***** Yeah I wish he would've checked up on the machine he was tearing down before making a whole video full of wrong information... and then patch up the situation with captions indicating the various mistakes... But, hey, we all make mistakes.
***** Yeah nevermind the great audio, editing, picture quality, and smart pacing. He made a few mistakes, therefore= bad show. Look, I understand what you mean, I was thinking "couldn't they have just re-shot those segments?" but when you don't realise there's a factual error until post-production, well...you do what you can. I used to work in TV.
Ben, I think you are confused. The first Macintosh was simply the Macintosh. That computer was released in 1984. The Mac Classic was really late to the game and was targeted towards the educational sector. Its main claim to fame was that it was the first mac priced at under $1000. 1:50 The only models that I know of which sported the signatures were the Macintosh, the "Fat Mac" 512k and the Macintosh plus. Beyond that, I have found no other compact models that have the signatures. 3:50 Apple had several All in one designs ranging from the LC to the Powermac 5X00 series. Most of them were targeted towards the educational market. 5:00 The first IDE mac was the Power Macintosh 5200 released in 1995. Most of these early macs used SCSI for the CD drive and IDE for the hard drives. 5:45 Fun fact: On the Mac Classic, if you hold down the Apple Key + Option key + X + O right after you turn it on, the computer would boot into a version of OS 6 Stored on a ROM chip. 6:40 You can download images of old Mac OS versions off of Apple's web site. As long as the disk is proper density, you should be able to use Linux and DD to copy the image over to a floppy.
There are some things wrong with this review. The Classic was released later than the original 1984 128k Mac. You should technically discharge the CRT correctly, using a screwdriver (instructions on Google or YT), to prevent a deadly shock. Also, Steve Jobs had nothing to do with the Classic. He was on the 128k development team, but by the time the Classic, or even the Mac Plus, was released, he was out of Apple and even created another tech company, NeXT Computer. He re-joined Apple back in 1997 when Apple bought NeXT.
+1912RamblerFan01 yeah some basics of the timeline were obviously out of context and some basic facts like the year of manufacture could have been determined before he disassembled the unit with the codes on the back. The screwdriver trick, works for most discharge methods.. I think he refrains from mentioning that for legal purposes as that's a pretty basic well known trick.
All of the compact macs had a resistor bleeder, much like some of the transistorised televisions at the time... The only real risk is the capacitors in the power supply.
Sounds like a good giggle, although first I'd run around and upgrade the ever loving hell out of the Classic just to see what it could really do. It's a shame the Classic was never THAT popular here in the UK, they're quite hard to get hold of.
he probably confused it with modern SATA or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). Before SATA's introduction in 2000, PATA was simply known as ATA, and ATA wasn't even an ANSI standard til 1994, (soon after also renamed to ATA-1). So IBM PC and clone drives at the time were more often referred to as "IDE" with no reference to whether the bus was parallel or serial at all. Remembering the "hard drive" standards are actually more confusing for those of us who worked with them at the time!, since they were only renamed more logically after being replaced!
Ahh man love this, in my town I live in we have a museum of computing history and I am pretty much taking stuff like this apart every week, and it's the best thing in the world :)
6:50 -- That's actually a rebranded Conner Peripherals hard drive (hence the CP on the label). It is from the time before Conner decided to use tape instead of screws to hold their drives together ;)
+MrGencyExit64 - Came here to say that. Can actually see Conner labeled chips on the drive's PCB. Conner drives were the worst drives I used until IBM's Deathstar fiasco. Better to hack in a compact flash drive rather than try to find another Conner pile of junk from that era.
Had a few 540 meg hdds by conner, were alright, better than the 1gig western digital ones i replaced them with, the Western digital ones only lasted a year...
Well technically, only the first ever GUI computer, the Xerox Alto, was developed exclusively for internal use at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, which is probably what you are thinking of. Both the Xerox Star and Apple Lisa were commercially available GUI computers before the Macintosh, but they were both very expensive executive workstations. The Mac was the first affordable GUI computer, mainly due to the fact that it had rather anemic hardware for its time in order to keep the cost down.
