[frcguy]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

Cool collection. I used to be very into the old Apple stuff. to me though, a lot of your stuff is somewhat "new." However, I'm a little envious of that Mac 128K. My oldest Mac is a Plus (fully functional), but I do have an Apple IIC and a IIC+ (functional). For over a year around 2005, I ran my classic as a web server using a SCSI to ethernet adapter, and it did great! You can actually stick 4MB of RAM in a Classic. I almost got my Plus to be a web server, but I was about 22K short of making it happen on a single 800K floppy.

If you're looking for a real speed demon, and you like the compact macs, try to pick up an SE/30. 16MHz and I believe up to 16MB of RAM. Lightning fast for it's time. I also have an LC III "pizza box" form factor mac, which you can actually get OS8 to run on with quite a bit of trickery. I always wanted a Color Classic, but they were too expensive.

Anyhow, it's getting harder and harder to keep these things alive and work with the software, but the experience of using early Apple computers was a great part of my childhood, and one I'll never forget. If you're looking for resources for the old Macs, one of the best ones out there is Jag's House. I don't care much for the guy who runs the site, but it's a wealth of resources, and I appreciate that he has compiled them all and kept them around. University of Michigan used to have all the old Apple OS downloads too. Not sure if they do anymore. You might want to look for a program called TransMac to write mac floppies from a Windows PC.

Thanks! Your collection sounds pretty awesome too. I like that you got ethernet on your Classic, I'll defiantly have to look in to that. The 128K is a special one for me. One of my middle school teachers had it in his classroom and he knew I was really in to computers so he gave it to me when I graduated. I have the original MacPaint disk for it too as well as the keyboard, mouse, and power cord. Unfortunately it has a bad memory chip, and I've been meaning since last fall to pick up a IIe RAM card and harvest the chip from there. Robotics took over I haven't had any time to do it, but I'm hoping to soon. The Plus has issues too and displays horizontal lines on the screen whenever I power it up. Still trying to figure that one out. The reason I have so many newer Macs is that PowerPC machines are relatively plentiful and people love to give them away.

As far as future additions, I would love to add an SE/30. I'm also looking into a PDP from DEC as well. Thanks for the resources, I've been meaning to load up some software besides MacPaint and MacWrite on my Classic and now I'll have to do so!