I have this mac 128k that I recently bought on eBay. It has a couple of problems but they already have their own posts, I just wanted to know if there is a way to downgrade a mac 128k that has been upgraded to a 512k. Will I need to solder?
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downgrading a mac 128k
- Thread starter MacTopus29
- Start date
it depends on whether it was an upgrade by Apple, or if it was an upgrade via the MacSnap or other upgrade
The board is not in original condition and can never be claimed to be as such again.
It's a functional computer in its present state. "Restoring" a 512K upgraded 128K level of the seminal RoadApple by lobotomy makes no sense to me. Why would anyone ever do such a thing? Recreating the relentless, RFI inducing floppy-swap experience seems so pointless, even for kicks.
Dunno, but if you've got an external 400K drive for fallback at hand, give it a whirl.
It's a functional computer in its present state. "Restoring" a 512K upgraded 128K level of the seminal RoadApple by lobotomy makes no sense to me. Why would anyone ever do such a thing? Recreating the relentless, RFI inducing floppy-swap experience seems so pointless, even for kicks.
Dunno, but if you've got an external 400K drive for fallback at hand, give it a whirl.
There's something to be said for having an "original" 128k, but there's also something to be said for having a machine with a period-correct upgrade. As it sits your machine is a piece of history that someone used, that they cared enough about to upgrade so they could continue to use it as it's original specs became limiting. It has a story and a past.
You could definitely find a way to "downgrade" the board to 128k of RAM, but consider if that's really the route that makes sense, or if it's better to appreciate what you have for what it is - a nice piece of Apple history.
I'm not sure you'd get much benefit from modifying the 512k board - it still wouldn't be an original/stock condition 128k, and you'd lose the benefit of the memory upgrade. The only way to restore to actual 128k condition is to ensure it has a 128k board and 400k floppy drive in there, but that just makes it a stock 128k which is not a very usable computer at all.
I convinced the only "stock" 128K Macs to survive were closet queens of the well to do who stashed them away when they got tired of them or just went out and bought a 512K less than a year later due to the frustrations of having to deal with them. Most folks needed to upgrade memory to get any use at all out of the pestiferous things. Even a 512K pretty much needed an external FDD to be of all that much use.
The 128K as released does have a place in history, but examples representing the turning of it into a real computer useful at the dawn of DTP are history.
YMMV
The 128K as released does have a place in history, but examples representing the turning of it into a real computer useful at the dawn of DTP are history.
YMMV
You will need to solder, yes.
Originality is overrated. Given that a lot of 128ks had Micron RAM in them, their 'original state' is 'dead'. Let's not get picky and pretend we're all maintaining museum pieces here (thank goodness, given how people fail to understand how conservation works). 128ks are, absolutely speaking, common; if OP wants to muck around with theirs, let them.
That said:
The reason why everyone upgraded is that the 128k Mac really isn't that good: if you want the "it's not very good" experience, then by all means downgrade it, OP. My 128k is literally for completeness' sake and so I can turn it on every so often and go 'oh dear'. If you want a machine that's actually going to be able to do anything, reversing the upgrade is probably counterproductive.
Originality is overrated. Given that a lot of 128ks had Micron RAM in them, their 'original state' is 'dead'. Let's not get picky and pretend we're all maintaining museum pieces here (thank goodness, given how people fail to understand how conservation works). 128ks are, absolutely speaking, common; if OP wants to muck around with theirs, let them.
That said:
The reason why everyone upgraded is that the 128k Mac really isn't that good: if you want the "it's not very good" experience, then by all means downgrade it, OP. My 128k is literally for completeness' sake and so I can turn it on every so often and go 'oh dear'. If you want a machine that's actually going to be able to do anything, reversing the upgrade is probably counterproductive.
I agree, but it is the only reason to actually modify or swap the 512k board, in OP's case. The 128k is one of the few machines where the originality does affect the value of it massively.
