I want a tower to complete my 68k "one of every form factor" collection, but since 950s are hard to come by I've been looking at 800s and 840s. However, one thing I've always heard (from LEM articles and even Wikipedia!) is that the 800/840 is a real pain to work on due to its size. My question is...is that really true? It doesn't seem THAT small...
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Is the 800/840 really that bad to work on?
- Thread starter EvieSigma
- Start date
They're exceptionally fragile these days (the 8100 shares the case), which is a problem.
Not sure about the 8xx but you have to remove the entire logic board to swap/add RAM on the 8100.
Not sure about the 8xx but you have to remove the entire logic board to swap/add RAM on the 8100.
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Wear safety glasses, shards of case plastics flying off at the slightest touch would be your biggest problem. If you find an undamaged case . . . never mind, you won't, but if you happen to, it won't be after the first time you open it.
I'd recommend you don't ship one. The 40 odd pieces I pulled out of my 8100 weren't an anomaly.
Oh don't worry, I've been looking for a few months now! I only just got into Mac collecting over the summer but I immediately wanted a 950 for its stunning profile and the fact that, aside from clock speed, it was the absolute pinnacle of the 68k Mac. It might take a long time but I'm gonna have one, because, well, I gotta have one. It's just that awesome.
Get a 650. The cases are more durable and it is literally the same computer as the 800. The (metal) top slides right off and the RAM and everything else is right there.
To answer the original question though -- the 800/840 aren't that bad in my opinion. Not sure if I just have some kind of super magical 840, but in the past ten years I've had the thing, between a few moves and being in storage for several years, maybe only one or two small internal clips have come off. More of that was due to the fact that the case is just a bad design to begin with than due to bad plastics, but the plastics on these things are aging.
My 840 and my first 840 were kind of a (metaphoric) pain to take apart, but mine never drew blood. It's just difficult, it takes a lot of time and patience and a large work area, but it's doable and if you plan things out and combine multiple work items into a single journey inside the machine, you'll be fine.
Another thought: It's probably worth thinking very very very hard about whether you really want "the pinnacle of the 68k Mac". I find that it's honestly not relevant these days as you can get a much better, easier to service, and more capable powerpc machine (from the 6100 on up to the blue-and-white G3) for almost nothing these days. And, because the main things that were important about the pinnacle of 68k computing is that they had higher performance back when performance actually mattered because minutes and hours spent rendering or waiting for the machine to complete tasks meant billable dollars on a project. And, in the later '90s and early '00s, the highest performance 68k Macs (in general, any '040 and most nice '030s) were good on the Internet. A faster machine with more RAM meant better multi-tasking and better usage of 56k modems, back when Internet connect time meant dollars, and so if you could chat, download, fetch email, and read news all more or less at once, you were in better shape.
Today, unless you're building an Avid, there's not a whole lot that a 950 can do that a 475 or a 610 can't.
To answer the original question though -- the 800/840 aren't that bad in my opinion. Not sure if I just have some kind of super magical 840, but in the past ten years I've had the thing, between a few moves and being in storage for several years, maybe only one or two small internal clips have come off. More of that was due to the fact that the case is just a bad design to begin with than due to bad plastics, but the plastics on these things are aging.
My 840 and my first 840 were kind of a (metaphoric) pain to take apart, but mine never drew blood. It's just difficult, it takes a lot of time and patience and a large work area, but it's doable and if you plan things out and combine multiple work items into a single journey inside the machine, you'll be fine.
Another thought: It's probably worth thinking very very very hard about whether you really want "the pinnacle of the 68k Mac". I find that it's honestly not relevant these days as you can get a much better, easier to service, and more capable powerpc machine (from the 6100 on up to the blue-and-white G3) for almost nothing these days. And, because the main things that were important about the pinnacle of 68k computing is that they had higher performance back when performance actually mattered because minutes and hours spent rendering or waiting for the machine to complete tasks meant billable dollars on a project. And, in the later '90s and early '00s, the highest performance 68k Macs (in general, any '040 and most nice '030s) were good on the Internet. A faster machine with more RAM meant better multi-tasking and better usage of 56k modems, back when Internet connect time meant dollars, and so if you could chat, download, fetch email, and read news all more or less at once, you were in better shape.
