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Restoring a Power Computing Mac Clone from 1996!
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- Опубліковано 13 січ 2022
- Apple's Mac OS licensing program from the mid-1990s seemed like a good idea at first, but ended up almost killing the company...because machines like this PowerBase 180 were just too good of a value.
Useful links:
Mac Driver Museum (has Apple CD-ROM driver 5.3.1): vintageapple.o...
Apple CD-ROM Driver Reference: siber-sonic.co...
Sources:
Macworld, April 1996.
MacUser, April 1996.
PC Magazine, March 28, 1995.
Low End Mac PowerBase: lowendmac.com/...
Macworld, October 1996.
Sonnet G3 upgrade card photo: www.flickr.com...
Macworld, January 1997.
MacUser, October 1996.
Apple Infinite Loop entry sign photo: allaboutstevej...
Macworld, November 1997.
Motorola StarMax tower photo: imgur.com/gall...
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Music by
Epidemic Sound (www.epidemicso...).
Intro music by BoxCat Games (www.box-cat.com).
When somebody else can sell a better version of your product for less money, you know you're doing something wrong.
I mean they licensed MacOS to these clone companies. Steve Jobs shut that down when he came back in 97.
Not necessarily. It’s easier to clone something than develop it. Apple was doing the heavy lifting here and getting thrashed in sales for their trouble.
@@nickwallette6201 In this case though, it's absolutely true. Apple has always been infamous for charging 4-10x the final cost of production for their products, can't even give them credit for manufacturing locally when they've always exported to the same ODMs the rest of the industry does in the same era. Even during the Intel era where the supermajority of the R&D work was done for them, they were still charging $500 more than an identical (hardware wise) machine from Dell or HP (Apple Mac Mini 2015 vs Dell Optiplex 9020 USFF), thus the popularity of "OptiMac" hackintoshing.
@@helenHTID That's not a healthy business direction in the slightest and is prone to extreme user burnout. Also makes a strong case for humanity's low average intelligence.
@@KiraSlith By your logic, anyone that doesn't buy the cheapest car on market is a idiot. Same goes for food, clothing or shelter. So do only buy clothes from the Goodwill, drive a old ass Honda Civic and only buy food using coupons or are you just another anti-Apple hater repeating a now 40 year old diss?
That motherboard is the kind of thing that got me salivating as a young tech-enthusiast. A Mac clone, with ADB and PS2 ports? With PCI slots? With SCSI and IDE? And with USB cards becoming available, just imagine the variety of peripherals you could have!
Except no one made MacOS drivers for them.
That was such an expensive time in computing! It wasn't uncommon to spend between $2000 to $3000 (or even more) for a powerful "blazing fast" system, which would start to feel slow or sluggish in only 2 years or less.
Six months was the average for the time and why there were so many third party cpu upgrades for both pc and macs. These days the average system often has to last around six to ten years partly due to the shortages.
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks, but it was obsolete before I opened the box.
It's ironic since most people assume that Macs are at their most expensive today with the highest spec Macbook Pro coming in around $5000 (in today's money). Meanwhile, $5000 (in 90s money) was the starting price for a lot of IBM business class laptops back in the 90s. And that was before you added on all the optional docking stations, printer adapters, external CDROM drives, etc.
@@soviut303 that's right, i own a Thinkpad 770X, i bought it two years ago for 70 Euros from a guy in Germany, That 1999 beast cost US$5000 back then, Crazy!!!!
I had an Amiga 2000. It was both expensive AND sluggish out of the box. It wasn’t nice and zippy until I laid out another wad of cash on an 030 accelerator board.
Mac clones are always interesting. Power computing was pretty smart to work that Clause into their contract.
The first CD-ROM drive (Sony?) has sockets for the terminators underneath the SCSI connector, as far as I can see. So you have to install the two or three resistor networks to enable termination.
Wow, what a find this was excellent. You have a lot of technical skill and are very resourceful with both vintage hardware and software. A Power Computing Mac Clone from the mid-1990's which, was around the time, I purchased my first Apple computer an All-in-One 5400. Also, I noticed that, "Mac User" magazine rated my 180MHz 603e processor system from Apple with 3 and 1/2 "mice" and rated Power Computing's 180MHz 603e processor system with 5 "mice".