An excellent reason to replace a 512K upgrade would be to take it to the next level. A Plus logic board/FDD/Bucket upgrade would be the final, historically correct upgrade path for the 128K. Apple's upgrade kit offer was a fix for the unfortunate state of the Macintosh at first release as well as for bringing the 512K/Ke up to speed for DTP work.
@cheesestraws as you said, originality is overrated. Not saying don't muck with it, putting things into historical perspective and outlining the reasons for it being so "counterproductive" in terms of use as you say. That's the source of my frustration with the whole downgrade thinking it's an upgrade thing when it comes to the 128K.
@joshhc I'll have to disagree about originality enhancing value here, an upgraded 128K can never again be in original, numbers matching classic car condition. A lobotomized 128K can only be classified as a restoration, so the value won't be massively affected unless misrepresented in a sale listing.
@MacTopus29 have at it, have fun with it and enjoy it whatever way you decide to go.
@cheesestraws as you said, originality is overrated. Not saying don't muck with it, putting things into historical perspective and outlining the reasons for it being so "counterproductive" in terms of use as you say. That's the source of my frustration with the whole downgrade thinking it's an upgrade thing when it comes to the 128K.
@joshhc I'll have to disagree about originality enhancing value here, an upgraded 128K can never again be in original, numbers matching classic car condition. A lobotomized 128K can only be classified as a restoration, so the value won't be massively affected unless misrepresented in a sale listing.
@MacTopus29 have at it, have fun with it and enjoy it whatever way you decide to go.
I think you misread/misunderstood me. I meant that an original 128K (original logicboard, not upgraded) is worth more than an upgraded one, eBay sold listings prove this. An actual 128K is worth more than a 128K that was upgraded to a 512K or Plus, as those are really just now a 512K or Plus and are worth similar to those models. Reverting an upgraded 128K back to being an actual 128K (find an original logicboard, period correct AB) would make it again worth more than one that's just a 512K or Plus inside, no?
In terms selling one you're probably right, dunno as the only 128K I've ever considered has a cattlebranded "D" next to the logo plate that nobody here knew the meaning of when I bought it.
There's no way of telling if the drive train's original in the early Macs. You cand find wildly mismatched build dates and copyright dates but that's all I can think of offhand.
Originality is overrated and provenance has only hit the Apple I scene so far as I know at present. Caveat emptor.
Well I guess I’m an outlier but I think a 128K Mac (with an external 400k drive, please) is great for lots of purposes!
- Mouse Stampede and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Sargon III are great games
- MS-BASIC (version 2.0, not 1.0) is fun to play around (though not a compiler) with and actually quite useful for rapid prototyping little apps
- MacPaint remains a delightful piece of software
- Macintosh Pascal is very usable (though also not a compiler)
- ExperLogo is an awesome, rare compiled Logo that, weirdly, supports the Toolbox (de-copy-protected version coming to the Garden as soon as I get around to it, unless anyone from ExperTelligence objects)
- And I think it even supports some of the early assemblers (MacAsm? McAssembly maybe? I haven’t tried)
- And you can run all this stuff via Floppy Emu if you want to avoid disk-swapping or the risk of floppy drive malfunction.
Ok for now I guess I’ll stick with the 512k.
Well if it was cattle branded (melted in), then its not the collectable Drexel Mac which has a blue stamped D on it, done at the Apple Factory during production.
Anyway, 128ks do have their place as a true collectable. I dont get why people have this silly notion that it aslo must be useful in some way. People collect all sorts of useless stuff for the sake of collecting/originality - its it kinda the point of collecting....
Pffft! 
We know all about that stuff now, but nobody around here even knew what a "Drexel Mac" was when that cattlebrand pulled it into my collection. Stirred up a lot of guesswork and research at the time.
It turned out to be of much less importance than something like a DayStar upgrade "D" mark would have been. Remains desirable even if not the fancified student version. It's still a Drexel University, property tagged 128K with mad upgrades! Plus Board/Bucket upgrade, 4MB and 16MHz 68030 MicroMac Performer onboard. That BLUE D of yours is just about the only thing that makes a production 128K much of anything to brag about.
