Radius16/SE/FPD: my first (wet) dream machine of yesteryear!

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I had the SE & the Radius16 back in the day, but never got the FPD/VidCard combo for it. :'(

Got the VidCard and adapter MUUUUUCH too much later, but the only time I tried to source the original FPD for the rig, the eBay thief quoted egregious shipping & handling charges AFTER the auction was over and wouldn't allow me to pick it up . . .

A 16MHz '030/FPU Equipped SE Accelerator with an FPD full of bonus pixels on the side was to die for in 1989!

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Here's the other side of the ad.

All this stuff was the result of the burgeoning DTP market, way back when:

Aldus PageMaker was the Cat's Meow

Fontographer was the very first illustration program used on Madison Avenue, predating/prodding Adobe's later development of Illustrator based upon their own, in-house, font development code.

Aldus FreeHand was then developed by the same guys from NYMUG, based upon the code they cut for the aforementioned Fontographer and released by Aldus to a much larger market.

When almost every innovative app or applet was developed by and for the Mac community FIRST and MAYBE ported for use under the HORRIBLE Win286 kluge.

Oh well, those were heady days!

 

[beachycove]

I remember back in 1990, having been recently introduced to the Macintosh platform in the form of an old compact Mac, which was given to me to work on in the office, and being absolutely floored when someone from technical services told me that it was possible (if expensive) to work with a graphic image of a full page on a Mac.

I had just come from the land of DOS, and while there was no wet dream involved in my little moment of ecstasy, there certainly was good old Augustinian concupiscence. Now we may yawn and wonder what all the fuss was about, but then these technologies were indeed really something.

Do you happen to have any scans of adverts selling the later, SE/30 full-page display cards? I have two or three of them (untested) and would love to see the lurid details.

 

[Byrd]

Loving these scans, Trash80!

Funnily enough, I'm currently fixing up an SE with these very upgrades - the '020 16Mhz accelerator and FPD card - not the most elegantly designed hardware I have to say, it's a nuisance to fit in there!

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I'm more than a bit prone to hyperbole . . . :I . . . but then again . . . concupiscence! }

No scans yet, just LOTS & LOTS of tearsheets from the magazines of those early days.

I'll riffle through the files for the SE30/IIsi related goodies!

One of life's little ironies:

this (almost) ten years old project to scan all my Macintosh goodies is, finally, now being done on . . . :-/

. . . HP_Mini, using only HP Peripherals, and all running under the ubuntu NetBook remix using open source apps! 8-o

 

[beachycove]

The word can, I think, fairly be extended to techo-lust.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Byrd, the definitions of "elegance" and "kluge" in engineering are one in the same and decidedly NOT oxymoronic when used in describing ANYTHING that could be shoe-horned into, in order to get more out of, the SE and later second tier Macs.

 

[Byrd]

That's true. To fit the Radius accelerator + SE motherboard in the case, you can't slide it in like usual, but rather wedge in one side using a butter knife then bend back the chassis on the other side - five minutes OF lots of prying back and forth - until it finally clamps in. Then, the TPD card is screwed in using what appears to be a home-machined (but isn't) bracket complete with large "Radius" dustcover just so you don't short it out on a neighbouring yoke, chassis or hard disk assembly. Solid once its all up and running, but definately not elegant!

Of course, I spent an hour installing all these parts, then realised it was still running 1MB RAM - so had to dismantle it again, butter knife at the ready, to put in the full 4MB complement of RAM.

JB

 

[Concorde1993]

Speaking of external monitors, I have what appears to be a 128/early 512 that was upgraded to a Plus with a BNC adapter at the back. Not sure if it works yet, as I just cleaned out part of the innards a couple of nights ago (very dusty). I intend of posting some pictures of it on the Compact Mac forum. It would be amazing if it works with my Commodore NCC-1701 monitor.