The main reason, I selected Apple was because they made or branded all elements of my system the CPU, keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner, internal video capture card, internal TV/FM radio card, with matching black remote control, and system software. My desktop came with lifetime free telephone support so, if I had a question just had to say to my Apple representative over the telephone my "xyz" is connected to my "abc" and state my version of the classic Apple operating system and my issue would be simple to resolve (smile...smile).
Man this is amazing. Hearing the noise from the floppy drive brought back many memories of panicking in trying to remove the floppy. I love how you bring back all the nostalgia articles. The good old days.
Is it just me or is it so thrilling when you open a old computer and find notes/stickys from the previous owner's upgrades. Who would have thought that 20 years later someone would find that message.
I'm not a Mac person, but still a good video. Trying to resurrect at least one of three Power Computing Mac clones I picked up for my best friend, and then repurchased from his estate after he passed away. He used to work for Be, so to him, it would be an honor to get BeOS installed on at least one of them. I also still remember when these were new, as my high school had several of them, along with UMAX and Motorola.
Brings back fond memories of my beloved PowerTower 180e. Those were wild times, I even remember running the BeOS demo on that machine.
It was the Wild West of OSs back then. BeOS was pretty sweet.
I miss the Mac clones in middle school! Our school was able to get lot of them because they were far more affordable and we were able to run the same Mac OS software on them! If Apple did a modern clone, I would so buy that computer, because I don’t their new computer models, especially the Mac Pro is already outdated!
Mac clones! There’s just something about that era that’s kinda neat. It was a mistake on Apple‘s part by basically every metric, but it spawned some fun machines. Oh, and of course that music video titled “I think we’re a clone now“ - if you’ve not seen it, go find it on UA-cam. Trust me on this one.
That is both a wonderful and awful video, thank you
bisexual flag cringe
The "clones" was a dumb program because of how it was implemented and not necessarily a conceptually dumb idea.
Apple did not license the OS the way Colin said. They licensed full complete Mac computers with only minor differences, like different drives. All the chipsets were Apple as well.
Had Apple actually licensed the OS and opened up chipset, Apple may very well have taken over the PC market. Instead, the clones had all the headaches of a Mac (like the cd problem in this video) and all the pricing of a genuine Mac and none of the openness of Wintel.
After Apple did the Mac clones, Steve Jobs returned to Apple and he stopped the Mac clones
@@tarstarkusz when did apple need a bailout by microsoft? Wasn't it around this time?
Nice video! Thanks.
We used to have the same machine running as a fileserver at the agency I was working for at the time. It ran for at least 6 years, and didn’t need many reboots despite the pre OS X era, IIRC.
That’s an awesome system! The Mac clones have always been interesting and Power Computing made some cool systems. The Sony Trinitron also goes really well with the setup! Great video!
Even the Mac CRT's with the Apple logo on the front were really Sony Trinitron tubes, they always looked so good. You could tell by the quality of the shadow mask it was using and the fact the tube was curved like on a cylinder instead of a ball. I suspect the electronics inside those CRT's was also Sony, but I never opened one up to see.
Oh yes. A restoration video on a nice Friday!
I took a risk recommending this very model at work. We ended up getting 2 of them and they were great, we really enjoyed using them. I even liked the keyboards on them. I had started out not liking the idea of clones but then was sad when they ended due to the quality of our Power Computing machines.
I’ve got a PowerBase 240 in the basement! It’s the computer I grew up with for the first part of my life. This video makes me want to upgrade it a bit and get it back to 100%!
That was a fun restoration, vintage computers always makes me happy since it doesn't compare to todays computing. it never fails to amaze me how far we've come and to see what the future holds.
My favorite and sweetest retro pc/Mac channel! Thanks for another memorable video.
Nice restoration and lovely videography as always.
I'm surprised the optical drives gave you so much trouble. I bought a PowerCenter Pro 180 in 2020, and it came with the original optical drive and a 16x Yamaha CD-RW - both worked fine after installing just the basic Power Computing system software on a BlueSCSI.