That Mac was indeed a Mac Classic - it was the last model of the old black and white Macintosh computers. That particular model had an easter egg - if you held down the Command key, Option key, X and O key together, then turned the Mac on (with your third arm), it would boot into a copy of System 6.0.3 that was burned into the ROM. The X O key combination comes from that model's development name - Macintosh XO
Ben; I've recenty gotten my Mac SE/30 (1987 compact mac) reinstalled with system 7, and oodles of apps. I can provide you with a scsi drive, preinstalled for that Classic. One thing of note, that appears to be a Classic I, if you hold down cmd-option-x-o, on it, it will boot from a floppy disk image in the ROM. As far as I know, this is the only mac that can do that. Please contact me in private message if you need help on getting it running.
My dad works at the company where they made the plastic injection molding mold for that case and I've seen the mold with the engraved names on it, it's pretty cool.
Also, the Mac Classic is by no means the first Mac model. It, along with its successor, the Classic II, actually one of the last B&W Macs Apple released. The Mac Classic can read & write 1.44 MB PC-formatted floppies, too. I don't know if it can boot to them, but a modern Mac with a USB floppy can still format a floppy in the Classic's native format. I'm sure there's still some way to write a bootable image of the old Mac OS 6 or 7 onto a floppy.
SCSI stand for Small Computer *System* Interface, not Serial. The SCSI-1 bus, which the Mac Classic uses, is an 8-bit parallel bus, not a serial one. Apple also started using IDE hard drives for lower-end Macs in the mid 90s, at about the same time the PowerPC-based models first came out. The last Macs to include an on-board SCSI controller were the G3 Powermacs & Powerbooks.
I would love to see you bring that thing back to life. Old machines like that deserve to get a second chance. I have an old server with 2 scsi ribbon drives in it, but I'm fairly certain that I need those 2 drives to get it to boot. saving up for a vid adapter for that thing atm.
I have several iMac G3 units, and I'm amazed at how they created such a small footprint for the technology available. I would love to see Ben's take on a Hackintosh in that Mac Classic case. Also, to show how much technology has advanced since the early Apple days, you can make an Apple Pi (Raspberry Pi) that emulates the Apple II.
that is one thing I never quite understood we landed on the moon with a computer that had the processing power of a modern day $3 calculator. heck if you can go back in time and take a Raspberry Pi with you you could probably land on the moon a lot better than they were able to...... that being said why the heck is it so hard for us to go back. its not like we haven't done it before
I love Ben's show but I would've liked to see him do more research for this video. As a Macintosh enthusiast and collector, some of the stuff he talks about makes me cringe as it's so incorrect.
SCSI actually stands for 'Small Computer System Interface'. It's still used today in servers and some workstations, but there's faster drives available on Sata(Serial ATA) called SSDs(Solid State Drives) if the interface on the main board is fast enough to fully utilize their speeds(Usually Sata III). Good video btw
first let me say i love your show, and i like the fact that you say 'kaput', also i'm pretty suprised how many german words exist in the english language
Some factual corrections: 1. The Mac Classic line wasn't the same line as the original Macintosh, it was a remake based on their newer component designs (and started well after Steve Jobs was ousted in 1985) 2. Apple moved to IDE long before they moved to x86; even the early PowerMacs back in the mid-90s used IDE 3. The Mac Classic line continued until the middle of 1995
I must assume this video helped along your meeting with the 8-bit guy. Your collaboration on the "Atari Junk Keyboard" is how I found your channel. I have been binge watching ever since.
Interesting facts about the old Macs, the floppy drives were SCSI, and they stored 800K instead of 720K like on PC. The drives stored fewer sectors per track near the center of the disk, and increased the number of sectors per tract on the outer tracks. They called each region where the number of sectors per track was different a speed zone, and the drive would actually change its RPM for each speed zone.
I had a Mac Classic from 1987, which still functioned as of 2009 that I salvaged from my high school. I could even access games and old student projects from it. And my mother forced my to throw it out, thinking it was worthless. To this day I wish I had stood my ground. I am so sorry to everyone for the loss of such a historical artefact :( Edit: It had an external keyboard & 5 inch floppy drive, with about a dozen floppys with it. :(
OH NO! I watched this video to the end, and I need to say this: My mac was outputting a similar pattern to the screen, but after a few tries it started working properly!!! Keep trying, please! It might still work!!!!!!!!
