Addicted to Old Macs

John C. Foster - 2002.03.29

My Turn is Low End Mac's column for reader-submitted articles. It's your turn to share your thoughts on all things Mac (or iPhone, iPod, etc.) and write for the Mac web. Email your submission to Dan Knight .

I know that I have a problem: I am addicted to old Macs. I can't help it, no matter how hard I try. I have this idea that I am going to pass away with an attic full of old Macs, and my grandchildren will discover them one day with much delight. Visions of my future grandchildren discovering the antique technology - and their attempts to use the computers - fuel my excitement.

I have been collecting a bevy of old Macs and attempting to max them out with memory, external CD drives, external hard drives, original keyboards, mice, modems, and monitors. To date, here's what I have scrounged:

Desktops

PowerBooks

Portable, 3
165c, 1
180c, 4
540c, 1
2400c, 1

This totals 39 computers - 29 desktops and 10 portables. Obviously, eBay loves me, and the result is that my attic is turning into a true Macintosh Time Capsule.

I am also attempting to put the original system software on each computer and load the hard drive with the appropriate version of Norton Utilities, WriteNow, Excel, SuperPaint, ClarisWorks, Netscape, Eudora, and fax software. This older software is getting harder to find. I am using Disk Copy to copy the installers onto a Zip disk and will eventually move them to CDs for posterity's sake.

Sites like Low End Mac and Jag's House provide an invaluable amount of resources for performing these computer restorations. Apple doesn't really support these efforts, any longer - the Apple Spec section that covered these machines was removed recently.

My weekends have been consumed with the restoration of these machines. I seem to be satisfied only when I have one machine downloading software, the hard drive out of another, and yet another online with ConfigPPP checking my email with an old version of Eudora.

If you have the same obsession that I have, then you can relate. Of all these Macs, my favorites are the SE/30, Quadra 700, and PowerBook 180c.

What are yours?

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Recent My Turn articles

Back to Mac OS 9 Because It's All I Need, 2011.01.26. Sebastian Patting sold his Intel Macs and went back to PowerPC Macs and Mac OS 9. Here's why.
Using Low End Macs for Internet Radio, 2008.08.18. When the local public radio station moved classical music to HD radio, it was time to find another way to listen. An old iMac with iTunes solved the problem.
'That's Not a Computer', 2008.07.30. Salvaging a broken PowerBook by turning it into a desktop computer.
More in the My Turn index.

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