My Power Computing was AWESOME! I had a tower Power Center Pro 180 and I think it was a 604E version. Great machine.
I had a Radius tower Mac clone. The 81/110 was an extremely heavy unit, all heavy gauge steel. I had it maxed to 264 megs RAM using IBM 72 pin SIMMs. I loved the irony of using IBM branded parts in a Macintosh. ;) I used it for a short time with a NuBus Media 100 video capture and editing system. The NuBus Mac clones with PPC601 CPUs shared the same hardware problems the genuine Apples had. There was an issue with the SCSI and NuBus which was only partially fixed in the 110 Mhz Apple and clone systems. That unfortunately made the Media 100 system incompatible with all NuBus SCSI cards in a Powermac or clone. Thus the only way to be able to capture full quality video at 150K per frame (this was standard definition before it was called that because high-def didn't yet exist), which required a write speed of 4 megabytes per second, was to use FWB RAID Toolkit to stripe a RAID 0 array of at least four high speed drives across both the internal only and the external/internal SCSI buses.
Why I only used it for a short time was because I never could obtain a professional VHS deck with component video I/O, Time Base Corrector, and RS-485 serial control. Since the NuBus Media 100 system has no frame buffer and does nothing to clean up problem video, the tiniest bobble in the video would make it stop capturing. Then there was the hard-coded limit of 2 gigabytes per capture file. Not a problem with a studio video deck with serial remote control so the system could save one 2 gig file after another. Without that I had to manually control a VCR and capture overlapping pieces then cut it together. On the other hand, it had no such file size limitations when digitally outputting to an HFS Extended formatted drive. I used a 17 gig 3.5" full height external SCSI drive to export to. Then I'd connect that to a Windows PC running the Basilisk II 68k Mac emulator in 68040 mode running Mac OS 8.1. With the emulator I could copy the video off the SCSI drive then use the Windows Media 100 transcoder with Adobe Premiere to convert the uncompressed Media 100 video to MPEG2 to use with a DVD authoring program. Media 100 was soooo much easier to edit with than those older versions of Adobe Premiere, but version 2.6.2 (the last that worked with NuBus) didn't do MPEG2 and it was slow enough when doing an uncompressed digital export.
If I'd had the pro VCR it needed I'd have bought a G3 upgrade for the Radius to drastically speed up exporting, but since capturing was timing critical the G3 would have to be disabled for capturing video. Can't make analog video capture go faster than real time anyway.
Hells yeah, it’s a Mac. My first clone was a StarMax from Motorola which was OK. But then I picked up a PowerBase 240 so that I could finally play Starfleet Academy. Loved that machine. Never gave me a single problem.
i remember Power Computing's ad "We lost our license for speeding". The first computer to ship past the 200Mhz barrier was a mac clone with Power Computing released the PowerTower Pro 225. Before Intel even shipped their Pentium Pro 200Mhz processors, Power Computing shipped one with a 225Mhz CPU. Apple's top clock speed on a genuine Macintosh at the time was 150Mhz.
Cool! I had a PowerComputing PowerCenter 150 that I bought new in 1996. PPC 604/150 mhz. I remember that the software bundle included FWB Hard Disk Toolkit. It was a SCSI only machine though.
I think the hard drive's manufacturing date of 2000 is more indicative than the expiry date of 2003.
Thanks for the video. Power Computing was killing it in 96 and 97. I bought the high end Power Tower Pro 180, with the 180 MHZ 604e which was brand new in late 96, and it was factory installed with the IMS Twin Turbo 128 video cars. This thing ran circles around anything apple was producing at the time, and faster than pretty much any Pentium or Pentium Pro PC at the time. In the next year Jobs killed PowerComputing (and all clones) and actually started making some good macs. You all know the rest of the story lol
This is what we had at my school too. They were made down the road in Round Rock, TX. They worked just fine for school and learning how to use the internet and make slides/ reports. And SimCity 2000.
Greetings from Australia. I had one of these back in the 1990's, when I could not quite afford a genuine Mac. It was fine, no complaints but no highlights either.