Ratstail91 The Macintosh Classic was released in 1990. Many people use the descriptor ‘Classic Mac’ when they should use ‘Compact Mac’. You may have owned a Macintosh Plus, a Macintosh SE or a Macintosh SE/FDHD from 1987. The Plus (1986) has a smooth front while the SE and SE/FDHD has some ribs in the front of the case.
The drive is a Connor CP3040A, a 40MB drive. Remember I had one, an IDE version instead and was very happy with it because it was the first drive I had that operates silently (no Space shuttle that just takes off). 40MB was allot in the DOS-days and Win 3.11 days. Also installed Win95 on this drive with use of drivespace (compression) and second harddrive for data and swap file. Great memories.
4:55 IIRC, the first Mac to use IDE was the LC/Quadra 630 which was released in July '94. Most Macs had external SCSI ports until the switch to USB, but the internal interfaces were IDE.
Nice "exploded View" Ben. Brings back memories of fixing these things. FYI..SCSI is actually Small Computer Systems Interface. SCSI is actually a parallel bus not a serial bus. :)
1. The battery is a 3.6v 1/2AA Lithium that you can find at most Mac enthusiast stores. My PowerMac G3 still uses one and requires me to change it every other year. 2. I see that there are IDE-to-SCSI adapters out there. Maybe you can use one of those coupled with an IDE-to-SATA adapter to use SATA hard drives on the Mac? 3. The first Classic Mac only had 128KB of RAM and no hard drive at all. So this is definitely a newer model.
I'd like to pick one of these up for a project I've been conjuring up in my head. Could I gut one of these and put in say a Raspberry Pi, and still use the CRT display? I'd like to make a home server terminal with a retro feel.
I remember my first time taking apart a classic mac a teacher gave me. I didn't know much about CRT displays at the time so you could imagine my reaction upon trying to lift the anode cap and accidentally touching the anode which still happened to have a charge. Thankfully it wasn't lethal but won't be something I'll forget.
Reminds me of a Mac classic I got for nothing. thing had a HDD and 2 floppy drives along with the max RAM expansion count. It was still a B&W screen but was fun to play around with until stepdad said it had to go to the trash 10 years ago. Wish I still had it...
i have 2 working apple mac classics, one boots right up properly, the other comes up with what seems to be an icon saying to put a disc in the floppy drive, so im guessing it lacks a (working) hdd, ive not bothered looking into it too far as i only have one set of input devices, i also have a working NEC APC III running dos 2.1 or 2.2
Ben, your best bet is to get a miniscribe hard drive that would normally come in an SE, they are stepper motor HDDs that usually never die. The Worst that could happen is the heads comming out of allignment, but thats fixed with a low level format.
Hey, Ben! I was wondering if you could explain/show me how I can install Linux Ubuntu on a raspberry pi for my school project. Any help is appreciated!
I think the form factor like a tv is much more practical........they should go back to a boxy design with the power button and DVD drive at the front of the computer. We've had 3 Imacs at work with SD cards put into the slot loading DVD slot accidentally which is just below the SD slot at the side of the mac. Now I can't get them out. You may say people are stupid but this has happened 3 times now. Makes you think. Also because the power button / USB ports are behind the Imac people invariably end up turning the computer one way to be able put a USB stick in (as they can't see around the back ). This suddenly strains a power lead that has been cable tidied up previously! Then they can't find the power button to reboot in the event of a hang - as it's also around the back hidden. Don't mention ejecting a DVD drive without a keyboard! Makes you wonder if we have progressed since The Classic. Anyway well done for the teardown Ben.......they are lovely machines.
The 'Classic' was a much later model (sold in various models from 1990 to 1994) than the original Mac (128KB) and Mac Plus (512KB). The original 1984 Mac's had the memory on the motherboard and no SCSI port and no internal HDD. The 1984 Mac's had the signatures inside the case. The case and the screen were much smaller than the model in the video.
The "classic" Macs that Ben is referring to are the Mac 128K, Mac 512K, Mac 512KE and Mac Plus. Those are the actual models. The Mac Classic, the computer in this video, was a distinct model, not a "classic" Mac. There was also a Color Classic and the Mac SE/SEII. The SE on up, including the Classic were massive upgrades on the original Mac hardware, in a similar case.
