5 old macs

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5 old macs

A new friend of mine just opened an indoor Radio Control Race Track. He found out I was into vintage computers and told me when he bought the warehouse the rack is now in there were 5 vintage macs stuffed in a corner. Turns out he has an original 128k, two 512ks, a Plus, and an SE. None have power cords, keyboards, or mice. I told him the 128K may be worth something substantial and the 512s may be worth something. He offered me two of my choice so I took the two I can test with an ADB keyboard and mouse. I have no way of testing the three oldest. One of the computers has a Dartmouth University computer inventory tag on it. The town the warehouse is in is just a few miles from Dartmouth so maybe someone bought these from Dartmouth and stuck them in the warehouse.

I may try to get a keyboard and mouse for him at some point. I guess they are kinda rare.

Mike

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Dartmouth has a history with

Dartmouth has a history with Macintosh computers. Here are some Usenet threads which you may find interesting:

http://macgui.com/usenet/?group=6&id=239
http://macgui.com/usenet/?group=6&id=1116
http://macgui.com/usenet/?group=6&id=284
http://macgui.com/usenet/?group=26&id=4626

There's more, of course, but I'll leave those for you to find. Wink

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Thanks, I will check those li

Thanks, I will check those links out. In doing some research I realized I may not be able to checkout the plus. What I thought were ADB ports are mini DIN serial ports. I will see what it does with power on before looking for a keyboard and mouse.

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Early Mac keybd & mouse

128k, 512k, 512ke and Plus all use the same RJ13 keyboard and 9-pin mouse.

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Out of curiosity, which machi

Out of curiosity, which machine has the Dartmouth property tag on it? Is it the 128k?

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The SE has the Dartmouth stic

The SE has the Dartmouth sticker.

Both machines live. The HD and floppy from my flakey Classic are now in the SE, the SE's were swapped into my Classic. I then put an old analog card in the Classic and that seems to have cured it's many issues except the video shimmers (which is why I replaced the analog card in the first place). After lubing the mechanicals in the SE floppy (which is now in the Classic) it has come back to life so I will switch the floppies back which will give me 1.44Mbyte capacity.

The Plus had bad video until I touched up the 4 pin molex connector on the analog card. The floppy started working after many attempts and is now solid. May have needed some run time to get back in shape.

Mike

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The plot thickens a little. T

The plot thickens a little. To make the clunky 20Mbyte drive fit in the classic I double-sided taped it to the floppy cage. When taking it apart to remove the 800K drive and put it back into the SE the drive/cage fell onthe yoke board and broke the end off the CRT. The sound of hissing air is not good!

I did find a CRT on Ebay and will continue pouring money into old computers.

One thing of interest is running Disk Copy on a 1.44M drive in a non-upgraded SE doesn't work, it keeps reporting the drive as single sided when trying to copy to a 800K floppy. Erase/format works OK. I assume Disk Copy is reading a low level register and not understanding.

Mike

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old 400k system images

I ended up getting a keyboard and mouse and now have a functioning Plus. I want to use the KB and mouse to test the two 512ks and 128. I was able to make some 800k floppies for the plus directly from Apple's site. I have found a couple places with 400K disk images but stuffit running on my mac se doesn't see them as valid archives. And if I use stuffit under mac OSX the disk image isn't seen by disk copy.

Does anyone know were to get older system images or what else to try?

Thanks,

Mike

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You can go back again

While cleaning up the den closet I found one of those plastic flip style floppy holders. In it were 21 floppy disks last written in 1992. They were the backup set for my MacSE.

I got an external hard drive for the Plus and did a restore. I can now go back in time about 20 years to view stuff like my checkbook, resume, and taxes.

I have a 9 Gig SCSI drive in the enclosure now. The old OS didn't like a disk size of greater than 4 gig so I partioned it as 500M for now. When I first formatted it using a patched copy of HD SC setup, it restored but I couldn't copy or add files. I would get out of space, -2 gig free space required. Maybe I can partion it greater than a gig but what's the point Smile

The Plus boots lightning fast with the modern drive.

Mike

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