I remember buying a used powerComputing machine in the late 90s! Can't remember how much it cost but i was a high school student so it could not have been much. I liked how you could use cheaper PC parts like IDE hard drives and PC monitors.
When it wouldn’t acknowledge the SCSI CD-ROM drive, I said out loud “needs to be terminated.” Then you said the same thing. Great minds and all that… 🤓 I had a Power Computing tower in 2001 or so. I used it as my home office machine, and it worked like a champ. Enjoyed the vid!
Brings back a lot of memories of my Power Wave 604|120 system. Many similar upgrades, however I found the Power Computing system to be very fickle as to what upgrades actually worked. I later had a Bondi G3 Mac tower that was a lot more compatible. Remember that Power Computing was using the same motherboard chipsets as Apple but were getting better benchmarks. I would bet that Power was tweaking the clocks a little to get better performance at the cost of compatibility.
Nice computer there. Good job doing maintaining. Also it's a piece of history and works well for being so old.
I used this computer (with the same Sony monitor that you show) in 1996 and 1997. The only physical problem I had with the machine was that the fan would occasionally stop spinning. A flip of the fan would start it spinning again, so I didn't really worry about it. I was using it for work and didn't own it. For much of that time, I ran System 7.5.3 and it would crash at least once a day. The crashing problem went away once I installed 7.6, so I don't blame the problem on Power Computing. It's the only clone I ever used, and it turned out to be the worst Macintosh I've ever used -- and I've been a Mac guy since 1984 and now use an M1 Mac mini.
I was so obsessed with the Mac clones when they showed up. I was just a kid but a huge Mac nerd. I had to settle for my IIsi for most of the 90s though.
It's interesting seeing the difference between you and action retro. It's cool to see what it was like originally but also nice to see what can be maxed out.
I grew up with one of these Mac Clones, pretty sure we had the Motorola StarMax 3000/180. Thing crashed all the time, but I can't remember if that was common for Mac's in that era.
Hehe, it was common for Mac's at the time, probably had nothing to do with it being a clone. I regularly had crashes on some genuine MacOS machines in those days.
The System 7.5.X versions were kinda buggy. Quite a few "Type 11" errors, I remember them well.
It's funny and ironic Motorola would jump onto the Power Pc mac clone bandwagon, isn't it?
Very interesting about Apple's licensing program. Such an expensive time in the computing world.
Thank you for this great and instructive video ! I actually have one of these Powercomputing clones, in a mini-tower form factor. They are great !
You definitely had the drive to get this clone running! :)
I actually used one of these back in 1995-1998. It was a good workhorse of a machine, but System 7.5.3 would crash at least once a day. Also, after about a year after purchase, the fan on the back would randomly stop spinning. When I heard it going down, I would flip it with my finger and it would start up again and would run for an hour, a day, a week and then eventually die again. I left that job in 1998. It was still in use, so I didn't have to be there at its eventual death.
I had a PB240 back in the day. My grandfather was heavy into Mac and we started with a mac plus, the went to a IIci, LC3, then the PB240 and eventually had Powermac 6500, before building my first Windows PC, in 2003. Been a PC user exclusively since then. I did have a lot of equipment that most people never heard of, like a Syquest drive, zip drives and a magneto optical drive.
That thing cleaned up nicely!
I love these old computers from before my time. Great video!
how did i miss this video i love this kind of stuff
I miss computers and technology from this era. More time equals greater power and ease of use, but I miss the feeling of opening pandora's box when upgrading a computer or diving into ini and registry files to help make magic happen. 🎩
I had the minitower version of this machine. Great upgrade from my old LCII - well-built and a fraction the price of comparable Apple models at the time. Add a 17" Sony Trinitron display and a USR 56K modem, and I was living the life - pirating everything in sight on Hotline.
I think this is beautiful, its like a classic MG car
I was about to jump into the comments section to talk about the "Broken"/Unlocked Apple official CD-ROM extension but you beat me to it. :)
I had one of these. Super, super dependable and well built.
What a lovely treat for lunch on a friday.