The 512K board in this 128K makes it a lot more fun than if stock. More and better games would be one thing. I had a 512K I used to digitize logos in Fontographer 1.0 at home. Those object oriented PostScript graphics went into my CNC plotter by day.
We know all about that stuff now, but nobody around here even knew what a "Drexel Mac" was when that cattlebrand pulled it into my collection. Stirred up a lot of guesswork and research at the time.It turned out to be of much less importance than something like a DayStar upgrade "D" mark would have been. Remains desirable even if not the fancified student version. It's still a Drexel University, property tagged 128K with mad upgrades! Plus Board/Bucket upgrade, 4MB and 16MHz 68030 MicroMac Performer onboard. That BLUE D of yours is just about the only thing that makes a production 128K much of anything to brag about.
The 512K board in this 128K makes it a lot more fun than if stock. More and better games would be one thing. I had a 512K I used to digitize logos in Fontographer 1.0 at home. Those object oriented PostScript graphics went into my CNC plotter by day.
Are there photos of your 'D' branded 128k somewhere?
Given incoming student to freshman faculty ratio, interesting questions about numbers come to mind for the first time. Drexel's need to purchase additional 128K Macs that year, before the release of the 512K at the beginning of their Sophomore year would be quite limited.
We'll never know, but I'd bet a shiny nickel that far fewer cattle branded 128K front bezels made it into the wild than the blue variety.
edit: now wondering if Drexel did the branding or if Apple did in fulfilling the second, much smaller order from Drexel? Tooling and process costs make me think the latter would be more likely. The odds of Drexel having gone through the expense and trouble of matching the Blue D seem remote.
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The cattle-stamping was done in house at Drexel, this was discussed here or someplace (maybe FaceBook) many years ago when I bought my first Drexel Mac. There was an extensive thread about them too with photos showing Drexel Macs on the production line and being delivered to students. There are other photos showing the same cattle stamped D done to PCs and other hardware like printers, etc. Not at all an uncommon practice really, even my High School branded stuff with a hot iron. The assumption is that its is very, very hard to remove. As for why the stamped the front they way they did, I think it was just to mimic what Apple did to the first 1,850 Macs with the Blue D.
The difference is the cattle-branding was only done to systems owned by the university itself, it was not done to those bought by students through the school. The Blue D versions go either way it seems. I have had four blue D Drexel's to date with my current one being once owned by a professor - it appears to be University property as it also has metal inventory stickers on the keyboard and I think even one wedged onto the mouse - would have to look, been a while. The other systems were student system and lacked asset tags. But interesting the professors Mac does not have a secondary cattle-stamp.
So yes, the cattle-branded 128ks will be less common I think since the University required students to have computers and thus probably has fewer systems themselves. Then you take into account the shorter life of the 128k. I have seen 512k and even Pluses with Drexel cattle branding, usually on the back or sides and often not well centered or leveled.
Just to add some cool info, dont want to derail this tread more! LOL
By January 1984, Drexel University had already cut its own slice of the Apple pie and was anxiously waiting to serve it on a silver platter. Rumor had it that each unit would be embossed with a blue “D” for Drexel. They would become known in the corridors of Matheson and Main as the “DUs.”
By the fall of 1983, just as Jobs addressed his troops in Waikiki, the Trek Building, located at 32nd and Race Street, had been renovated to facilitate the influx and distribution of approximately 2,000 nameless, top-secret Apple computers. A state-of-the-art computer classroom was installed in the Korman Center; a group called DUsers, comprising students with microcomputer experience, was convened to help the uninitiated. A newsletter called boot was conceived and edited by Professor Tom Hewett to address the pressing issues of the microcomputer user.
Just before the launch, a group of graduating seniors was given access to a roomful of covered computers with no visible labels. They poked around, played with the graphic user interface, saved files on strange floppy disks. Afterward, they were administered a test to assess the effects of microcomputing on stress and anxiety, stratified by age, gender and academic major. The results were clear: Drexel was ready.
