I have been trying to reduce my collection and sold a few of them recently. But having issues reducing further. For the following 11 machines, if you could only keep 5 of them, which would you let go?
- Macintosh SE - full memory, has a working miniscribe hard disk
- Macintosh SE/30 - full memory, 47MHz 030 Booster and color LCD kit from ZZJ, internal magneto optical drive, Bolle's combo card for ethernet
- Macintosh IIci - full memory, has a daystar 50MHz 030 accelerator, ethernet card, many supermac video cards to choose from
- Macintosh IIfx - full memory, ZZJ's NuCF compact flash drive, 8 * 24 GC, ethernet, another 8 * 24
- Macintosh Quadra 700 - full memory, running at 50MHz with Bolle's quad doubler
- Macintosh Quadra 800 - full memory, overclocked to 40MHz
- PowerBook 540c - full memory, overclocked to 40MHz, has a full 68040 processor (ie. FPU), working batteries
- PowerBook Duo 280c - full memory, has a full 68040 processor (ie. FPU), working batteries
- Power Macintosh 8500 - 1GB of memory, 500MHz Newertech processor card upgrade
- Macintosh Quadra 950 - full memory, having issues with the SCSI subsystem right now though.. needs to be fixed
- Macintosh 512K - stock
I don't think I can cut anything...
If it were me, I could cut you down to three and then bring you back up to five.
Mac SE/30 — Your build is absolutely top tier compact Mac and a manifestation of the “how far can we take it?” camp of vintage computing.
PowerBook Duo 280c — Sub notebook before sub notebooks were even a thing. Take your full ‘040, memory maxed Duo and match it with a Duo Dock, M1212 Color monitor, and the gen1 Apple extended keyboard, and you’ve got a supreme setup the would make anyone in the 1994 know absolutely drool.
Quadra 700 — Yeah, sure it’s basically a IIci turned on its side, but somehow so much aesthetically more. Being topped out as it is, this would be a fantastic A/UX machine.
So I’ve got you down to three machines. Now what? Well, how about a couple of curves to bring you to that five machine goal:
Macintosh Portable — Esoteric classic, exhibiting perfect Snow White design language. With its 640x400 display, possible 9Mb RAM, internal hard drive and 16 MHz (!!!) 68000, it probably what the Plus could have been given no budget constraints. And it’s “portable”!
UMax SuperMac SuperMac S900 250/DP — Gives you a clone era machine in your collection that is arguably a better than the PowerMac 9600. Dual 604e CPUs! Up to 1Gb RAM! (In 1997!) 6 PCI slots mean unlimited (lol) expansion possibilities. Maybe a RAID card with striped 10,000 rpm scsi drives? Dual monitors on a Twin Turbo card? Absolutely 90s aesthetics. The very end of old-school Macintosh before the Jobs era. A testament to what might have been had clones really been allowed to innovate.
