Hi everyone!
I wanted to share some high-quality pictures of a rare piece of digital typography history that I recently rescued from a defunct print shop warehouse here in Moscow, Russia.
Inside one of the Macintosh Quadra 650 units, I found this amazing Harlequin Mac Video Interface PCB. As you can see, it features some extensive factory bodge work (wires and diodes soldered on both sides of the board), lots of signed 74F-series logic chips, two massive Texas Instruments SN74BCT2420FN bus controllers, and a custom EPROM labeled GPVI V1.0.
The external port is a massive high-density DD-50 female connector, which was used to stream rasterized bitmaps directly to high-end image-setters (likely Linotype-Hell or Agfa machines) back in 1993-1994.
Sadly, the Mac itself suffered a power supply failure right after the first successful chime, so the whole set is now listed for local sale to a restorer. But I made sure to take these high-res photos to preserve this hardware for the digital archive, as there are almost no clear pictures of this specific Issue B revision on the internet.
Hope you find this interesting!
I wanted to share some high-quality pictures of a rare piece of digital typography history that I recently rescued from a defunct print shop warehouse here in Moscow, Russia.
Inside one of the Macintosh Quadra 650 units, I found this amazing Harlequin Mac Video Interface PCB. As you can see, it features some extensive factory bodge work (wires and diodes soldered on both sides of the board), lots of signed 74F-series logic chips, two massive Texas Instruments SN74BCT2420FN bus controllers, and a custom EPROM labeled GPVI V1.0.
The external port is a massive high-density DD-50 female connector, which was used to stream rasterized bitmaps directly to high-end image-setters (likely Linotype-Hell or Agfa machines) back in 1993-1994.
Sadly, the Mac itself suffered a power supply failure right after the first successful chime, so the whole set is now listed for local sale to a restorer. But I made sure to take these high-res photos to preserve this hardware for the digital archive, as there are almost no clear pictures of this specific Issue B revision on the internet.
Hope you find this interesting!
