Today's conquest

[Mike Richardson]

For some reason today there were about 50 garage sales all going on at the same time in the same part of town, so I spent all morning cruising around to each one.

My friend got a 21" ViewSonic CRT for $25 and a Color LaserJet 4500N for $60.

I got a Color StyleWriter 2400 with cables for $4, and a Power Macintosh 7200/120 with 128 MB RAM, Extended II keyboard (worth the $10 alone), teardrop mouse, and Mac color monitor (burnt in) for $10. This Mac has some VERY interesting PCI cards in it. One has a 50 pin SCSI that faces out of the PCI slot to the back of the Mac, and the other one is this shrunken parallel port thing. The Mac it's self has all this development software on it and it appears to have belonged to Rice University.

I also got for $5, a display which appears to be identical to my damaged Performa Plus display, except this one says "Magnavox" and it has a VGA cable. The Performa Plus display has no cable at all (it is completely ruined) and the glass on the tube is severely scratched. I think I can transplant the tube and stuff from the Magnavox to the Performa Plus case, and use a VGA to Mac adapter, to more or less resurrect my Performa Plus display to go along with my Performa 400.

Hopefully there's a lot of garage sales going on next Saturday and maybe I can pick up a few more things.

 

[Bolle]

nice one on the 7200. especially the RAM and PCI cards.

 

[funkytoad]

yeah. Nice Job!

 

[MrMacintosh]

What's the model number and information on that Magnavox monitor? I've seen those before but never knew what model.

Nice conquest!

Kyle-

 

[Mike Richardson]

What's the model number and information on that Magnavox monitor? I've seen those before but never knew what model.
Nice conquest!

Kyle-

I just transplanted all of the guts of the Magnavox monitor into the Performa Plus case. Now I basically have a Performa Plus monitor that takes VGA. The picture is great. It's just a tad fuzzy but the colors are really good.

The Magnavox is model CM9032 194T. The front plastic says, "VGA COLOR MONITOR" with a colorful little emblem. This one was manufactured September 1990. The old Performa Plus guts were manufactured February 1993.

My theory is that for the Performa/Performa Plus displays Apple just went with the lowest bidder who could slap a DB-15 cable on a generic VGA monitor. The monitor displayed at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Apple_Performa_Plus_Display.jpg looks different than mine.

 

[MacMan]

I have a feeling the Performa Plus displays were just PC monitors with a Mac connecor as I have seen the same monitor under various guises, most notably branded "Tulip" on some ancient PCs in the Physics department at Uni.

I'm lucky enough to own two Performa Plus Displays and they work fine (although the power switch on one is permenantly stuck on).

 

[Scott Baret]

Performa Plus was a generic monitor. At one point I heard who made them but the name escapes me. Was it Packard Bell, or did they at least brand them for Packard Bell?

 

[Mike Richardson]

The inside of the Magnavox seems to indicate it was made by Philips.

The Magnavox screen does not have as good of a dot pitch, compared to the genuine Performa Plus display, but it's good enough.

 

[techfury90]

Mike: of course it'd be Philips, they're the same company.

 

[Mike Richardson]

Mike: of course it'd be Philips, they're the same company.

Not necessarily.

For items like CRTs the companies often contract out the actual manufacturing of the product. In other words they just sell their name so the other company can put it on. In this case, yes, Philips owns Magnavox, and they just opted to use that particular brand on the CRT.

For example, Toshiba CRT TVs are actually made by Orion (a really crappy TV manufacturer). Of course I learned this AFTER buying a Toshiba TV :/

 

[Bunsen]

Pics of the "shrunken parallel port thing"? If it's a university machine, chances are you've scored a GPIBcard there

 

[Mike Richardson]

Yes, it's a GPIB. There's a sticker on one of the cards, that says, GPIB, and IEEE-488.

I have no idea what it's really used for. Even the wikipedia article is kind of vague. I wonder if the card is valuable at all?

 

[MacNoob]

GPIB is used to interface to scientific and industrial equipment.

It's also the interface the old Commodore PETs used for peripherals like disk drives and printers.

 

[Bunsen]

Stuff like oscilloscopes and laboratory instrumentation. They are useful, so they could be valuable to someone. Check ebay completed auctions.

 

[Quadraman]

Mike: of course it'd be Philips, they're the same company.

Not necessarily.

For items like CRTs the companies often contract out the actual manufacturing of the product. In other words they just sell their name so the other company can put it on. In this case, yes, Philips owns Magnavox, and they just opted to use that particular brand on the CRT.

For example, Toshiba CRT TVs are actually made by Orion (a really crappy TV manufacturer). Of course I learned this AFTER buying a Toshiba TV :/

That's a surprise. I always thought Toshiba was Sony's biggest competitor in the television market. You don't go toe to toe with Sony by selling rebranded crap, that's for sure.