Awww maaaaaan! This is bringing back memories, the inside of that looks sooo sooo similar to the xt at PC cases I used to pull apart in my youth! That harddrive is a 90 model from the looks of it, I saw a crapload of them. (ps I had a c64 growing up too) I never really dealt with mac but I went from c64 to xt, to at, and worked my way up step by step! I still have a dos games with dos 6.4 + quickmenu (running via dosbox fully set up) from the late 80's early 90s. My favourite game from that era was Commander Keen. From before, c64 My Little Computer Person (What Sims was based off). What was everyone elses??
Fyi, I made my 1990 prediction right after you said you didn't think it was early mac but before you read the mother board. So woot me I guess. The Z chip might be a graphics co-processor.
SCSI = Small Computer System Interface and it is parallel. You can use any parallel SCSI hard drive. I even used a newer SCSI disk with an adaptor. I have one these computers too but I have a small problem I do not hear the sound loud. The only way I could hear something very faint was by using headphones and having the volume to the max. Could you figure out what could be the problem??? I removed the board and I could not see any corrosion or leakage.
@wwjoshdew YOU JUST MADE MY WHOLE WEEK! IVE NEVER HAD SUCH A WELL KNOWN AND WELL RESPECTED UA-camR REPLY TO ME! THANK YOU! Also, as a gamer just trying to get into PC gaming, do you think I should get a gaming laptop or desktop? Thanks!
There's more problems than just the HDD, notice the greenish electrolyte leakage from the SMD caps on the mainboard. It already started to corrode some pins and traces. This is a common problem for old Macs (or any system that used the bad stock of old SMD electrolytic capacitors back in 1989-1993 or so). You *must* replace them with new ones and clean all the electrolytic gunk with isopropanol alcohol or something. If you want it to last, replace them with SMD tantalum caps instead. There might be broken traces, so if you're not in for an hour or two of inspecting/rework, you might be better off bying a recapped mobo on ebay.
You're definitely right about the surprising relationships between tech companies over the years - Every time I've opened a Pentium 4 era Intel test unit, it had an ATi branded GPU. And AGP - Fancy! Intel's Oregon farm of Dual Socket, Pentium 4 1u blade servers also all used ATis Professional chipsets. (Not very hard to figure why this relationship stopped.)
I have 2 of those old things, I used to run 1 off a inverter from 12v, I would get about 3 hours at a time of use from 1 12v deep cycle battery. Not too bad for just keeping records on, like a day planer or calender, these retro machines can still be useful.
FWIW: the Mac Classic is really the 3rd, and last generation of the compact B&W Mac. The first generation model is the original Mac, the one with the signatures in it. It housed the original Mac 128, the 512/512E and the Mac Plus. They produced this in the original Tan and the later Platinum. It had no capacity for official internal expansion. The 2nd gen compact Mac was introduced with the Mac SE and had power supply improvements and internal capacity for expansion, either a 2nd floppy or a hard drive. The much heralded Mac SE/30 was the first compact to not run the Moto 68000 CPU. The 3rd generation compact was a major effort for cost reduction and was for a long time Apple's greatest seller in terms of quantity. They offered it in a 68000 and 68030 version, all with internal HD's of 20-40MB size. They made one color compact, the Color Classic, but it had a significantly different case. Good stuff Ben!
Hey! You said "look at that diode jumping from there to there- that's a rework!" Does that mean it was an error in manufacturing that they manually corrected?
It did have a hidden ROM and will load into system 6. The classic was around early 90s and came with a 2mb ram 20hd or a 4/40. It was one of my fave macs. The orig 128k had the same 68000 processor with no HD.
I have a suggestion for a project. make a tablet HID for desktop like turning a nexus into a drawing pad or keyboard or macro pad. Im stumped how to do it. although its probably in front of my face. i just want a nice set of macros for my desktop on a tablet so i wanna see how you would get the hardware.
Ben you're a fuckin man lol this is turning into one of my favorite shows, ever, not just on youtube im including shitty cable t.v. Everythings great, the acting, production quality, the show setup, and the content is right up my geek alley. good freaking shit guys.
and I tore down an iMac G3 lime (the rarest color) because i thought the crt had corrupted the unit, but it turns out the hard disk motor was jammed and smelled like burning plastic every time it was turned on, and nothing showed on the screen. But the day before, the screen was fine, but the no hard drive screen appeared. So your mac and mine had a similar fate
Is there any way you can take the small case of an old mac and put in a mini itx motherboard and other small components, and run bootcamp on it? If so make a video that idea seems etched in my brain right now and really cool!
