Apple kit

A couple of Apple machines from back in the day.

Published , updated by Richard GoodwinFiled under Computers

Apple mac..?

This is my Apple Mac. It was obsolete when I got it, as payment of a bad debt, so the most useful thing I've been able to do with it was use it as a bedside table when I first moved into my own flat and couldn't afford furniture (it was fine for putting the lamp on, but too low to see the alarm clock).

I have no clue what it is (I guessed it had a 10MB SCSI HDD, and noticed it had a standard parallel port, but that didn't help me much), so I requested that anyone with info let me know.

Andrew Hancox was good enough to email in:

I was reading your web site, and saw your page with the mysterious Mac on. I can shed some light on this for you. It is a Mac SE, the second machine they made after the Lisa. The hard drive is indeed a standard SCSI interface. It did ship with standard parallel ports as it was released before Apple got really perverse.

However Magne, a Norwegian vistor who posted to the guestbook, said that it is not an SE, and is either a 128K, a 512K, a 512KE, or a Plus, while Alcine from the UK maintains that it's an earlier machine:

Hey...I'd say you've got an original 1984 Macintosh there! AFAIK once the 128k came out the badge on the back said 'Macintosh 128' (and then Macintosh 512 etc.). As yours just says 'Macintosh', it can only be an original 1984 Macintosh. Collectable! Not that I'm jealous you understand...

On further investigation it would appear that this machine is of a 1984 vintage, at least if the pictures on this site [apple-history.com] are to be believed. Maybe I should spark it up and see how much memory is in there...


Mac IIsi

Little doubt about this one however.  Getting it to upgrade to a useful version of the OS took a Herculean effort but with a whopping 9MB of memory I could get it to display a whole 256 colours.

I bought it from a friend of a friend who had left it in the garage for some time after liberating it from impending skipdom at Portsmouth Uni. It had a TCP/IP stack and an FTP client, but no archiving software. So, to get it in a usable condition I had to upgrade the OS via self-extracting archives just so I could get a self extracting de-archiver working, and then upgrade to a later version of the de-archiving software to get any usable software. It ran Netscape 2 and Internet Explorer 3, which are the only versions to fit into the 9MB limit. And it took me three solid days to get that far, hunting around old FTP and web sites, trying to get it on the Mac, finding out it didn't work, rinse, repeat.

For a while it was in the kitchen, next to the microwave.  I had it on a 10bT network which connected to the ADSL line, so I could use it when waiting for the kettle to boil to check the TV schedules and news headlines. Although the screen did go wobbly when the microwave was on, despite the 12" (30cm) clearance and several metal tea trays between them, which was a bit scary.