My Compact Macintosh Story

My Favorite things about compact Macs

Old Mac Web Sites

Low End Mac
Apple-History
Macintosh SE Support Pages
Great Ideas for Old Macs

In the battle between computer formats, the two main sides are the PC and the Macintosh. I have had a PC for a couple of years (first a slow 486, then a buggy Pentium II-based Compaq Presario, and now a Sony Vaio laptop), but until relatively recently, never owned a Mac (I used Mac LC IIs when I was in middle school, though). When the technical school I go to decided to get rid of all their compact Macs (a few Mac SEs, a bunch of Mac Classics and a small amount of Mac Classic IIs), I was determined to save some of them. I ended up saving three: a Mac SE (the oldest [1988] of the trio, it is a 4/20 [4MB RAM and a 20MB hard drive] with a 1.44MB disk drive), a Mac Classic (from 1990, it is a 4/40), and a Mac Classic II (the newest [1992] of the trio, it is a 4/40 with a 68030 CPU). They all run fine, and they all run MacOS System 7.1. What is a compact Mac? For those who don't know, it is a one-piece computer (computer and monitor in one unit) with a built-in 9" black-and-white monitor and a floppy drive. Since other students at the school are going to be gutting them anyway, I took apart quite a few of them for spare parts for my Macs (unlike what most people think, they're not very hard to dismantle if you have a long Torx-15 screwdriver). I have saved a logic board (motherboard to PC people) and an analog board (the combination power/video board) for each model Mac I own. I use an Apple ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer (one of the first color printers) for printing. I think I'm gonna stick exclusively to compact Macs, because I don't have room for much else... Over time, I have come to love using Macs, but I will continue to use a PC (I downloaded a Mac emulator to close the gap), as well as the other computers in the museum (including my newer Macs). I like to consider myself a "multi-user" since I like using many different computer formats. Stay tuned for more news!

News!
A story about my old Macs has been posted on Low End Mac! Read it here!

I have created pages for some of my latest Mac exploits. It can be found here, here, and here.


Pictures

Here are some pictures of the compact Macs I own. Note that the Mac Classic II looks like a Mac Classic I, so the pictures stand for both models.



Macintosh SE



Macintosh Classic



Macintosh Classic II


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