And so it was that, on March 5, 1984, some three years after President Hagerty’s prophetic announcement, 1,850 Drexel freshmen trudged up 32nd Street in the cold to pick up their very own Macintosh 128K.
The rumors were true. Each computer was embossed with a blue “D” for Drexel. The price? $1,000, plus tax. Not bad for a unit that sold for $2,495 retail. The 20-pound package included MacWrite, MacPaint and Microsoft Multiplan software, designed by some nerd named Bill Gates. Each box contained the CPU, a keyboard and a mouse. At the time, some faculty had to be told that the mouse was not of the rodent persuasion, but was, rather, a device for navigation.
The difference is the cattle-branding was only done to systems owned by the university itself, it was not done to those bought by students through the school. The Blue D versions go either way it seems. I have had four blue D Drexel's to date with my current one being once owned by a professor - it appears to be University property as it also has metal inventory stickers on the keyboard and I think even one wedged onto the mouse - would have to look, been a while. The other systems were student system and lacked asset tags. But interesting the professors Mac does not have a secondary cattle-stamp.
So yes, the cattle-branded 128ks will be less common I think since the University required students to have computers and thus probably has fewer systems themselves. Then you take into account the shorter life of the 128k. I have seen 512k and even Pluses with Drexel cattle branding, usually on the back or sides and often not well centered or leveled.
Just to add some cool info, dont want to derail this tread more! LOL
By January 1984, Drexel University had already cut its own slice of the Apple pie and was anxiously waiting to serve it on a silver platter. Rumor had it that each unit would be embossed with a blue “D” for Drexel. They would become known in the corridors of Matheson and Main as the “DUs.”
By the fall of 1983, just as Jobs addressed his troops in Waikiki, the Trek Building, located at 32nd and Race Street, had been renovated to facilitate the influx and distribution of approximately 2,000 nameless, top-secret Apple computers. A state-of-the-art computer classroom was installed in the Korman Center; a group called DUsers, comprising students with microcomputer experience, was convened to help the uninitiated. A newsletter called boot was conceived and edited by Professor Tom Hewett to address the pressing issues of the microcomputer user.
Just before the launch, a group of graduating seniors was given access to a roomful of covered computers with no visible labels. They poked around, played with the graphic user interface, saved files on strange floppy disks. Afterward, they were administered a test to assess the effects of microcomputing on stress and anxiety, stratified by age, gender and academic major. The results were clear: Drexel was ready.
And so it was that, on March 5, 1984, some three years after President Hagerty’s prophetic announcement, 1,850 Drexel freshmen trudged up 32nd Street in the cold to pick up their very own Macintosh 128K.
The rumors were true. Each computer was embossed with a blue “D” for Drexel. The price? $1,000, plus tax. Not bad for a unit that sold for $2,495 retail. The 20-pound package included MacWrite, MacPaint and Microsoft Multiplan software, designed by some nerd named Bill Gates. Each box contained the CPU, a keyboard and a mouse. At the time, some faculty had to be told that the mouse was not of the rodent persuasion, but was, rather, a device for navigation.
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I recall the research efforts regarding the student 128K, but no recollection of documentation of the cattlebranded 128Ks other than as an aside. Those pics were posted here. Further discussion must have been on Facebook, have you any documentation of such? Very curious. Mine is impeccably aligned with the logo plate.
I'm more than happy with it, even if it's not the "collectible" Drexel Mac.
edit: I think I like the much heavier weight of the branded D on my 128K better than the more elegant Blue D in your avatar. But that's the typographer/graphic artist in me talking.
I'm more than happy with it, even if it's not the "collectible" Drexel Mac.
edit: I think I like the much heavier weight of the branded D on my 128K better than the more elegant Blue D in your avatar. But that's the typographer/graphic artist in me talking.
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Its been so long, I don't have much documented and I think some was lost when the forum here crashed. I think either are cool, I just am partial to the printed one because it was from the first batch of 1,850 and since it was applied by Apple themselves, it is one of the more rare production Macs out there and the only public variation of the 128k sold. But then I am a collector and less a hobbyist.