I did a little search and found out that the AMD AM53C80 chip on the motherboard is the SCSI controller chip. I never knew AMD made stuff like that. Also, that was truly back in the day when computers didn't need heatsinks on their processors...how times have changed. EDIT: I want a Mac Classic.
Wonderful memories of when 4mb of RAM and a 40Mb hard drive was enough to get online with AOL 1.0a, not to mention the fun of BBSing...geez, I'm getting old.
SCSI = Small Computer System Interface. Not "Serial Interface". Now there are SAS drives, but back in the days of the Mac Classic, SCSI drives were parallel.
OMFG WHOLE TIME I WAS THINKING "MAN DAVE JONES DID IT ALREADY". THEN HE SAID "BEAUTY". I JUST DIED LAUGHING AND NOW I'M A GHOST COMMENTING ON THIS VIDEO.
Likely any SCSI-2 hard drive smaller than 2 GB will work in there. I know there was a 2GB ceiling for a while on 16-bit OS's, which likely is a limitation of that old thing. I know it used that hybrid 16/32 bit Motorola processor. Also, that original hard drive was 40 MB. Oh and the Mac Classic came out in 1990 :P The original boards afaik had 1990-1991 on them.
Avast made a serial to Ethernet adapter for these. I thought it would be too slow back in the day but I was very impressed. I'd like to see if this would have a chance in the Internet. CRT is black & white not gray scale, so that's a no on internet I think.
Your show is so well produced, Ben! One of the best!
***** Yeah I wish he would've checked up on the machine he was tearing down before making a whole video full of wrong information... and then patch up the situation with captions indicating the various mistakes...
But, hey, we all make mistakes.
*****
Yeah nevermind the great audio, editing, picture quality, and smart pacing. He made a few mistakes, therefore= bad show.
Look, I understand what you mean, I was thinking "couldn't they have just re-shot those segments?" but when you don't realise there's a factual error until post-production, well...you do what you can. I used to work in TV.
mootbooxle Not as good as Christmas Talkbox music :) I listen to it every year.
stonent aww awesome! Thanks! I have a new album coming out that I'm really excited about. Next week if all goes well!
Ben, I think you are confused. The first Macintosh was simply the Macintosh. That computer was released in 1984. The Mac Classic was really late to the game and was targeted towards the educational sector. Its main claim to fame was that it was the first mac priced at under $1000.
1:50 The only models that I know of which sported the signatures were the Macintosh, the "Fat Mac" 512k and the Macintosh plus. Beyond that, I have found no other compact models that have the signatures.
3:50 Apple had several All in one designs ranging from the LC to the Powermac 5X00 series. Most of them were targeted towards the educational market.
5:00 The first IDE mac was the Power Macintosh 5200 released in 1995. Most of these early macs used SCSI for the CD drive and IDE for the hard drives.
5:45 Fun fact: On the Mac Classic, if you hold down the Apple Key + Option key + X + O right after you turn it on, the computer would boot into a version of OS 6 Stored on a ROM chip.
6:40 You can download images of old Mac OS versions off of Apple's web site. As long as the disk is proper density, you should be able to use Linux and DD to copy the image over to a floppy.
I think the original SE had the signatures, but not the SE/30
My 1989 Mac IIci has signatures inside the case. I will take a picture and send.
There are some things wrong with this review. The Classic was released later than the original 1984 128k Mac. You should technically discharge the CRT correctly, using a screwdriver (instructions on Google or YT), to prevent a deadly shock. Also, Steve Jobs had nothing to do with the Classic. He was on the 128k development team, but by the time the Classic, or even the Mac Plus, was released, he was out of Apple and even created another tech company, NeXT Computer. He re-joined Apple back in 1997 when Apple bought NeXT.
1912RamblerFan01 Great tip on that CRT, they hold a hell of a charge!
Thanks! Stay safe and don't get shocked...
+1912RamblerFan01 yeah some basics of the timeline were obviously out of context and some basic facts like the year of manufacture could have been determined before he disassembled the unit with the codes on the back. The screwdriver trick, works for most discharge methods.. I think he refrains from mentioning that for legal purposes as that's a pretty basic well known trick.
