Walkmac: Can you boot a Mac Plus without the +12V line ?

[pinto_guy]

So I recently acquired an original Walkmac (photo below) from the estate of the late Chuck Colby, founder of Colby Computers. The Walkmac used a Mac Plus logic board, and attached an LCD and a battery to package an arguably fully portable computer (it still missed a keyboard and a mouse), a full year before Apple's luggable. One cool feature is that you could plug in external storage peripherals (FDD and/or HDD) directly into it from the side. See some more discussion on this here.

I'm now trying to revive it. After toying with it quite a bit I could get the simasimac screen on the LCD (2nd photo below), but the LB refuses to boot up. Something I noticed is that it's missing the +12V line from the power supply. Do you know if the lack of +12V would prevent the LB from booting ? I thought 12V was only used for the FDD and HDD, but I could be wrong. Thanks in advance.

 

[pinto_guy]

So I can now say that booting up the LB of the Mac Plus requires +12V. Turned out the 12V line from the PS was fried because of a short in the Colby circuit board. After I got the +12V back, I got the LB to boot up.

 

[ScutBoy]

Pics, or it didn't happen!

Seriously, interested to see how your progress is going on this thing!

 

[pinto_guy]

Fair enough ScutBoy, here it is : . Now I need to figure out how to boot from the detachable floppy or HDD

 

[ScutBoy]

Fair enough ScutBoy, here it is : . Now I need to figure out how to boot from the detachable floppy or HDD

That's sweet! Congrats on getting this far!

 

[cheesestraws]

This is so cool.

 

[pinto_guy]

So it's now booting off the detachable FDD, or an external HDD. I had it booting from the detachable HDD for a while, but lost it. The connection to the SCSI chip of the LB appears to be quite temperamental.

I also attach a high resolution photo of the screen. Based on some of the stuff read on-line, it looks like the screen is actually not an LCD as I had previously mentioned, but plasma !

 

[LaPorta]

Now that is truly one rare machine. Hold onto that!

 

[bibilit]

the screen is actually not an LCD as I had previously mentioned, but plasma !

Yes not uncommon, had a Compaq Portable III for a while, and this unit had a similar plasma screen

 

[ScutBoy]

That looks great - thanks for sharing more pictures!

I like the plasma more than the passive-scan LCD on my Outbound

 

[cheesestraws]

That is a very charming little machine.

 

[pinto_guy]

If you're interested, I put a few more pictures of the machine, together with some comments, in this other thread: 

 

[macdoogie]

Who would have thought that Orange would look so good on a monochrome Mac?

Actually, many years ago I discovered that the Green CRT in the small Apple IIc monitor is the exact same size and fit as the original Mac. I retrofitted one of my Platinum Mac Plus machines with the green CRT which was pretty cool. I believe I had to swap the Yokes over as the IIc one had a different harness or something. It's quite possible that a collector buddy of mine still has that machine 20+ years later. Now I'm gonna ask

 

[pinto_guy]

Thanks macdoogie. Yes, the orange plasma screen looks awesome.

By the way, I am in the process of refurbishing 2 (perhaps 3) more Walkmacs of this type, that we will be putting up for sale. Not sure at what price and under what format (Private sales, eBay, CL... ?). If anyone in this forum is interested, please PM me.

Also, in the collection of floppies, we found an HyperCard file promoting the Walkmac SE, successor to this Walkmac. We put a screen shot of navigating the demo in this youtube video. It's precious  :-D

Edit: I realize that I posted in the wrong forum, so I reposted in the Conquest topic. Apologies