was added. I think this is for the 'Micah Drive' upgrade. It connects to a power supply that has been added.

Slides right out...again, a nice reversible mod, which I approve of.

Inside the machine...you'll notice the BNC connector we saw earlier, and the power supply that has been added below the CRT. If you look really closely at the floppy drive cable, you'll notice it's been modified (some wires have been cut). It seems the floppy has been upgraded to 800k, because it reads 800k disks. Handy mod, and fairly transparent. The previous owner thought the BNC connector was a network card, but having seen this mod before, I knew it was a video out. Once the case is cracked, it's pretty apparent.

Close up...the 'video out' port is just a dongle between the existing cable. No soldering, no splices. Again, a very reversible mod. Except for the hole in the back of the case.

Here's what we're left with once the silicon-goop has been peeled off. Not much to it.

The numbers on the ICs have been completely scratched off! Not really a big deal, since it's unlikely I'll be able to even use this thing, but it'll make it harder to reverse-engineer.

Mainboard! Definitely not typical. Two daughter cards have been added...

Obviously, this one is a memory upgrade. Looks like a few chips have been removed from the mainboard, and this card goes in their place.

Closer look...made by a company called 'Compuclinc'

And here is the SCSI upgrade...it seems to go in between the Apple ROMs. I'm not sure if those are the original 128k ROMs, but judging by the date code (1985), I imagine they are not. Maybe Mac Plus ROMs?

Closer look at the added power supply. I think the hard drive piggy-backed along the back of this board. If you look on the right side, one of the mounting tabs appears to have broken off. There was no hard disk in this machine when I opened it up.

Here is how it was tied to the mains supply, which is not a safe way to do it. The Hot is connected to mains ground, and Neutral is connected to the switched Hot. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It works, but it's really not proper.

And finally, here it is running System 6.0.7, showing 1 MB of RAM, just as you'd expect in a stock Plus. Between that, the 800k drive and the SCSI upgrade, it is essentially a Macintosh Plus. Ultimately, I think I'll remove the additional power supply (there's just no need), the video board (that I can't use, anyway) and the fan (which isn't really necessary since it's not a workhorse machine any longer), give it a good scrubbing (it reeks of cigarette smoke!) and keep it as an example of a (more useful) 128k. Maybe one day I'll get a stock model, but if not, this'll do.

 

[MinerAl]

Very cool. Pics were too big for my phone so I'll have to check it out on the big iMac later. BNC mono portrait monitors are not ultra rare... might be worth a try before you uninstall anything.

 

[mcdermd]

Does that daughter board piggy back on the original ROMs on the logic board or replace them altogether? It's a shame if the originals are gone as they are difficult and expensive to replace. The 400k drive and bracket may prove easier to find if you're after a restoration.

 

[JoeCanada]

BNC mono portrait monitors are not ultra rare... might be worth a try before you uninstall anything.

Fortunately, if I do come across one, it's not a big job to pop it back open and re-install the device. For now, I don't need it flopping around in there.

Does that daughter board piggy back on the original ROMs on the logic board or replace them altogether? It's a shame if the originals are gone as they are difficult and expensive to replace. The 400k drive and bracket may prove easier to find if you're after a restoration.

From what I can tell, the board is plugged into sockets where the ROMs would go. So I think it's safe to say the originals are gone. I didn't realize they were that rare.

 

[MinerAl]

I don't think you can have any kind of SCSI in a 128k/512k Mac without the ke/Plus ROMs.

 

[krye]

Crazy upgrade. I wonder how much that cost back in the day. It was probably really expensive. I wonder why he wouldn't just buy an SE?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Dollars to doughnuts, this setup pre-dates the SE by a fer piece. The Card with the RAM on it looks to be a memory upgrade and I'm wondering if that second monitor/BNC hookup was for a TV Tube mounted vertically with a Touch Screen Overlay.

My friends a Tekserve got their start in Macs about the same time they were only "Current Designs" with a contract for building the Interactive Mac-Based Directories for Rockefeller Center. The Mac was the only game in town for VAR/Vertical Market Developers in that time frame.

That puppy is well worth the price if I'm right about the chips on that "FPD" Card. It would also explain the rest of the field grade I/O hanging off the @$$ end of that great kluge.