I had one of those Trinitrons, great memories there
Please more Videos about Mac Clones! They are more interesting than Macs itself!
I never owned a mac in the 90's, and only now own a mac mini (that doesn't power up anymore), but I find classic macs very interesting.
Mac clones are such a cool period of time! I got a couple from my local thrift store - they were donated from my old elementary school, they apparently bought them with grant money the year I was born! Which is strange because I don't remember there being any macs (or clones) at my elementary school, I guess they either bought them for a special purpose or they phased them out by the time I was in kindergarten. The computers even still had network mappings to the schools network share so that was cool to see. But yeah these machines are awesome!
I still have my Power Computing 180 - back in the day, I upgraded it to a G3 processor. It was a real workhorse at the time. The price for it was excellent at the time. ($1200 if I recall) - I pared it with a 15" sony based CRT. As I said - great machine. I need to bring it back to life one of these days.
So cool!! Love how easy it is to get inside and upgrade these
We had one of these back when they came out with them and it worked fine, although it did seem to crash a bit and we had to send it out for service once. We still have a Radius 81/110 though that's dormant but still here. Last fired up about 7 or 8 years ago.
Ah memories! I had a PowerBase 180 with 32 megs of RAM running MacOS 7.6.
I love Mac clones so much. Nice machine!
We had these in High school.
I had a dealer license for Power Computing from the mid 90s until the company was wound up. I sold a lot of units to schools who were Mac friendly because Power were so competitively priced, had lots of useful ports built in and were easy to upgrade with standard PC options. At the height of the sales the NZ Apple representatives asked me to discontinue Power sales in return for a better margin on Apple equipment. Discussions went backwards and forwards and eventually realizing that the days of the clones were coming to an end, I went with an Apple dealership instead. Good times.
I have one of these. I also have apples first ever work group server to which is very cool. I just got a tape drive working on vintage macs to an HP DDS drive.
I have a real power computing cd restore disc. I also have a letter from steve jobs when he bought the company he mailed one to me at the time. I owned one of these when it was new.
Brings back memories of working in an ad agency during the 90s in South Africa. Apple had divested from the country so genuine apple machines were grey market imports and very expensive. The clones allowed us to increase the number of design stations from 1 to 3 (we were a very small but busy agency). Nothing could beat the apple OS for stability and speed in graphic design apps from Adobe, Macromedia and QuarkExpress.
Yet another great video!! How's it goin', Colin?
A Maxtor hard drive that still works? Color me shocked. 🤭
No shit. I bought a NOS one for a project and it crapped out while installing XP.
Had 2 clones at my former job. A Umax tower and a Power Computing tower. Very decent machines for a fair price. I wanted to save them but they ditch them to the bin during my summer vacations...
The clones were odd, but great machines. They were essentially a hybrid of 90's Macs and 90's Dell PC's. I had a couple clones - a Power Computing and a Umax S900. The Umax was probably my favorite of the clones.
Hey Colin, excellent episode as always, but this one was particularly interesting - keep up the grind, King 👑
I own the same model. Nice little Mac.
Great nostalgia. PCC was an anomaly in the industry, not just because it was a Mac clone maker. Their demise was also interesting. It got Apple back on track.
I had that exact same machine in it's original form. Very potent little machine that I used for my contracting work. Best value and great performance. I could see why Apple had to pull the plug, but it was sad nonetheless. PowerComputing focused on function over form, which was fine by me, and probably many others as well.
Love it! I had a 200mhz stsrmax 4000 tower. That thing was a beast. :)
That Pram battery at 3:46 was installed the day I was born
I have PowerCenter 120 that has the same case, but it has 604@120 Mhz. I never used original OS with it, I installed Czech version of Mac OS 8.1 on it. Never had any issues with drivers (didn't have to install them). Also, I find clones more reliable than the original Macs from that era
And it doesnt have PS/2 ports
I had the 220 model with 64MB and a 21"CRT
10:49 “Incredibly useful, but also odd.”
Story of my life.
I had a PowerCenter 132 for a while. I updated it with a faster Sonnets G3 CPU card.