Today, unless you're building an Avid, there's not a whole lot that a 950 can do that a 475 or a 610 can't.
I've yet to have a late 68K or beige PPC Mac shipped to me that survived the journey completely unscathed. The best was my 6500, which came in a Mac Pro box(refurb white box) but even it had a few odds and ends broken.
I really, really hate working on the case style of the 800/8500 and the like. As said, you basically have to take everything apart to get to the RAM. It's all good and well to say you only have to do it once, but in reality if you run into corroded RAM slots you might be fighting it for a while to get everything working. It's a VERY good idea to power these up on the bench before putting them back together-you can hopefully address any issues there.
I was given a Q800 case a while back, but unfortunately it has a 7100 LoBo in it. I consider that a real shame, but then who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth(the same guy gave me a bunch of great stuff, including a IIci, an ImageWriter II, a pair of Imagewriter LCs, a IIgs, and a couple of parts Apple IIs, 68Ks, and PPCs).
I really, really hate working on the case style of the 800/8500 and the like. As said, you basically have to take everything apart to get to the RAM. It's all good and well to say you only have to do it once, but in reality if you run into corroded RAM slots you might be fighting it for a while to get everything working. It's a VERY good idea to power these up on the bench before putting them back together-you can hopefully address any issues there.
I was given a Q800 case a while back, but unfortunately it has a 7100 LoBo in it. I consider that a real shame, but then who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth(the same guy gave me a bunch of great stuff, including a IIci, an ImageWriter II, a pair of Imagewriter LCs, a IIgs, and a couple of parts Apple IIs, 68Ks, and PPCs).
I had good luck with shipping my 7300 and my 6500 "back in the day" -- but I"m talking about over ten years ago, so there was a time it made sense to ship all this stuff.
I bet it can still be shipped fine, but it can't be shipped fine particularly inexpensively, since you're going to need big, well-packed boxes that can protect these things from being dropped and jostled. Long gone are the days of pulling like five machines that were wrapped only in newspaper and one layer of peanuts out of a single box.
Building "an Avid" basically up through the G3 era meant stuffing a Mac with more than three slots completely full of cards. Usually there's a video in/out card, a compression board or two, and at least one SCSI card, possibly also a video card for use with a big monitor.
Big video editing systems, or, say, something to do with Rockets, or something like the Symbolics/Genera card are probably the main reasons to ever get such a big system. Nothing on system 7 outside of these things, or using OS 8/late'90s era Internet applications has a practical usage for much more than about 32 megs of RAM on a Quadra.
I bet it can still be shipped fine, but it can't be shipped fine particularly inexpensively, since you're going to need big, well-packed boxes that can protect these things from being dropped and jostled. Long gone are the days of pulling like five machines that were wrapped only in newspaper and one layer of peanuts out of a single box.
Avid is a company that makes video editing software and hardware. They still do, but today, computers are powerful enough to do most video tasks without any assistance from special hardware, and cameras put video files directly onto cards and disks that can be read with USB adapters.
Building "an Avid" basically up through the G3 era meant stuffing a Mac with more than three slots completely full of cards. Usually there's a video in/out card, a compression board or two, and at least one SCSI card, possibly also a video card for use with a big monitor.
Big video editing systems, or, say, something to do with Rockets, or something like the Symbolics/Genera card are probably the main reasons to ever get such a big system. Nothing on system 7 outside of these things, or using OS 8/late'90s era Internet applications has a practical usage for much more than about 32 megs of RAM on a Quadra.
You can do that on pretty much any machine. There's nothing special about the 950 in particular when it comes to serving, except that in the early '90s when it was current, it held more internal disks than any other Mac. The 950 also holds 5.25-inch hard disks if necessary, which were at that time usually reserved for bigger systems, but they had bigger capacities.
There were, in fact, Apple Workgroup Server configs of the 610 and 800 as well, and later, the AWGS family had systems such as the 6150, 8150, 7350, 9650, and the 9150.
Today, a pi or a VM on a modern machine with netatalk running is probably going to be as good or better for a network server.
There were, in fact, Apple Workgroup Server configs of the 610 and 800 as well, and later, the AWGS family had systems such as the 6150, 8150, 7350, 9650, and the 9150.
Today, a pi or a VM on a modern machine with netatalk running is probably going to be as good or better for a network server.