OOPSIE!!!! Wrong thread. :I

Great score on this one, still interested in the chips on the BNC card though. No VRAM = not for FPD. I was thinking ThinNet, but that doesn't make sense under cursory inspection.

 

[krye]

I'm just saying, it seems crazy that someone would spend $2500 on a 128K to turn around within a year and spend what, a good $1500-$2000 on that upgrade? It must have cost close to a new machine. Right? If it was '85-'86, wouldn't the money have been bette spent on a Plus with an external HDD? Or a 512Ke with an HD20? Maybe I'm talking out my gourd; I'm assuming the upgrade was a good $1500-$2000. Maybe someone had silly money to throw around. Maybe it was only a grand and way cheaper than a new machine.

 

[James1095]

EVERYTHING mac related cost a fortune back then, and people did upgrade old machines even when it was only marginally cheaper than buying a whole new one. A lot of those CPU upgrade cards were pushing up on $1500 throughout the 68K era.

I always thought it was funny when people scrape the numbers off ICs in attempt to hamper reverse engineering. With standard TTL parts which those almost certainly are, any semi-competent engineer armed with a logic probe and a TTL databook can usually figure out what they are in a few minutes. I wonder what sort of monitor that supported though? Was there a composite video format that shared the Mac scan rates?

 

[waynestewart]

I spent around $1500 on an upgrade for a 2 month old Mac at one time. A year later stock machines were that fast and two tears later I upgraded to a faster machine again which I also upgraded shortly after buying it. It may not seem as worthwhile from here but I couldn't buy that fast a machine from Apple and if it didn't pay for itself in the time saved, it did make the machine a lot more enjoyable when you're pushing your hardware limits.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I'm just saying, it seems crazy that someone would spend $2500 on a 128K to turn around within a year and spend what, a good $1500-$2000 on that upgrade?

You're looking at it a bit backwards. Nobody knew what was coming down the line from Apple back in the day . . . or today for that matter, but back then there wasn't a set of specific dates set each year around which to plan purchasing decisions. There were real needs to be met that the Mac failed miserably at providing on the hardware side. It was revolutionary in its Graphical User Interface and WYSIWYG relationship with the LaserWriter and Linotronic, but as a hardware platform it was very much a lightweight until the SE/Mac_II release.

The DTP revolution put production people in dire need of real monitors, RAM and SCSI that the 128k-512ke were unable to provide and they needed them long before the Plus was released. Pagemaker was developed on a 128k and ran in 512k, dunno what the LaserWriters for proofing cost, but Scanners cost in excess of $5k and time spent in the workstation seat prepping for Lino Output was the most precious commodity of all. Vertical market systems often included these kinds of upgrades at time of purchase. They were not necessarily add-ons bought by individuals to keep aging Macs current in the early days. That was a later development, user installable upgrades were a much later development.

I spent almost $10k on the MacSignmaker System. This was an SE/20/1M with the Radius16 Accelerator, a Video Digitizer, a B&W security camera with a decent lens, a cheap tripod and a closeup filter pack. The heart of the system was a stepper driver card wedged between the Plotter Cable Pins and Plotter Cable of a Gerber SignMakerIII, or in my case, the second generation Sprint. The added 8MHz was wonderful, but the Math CoPro on the Radius16 was a dire necessity, something unavailable on any stock Mac but the Mac II, released along with the SE. I figured the system would pay for itself within the first year simply by computerizing the pattern making process. That's how I sold my partner on it. The Logo digitizing for Vinyl Cutting was gravy on a meat & potatoes process.

You used to be able to run a TTL Monitor off the Mac's Video Interface, but I never saw anything that ran off a BNC connector hooked up to the Power Connector. Buzz the connections, check to see if the video signal is what's running from that double level power connector or if someone hijacked one of the 12V pins for something else. I can't see any indications from the pics, have they shoe-horned a signal to the missing pin on the Mac Cable and run that to the BNC signal Wire?

I'm still thinking ThinNet if there's no clear indication of a Video Card.

A diagram of all the patch wires heading to which MoBo positions from where on the cards might explain quite a bit.

 

[Bunsen]

Oh for...

You could resize those images you know.

 

[JDW]

You could resize those images you know.

Sure makes page scrolling a bit sluggish, even on my 2.8GHz QuadCore i7 iMac. But I still appreciate the detail nonetheless. All too often when I really want to see the detail on a photo it turns out to be too small. No worries about that with these pics!