Cool video, youtube put on my timeline. Subscribed.
The irony is, unless you're very new to this channel, YES, this IS exactly "what you would expect". Haha
welcome to the world of classic mac..
Big shoutout to the Mac clone inspector at 6:34
If EveryMac is correct, and I remember correctly, Power Computing were unique in adding PS/2 ports.
The Mac clones are really interesting, and being a Swede, I'm particularly interested in the Reid computers from Centralen Norrland. Of course, being a Swedish company, Sweden being a rather small market, and them only lasting 6 months before the program was shut down makes those machines even more rare than ones from American companies that were quicker to get a license like Umax, Motorola, and Power Computing (no chance whatsoever for them turning up on auction sites, though I do have a search saved just in case).
I remember having those in my freshman year library in 1994, maybe even earlier.
Sweet. That's a good-looking setup, too, with that Sony display.
We're gonna fight back for the mac!
Man, I do not miss SCSI IDs and termination. Not to mention the dozen flavors of SCSI2 and 3. Fast, wide, ultrawide, LVD…
Yeah these things are weird because they're Alchemy systems (basically the chipset from the 54/6400 series) which normally had 8MB soldered RAM and two RAM slots, which explains the weird RAM configuration here. Also there's the blank pad for the VALKYRIE chip which would've been for the lackluster Valkyrie AR onboard video that the Alchemy models normally had. Thankfully PowerComputing opted to engineer their own solution with that ATI chip (which allowed for at least 2MB VRAM unlike the Valkyrie's max 1MB). Also try using D2 CD or the Toast CD Reader extensions; they support a fairly wide range of modern drives including burners and CDROM changers.
I loved these machines!
Very enjoyable video, could you please identify the the Sony Monitor you are using? Thank you.
I used to own a Motorola Starmax 3000/180. My first mac!
Me, Brain Slippage - You said the hard drive was upgraded to a 30 GB model. I heard the correct words. My brain insisted on thinking GB meant TB and for three seconds I was going, "No way did they have that much storage back then."
If you find me wandering around, babbling, please be nice and call the men in white coats.
When you ran into issues booting from the hard drive in Mac OS9, why didn’t you try holding the shift key and booting without loading extensions?
You know it's funny because there was nothing "typical" or "generic" about a VGA port, it was a proprietary IBM connector on the IBM VGA card, the only thing that makes it "typical" or "generic" is the fact that VGA clones like most stuff in the PC world were rampant.
I upgraded from a Quadra 650 my dad "found in storage" at his office to a Performa 6220CD in late 1995. This was a bad idea for multiple reasons. For one, I was 11 or 12 and didn't have any reason to upgrade, other than buying all the PowerPC hype and wanting to see how fast SimCity 2000 would run. The second reason: Had I held off until late 1996 or early 1997, I could have gotten one of these instead, with money left over to get a matching multiscan monitor.
If you ever decide to part with it, let me know. I'm only 450 miles down I-35 from you.
Does anyone know where you can pick up used computers at a decent price in the Dallas area? I know there's the main goodwill, but I was hoping to find a place that sells ready-to-go* systems at a decent price. A 5-7 year old machine would be a perfect upgrade for me right now. Currently using a ten year old laptop and a raspberry pi 4 for my work (yeah, I'm cheap ;), but also, 2 years of covid heckery :/ )
*I don't mind putting in an SSD or even upgrading RAM if needed, but I'd rather not do tons of part swapping or troubleshooting
I don't understand the RAM situation, what size modules are installed to make it 72mb? 32, 32, 8?
Trying to understand how a 32mb limit on one slot would ever force the outcome of 72mb total...
I'll wager there's some built in on the Mobo
Man I lusted after all the Power Computing models. And their advertising was second to none. I have a "cold dead hands" tshirt that is in my "too precious to wear" category.
Me: Imagine using a floppy drive in 2022!
TDNC: Hold my beer.
I was really interested in those PowerPC G3 & G4 upgrade cards, I was wondering about it though, could you upgrade one of these Mac clones with a PowerPC G3/G4 chip to macOS 10..? That would be so cool to see if you could!!