Tanaquil's Hoard

[tanaquil]

My hoard is a bit ridiculous, so it will take a while to catalog it all, but here's a start: a shot of my current workshop, in a few different configurations.

My oldest mac (which I still have, not pictured) was a Classic from 1991. I also have the old family Apple IIe in the basement (working last I tested, but that was a lonnnng time ago). My current macs are a 2011 13" MacBook Pro (home) and 2013 21.5" iMac (work).

My project workshop is centered around a Mac Plus (used for testing older software), a IIsi for running System 6/7, and a couple of bridge macs running 9.2.2 (or early OSX if I need it, though I mostly can't stand the earliest versions of OSX and avoid them whenever possible). My modern MacBook Pro is my main internet machine; Classilla runs under 9.2.2 on my bridge machines, though it has a hard time interacting with many modern websites. I now have my MacBook Pro set up to be a FTP server for the bridge machines. 

Album on flickr, if I did this right:

https://flic.kr/s/aHskpQi3Qg

No pictures yet of the imac G3 hoard mentioned in another thread... that will have to wait for a later update.

 

[Macdrone]

Nice start.

 

[tanaquil]

Now that's what my basement looks like

How do you guys do the thing where you list all your Macs at the bottom of the page? Is that part of "Signature"?

 

[Macdrone]

yes

 

[XBHS1997]

Indeed a "good start"!

 

[360alaska]

+1 point for the cat

 

[Unknown_K]

It's not a hoard unless it can fall on you and crush you.

Nice cat btw.

 

[olePigeon]

It's not a hoard unless you have feral cats living in it.

 

[tanaquil]

It's not a hoard unless you have feral cats living in it.

I have three, does that count?

(Only one is semi feral. Well, she waves her wild tail and walks by her wild lone. Once in a while, she consents to notice my presence.)

 

[XBHS1997]

Cats are a bad thing sometimes... I was very "pleased" when I saw that one of my 4 cats chewed on some original vintage Apple cables...

 

[Unknown_K]

One of my cats (still around) used to chew up the CAT5 Ethernet cables in my room under my desk (and a couple KVM cables as well). He got over it.

 

[CC_333]

I like cats. Although if left unchecked, they have an unfortunate tendency to mark and/or scratch things, I've found. Particularly carpets and furniture.

We've gotten them catposts and scratchers MANY times, but after scratching at those awhile, they just kept going back to the furniture....

It's all part of the fun, though!

Until they decided to mark my iMac! (it ruined the CD-ROM drive TWICE back in '99 or so, but fortunately, the bulk of the machine never got harmed, and it survives to this day (albeit with a new CD drive)). Kinda my fault, though; I'd put it on the floor and use it there, inadvertently making it easy for them to... do things.

c

 

[olePigeon]

It takes some work, but cats are as trainable as dogs.

 

[tanaquil]

A week or two ago, EvilCapitalist posted a heads up on a mystery ebay auction (the very confused seller claimed to be selling a Mac Plus 1MB 512K [sic] for $150 shipped), pointing out that it potentially contained a Hyperdrive. I was in the market for a non-upgraded 512K, so I jumped on the auction, and spent a week telling myself that it would probably be a dud when it arrived, so I wouldn't be disappointed.

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/26027-ebay-finds/?p=293087

http://www.ebay.com/itm/221989005464

It arrived last Friday (hours before I had to fly out of town for the weekend), and I am thrilled to report that not only does it have an intact HyperDrive (I honestly didn't expect that it would), but it seems to be a fully working, in excellent shape, unmodified 512K machine with bootable internal drive. The screen is nice and clear, the Hyperdrive boots to desktop (with four drawers!), the floppy drive reads 400K disks but not 800K ones - pretty much everything I was looking for.

Apparently the machine belonged to a church (!) and has not been touched since it was decommissioned in God-knows-when. I will have to spend a little time wiping personal data off these "drawers," unless I want to read all about the church youth group's activities.

Of course it's an older machine, so I will have to do more extensive testing, but I feel I really lucked out with this one. Thanks, EvilCapitalist!

 

[olePigeon]

That's awesome.  The Hyperdrive is one of the few upgrades that didn't have you replace the ROMs with Plus ROMs, probably because it came out before the Plus.

I have a brand new Hyperdrive upgrade that I haven't touched yet.  I'm waiting for that perfect 128k or 512k machine in which to install it.  There's a 512k on eBay right now that I'm tempted to get, but it's missing the Picasso covers on the keyboard and mouse boxes.  (Yeah, I know, I'm weird.)  There's a 128k on eBay right now, but the handles are ripped (which is very common.)

Sigh.  It'd be nice if I didn't care about that crap, but it bugs me for some reason.  I want the box and accessories to look as nice as the computer.

 

[tanaquil]

I hear you, my computer hobby has OCD to the max. Remind me to talk about my original System disk restoration project sometime.

 

[EvilCapitalist]

That's great!  Glad that my boredom led to something worthwhile and that it's in fine shape to boot.

 

[tanaquil]

I am having a good month! I have other conquests to post, but the latest is an original 128K. It came up on ebay for less than $200 shipped ($175 BIN) and I couldn't resist. No power cord or accessories, but I have a lot of that stuff for testing purposes.

Manufactured in: F => Fremont, California, USA

Year of production: 1984

Week of production: 24

Production number: 3T6 => 4392

Modell ID: M001 => original Macintosh 1984 (128k)

Your original Macintosh 1984 (128k) was the 4392th Mac manufactured during the 24th week of 1984 in Fremont, California, USA.

It is in nice, clean condition except for a property mark (UM = UMich) burned into the back case. I'm sure it would damage the value for a true collector but I think it is kind of neat.

It chimes and starts up to the floppy question mark, but unfortunately it seems that both the internal floppy drive and the external floppy connector are not working correctly (internal floppy won't grab a disk at all, let alone read it; external gives rise to a sad mac regardless of whether I attach a physical M0130 or my floppy emu), so this will be a fixer upper.

I'll try cleaning the internal floppy drive, but if it is a no go, does anyone know if the guts of an external M0130 can be moved into the internal slot? The external drives, while not cheap, seem to be cheaper and more plentiful on ebay than OEM internal ones.

Will upload some pics when my phone/camera decides to cooperate with my mac. I opened the back to get a better look at the motherboard. Looks pretty clean. I can't see any obvious signs of a RAM (or ROM) upgrade having been done, but then I am not an expert at reading the chips on the old boards.

Now that I have a working 512K, I wasn't even really planning on picking up a 128K, but for that price...

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Nice one!

Even has the ceramic CPU package!

I see you have Version A 64k ROMs. So it's original all right. I think only the very early ROMs can use the system 0.85 tour.

But you can't use some floppy drives. Check out those pics. And the Apple article about ROMs and floppy drives 

IMO you can use the external drive internally, as long as it's one of those with the round sticker.

I noticed that later external floppy drives (i.e. with revised eject mechanism) will work externally with Version A ROMs, but holding the mouse button at startup won't eject the disk. Haven't tried mounting those later drives internally tho.

We have exactly the same configuration ! Yours' a little older.