Thanks for the photos though. You've got a very interesting old machine!

...it seems crazy that someone would spend $2500 on a 128K to turn around within a year and spend what, a good $1500-$2000 on that upgrade?

We Mac enthusiasts were pretty crazy back in the day, but those prices were the going rate on cutting edge tech at the time. When I was old enough to buy a computer outright, with my own money, I landed myself a Mac IIvx in 1992. Sadly, it was one of the most short lived Macs that Apple produced, and crippled by a slow bus that made it inferior even to the IIci. (Suffice it to say, I'm not into buying lottery tickets.) Not long thereafter I purchased a Quadra 650 logic board for a cool $1000. I was by no means wealthy either. Something just drove me to scrimp and save to buy what I felt at the time was a great computer. But my upgraded Quadra 650 machine was a workhorse, let me tell you. I brought it to Japan with me when I moved there from California in 1994, and I eventually sold it to the Japanese company I worked for (around 1997, I think), for $1200 (equivalent in Yen). They bought a FAX card for it, and it served them 24/7 for many years. In fact, I think it may still be in service!

 

[CelGen]

Sure makes page scrolling a bit sluggish, even on my 2.8GHz QuadCore i7 iMac. But I still appreciate the detail nonetheless.

Except the 1024x768 crowd don't. I'm sidescrolling more than three times the width of my screen.

You know, if the forum had [thumb][/thumb] tags....

That aside, I have in the past seen the external video adapter before on aonther mac.

 

[JDW]

Except the 1024x768 crowd don't. I'm sidescrolling more than three times the width of my screen.

When I first load this page into mobile Safari on my iPad 3, the photos appear enormous, at zoomed "actual size." But once they'll load, then they shrink down to thumbnail size. I would think that's how it works in other browsers too if you just wait for them to all load completely. It may take a while on a slow net connection though. I myself have a 100Mbps fiber optic line to the net here in Japan.

 

[JoeCanada]

Oh for...
You could resize those images you know.

I would have made them much smaller, but I figured most people would feel like JDW:

All too often when I really want to see the detail on a photo it turns out to be too small. No worries about that with these pics!
Thanks for the photos though. You've got a very interesting old machine!

And in fact, on my end, this is what happens too:

When I first load this page into mobile Safari on my iPad 3, the photos appear enormous, at zoomed "actual size." But once they'll load, then they shrink down to thumbnail size. I would think that's how it works in other browsers too if you just wait for them to all load completely. It may take a while on a slow net connection though. I myself have a 100Mbps fiber optic line to the net here in Japan.

So they are thumbnailed, in effect. But perhaps not everyone's system is the same. I apologize for that, but at the same time, I tried to warn you in the title! :beige:

 

[Bunsen]

I would have made them much smaller, but I figured most people would feel like JDW:

You can always provide a link to the larger images; you can even wrap the [ url ] tags around the image tag, so the image is the link.

Being as this is a vintage computer community, we try to keep it as readable as possible on older and slower machines.

 

[JoeCanada]

You can always provide a link to the larger images; you can even wrap the [ url ] tags around the image tag, so the image is the link.

Being as this is a vintage computer community, we try to keep it as readable as possible on older and slower machines.

Ask, and ye shall recieve! I have more to add...and in a more user-friendly format. If I could (hint, hint) edit my inital post, I would do the same to that.

(Although, it seems you cannot wrap URL tags around image tags...)

I was curious about that video adapter, so I figured, why not throw the 'scope on it, and see what the signal looks like?

So, here we go:

Click HERE for Large Version

A closer look:

Click HERE for Large Version

How about a shutdown screen:

Click HERE for Large Version

At first glance, it doesn't look like anything I recognize, so some more research is in order. It bears a superficial resemblance to a composite signal, but I don't think it is. A mystery for another day...

 

[techknight]

Thats not a video signal of anything I had seen.

Maybe its not a video signal at all. Could be a proprietary signal for maybe Sync? who knows... what is the duty cycle/period of the oscillation? Could give clues as if this is a sync pulse.

Hard to tell from your picture, but it appears the period is 120ns. That is roughly 8.33Mhz. System clock freq? hmm.... Could be encoded/modulated, and not clean video persay.