All of the compact macs had a resistor bleeder, much like some of the transistorised televisions at the time... The only real risk is the capacitors in the power supply.
You must be pretty brave to trust a resistor with your life - sometimes which did not work properly.
I would bring the case back to life with a hackintosh on a mini ITX
and downgrade a custom pc?
why not? it's for fun
Sounds like a good giggle, although first I'd run around and upgrade the ever loving hell out of the Classic just to see what it could really do. It's a shame the Classic was never THAT popular here in the UK, they're quite hard to get hold of.
with a rewired ipad screen
sarahts21 ive got one its all yellow from smoke I guess I found it in my grandads basement
I can't wait for the EEVBlog quote generator! He's one of my favorites! Aussies say the darn'est things.
Scsi - Small Computer System Interface, No Serial, as it's a Parallel bus
he probably confused it with modern SATA or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). Before SATA's introduction in 2000, PATA was simply known as ATA, and ATA wasn't even an ANSI standard til 1994, (soon after also renamed to ATA-1). So IBM PC and clone drives at the time were more often referred to as "IDE" with no reference to whether the bus was parallel or serial at all. Remembering the "hard drive" standards are actually more confusing for those of us who worked with them at the time!, since they were only renamed more logically after being replaced!
@@squirlmy he probably didn't confuse it with SATA. Serial attached SCSI maybe. I think he just remembered it incorrectly.
I'm glad they fixed the problem with DevKits falling from the sky and getting stuck in trees and on roofs.
Why we need a shop pet:
1. It's cute.
2. Fun time.
3. CUTE!!
Totally logical, right? :) -Alyson
The Ben Heck Show lol
+XerShade 4. Cute
Steve left around 1985 and the classic is from around 1990. The original mac 128k would be a better representation of his work.
Ahh man love this, in my town I live in we have a museum of computing history and I am pretty much taking stuff like this apart every week, and it's the best thing in the world :)
6:50 -- That's actually a rebranded Conner Peripherals hard drive (hence the CP on the label). It is from the time before Conner decided to use tape instead of screws to hold their drives together ;)
+MrGencyExit64 - Came here to say that. Can actually see Conner labeled chips on the drive's PCB. Conner drives were the worst drives I used until IBM's Deathstar fiasco. Better to hack in a compact flash drive rather than try to find another Conner pile of junk from that era.
Had a few 540 meg hdds by conner, were alright, better than the 1gig western digital ones i replaced them with, the Western digital ones only lasted a year...
Well technically, only the first ever GUI computer, the Xerox Alto, was developed exclusively for internal use at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, which is probably what you are thinking of. Both the Xerox Star and Apple Lisa were commercially available GUI computers before the Macintosh, but they were both very expensive executive workstations. The Mac was the first affordable GUI computer, mainly due to the fact that it had rather anemic hardware for its time in order to keep the cost down.
That Mac was indeed a Mac Classic - it was the last model of the old black and white Macintosh computers. That particular model had an easter egg - if you held down the Command key, Option key, X and O key together, then turned the Mac on (with your third arm), it would boot into a copy of System 6.0.3 that was burned into the ROM. The X O key combination comes from that model's development name - Macintosh XO
You should use the case and the monitor, the rest (MB, processor, memory, "disk") could be done with a raspberry, would be very interesting!
EEVblog quote generator? YES
"bob's your uncle" ;)
"Crusty".
Look at that bodge
"Good enough for Australia"
"A thing of beauty and a joy forever!"
A Dave Jones quote generator. Brilliant... Already can't wait.
making so much advertisement for Element14... and then telling to get that battery from ebay... Gottcha BEN! xD
Ben; I've recenty gotten my Mac SE/30 (1987 compact mac) reinstalled with system 7, and oodles of apps. I can provide you with a scsi drive, preinstalled for that Classic. One thing of note, that appears to be a Classic I, if you hold down cmd-option-x-o, on it, it will boot from a floppy disk image in the ROM. As far as I know, this is the only mac that can do that. Please contact me in private message if you need help on getting it running.
My dad works at the company where they made the plastic injection molding mold for that case and I've seen the mold with the engraved names on it, it's pretty cool.
Also, the Mac Classic is by no means the first Mac model. It, along with its successor, the Classic II, actually one of the last B&W Macs Apple released.
The Mac Classic can read & write 1.44 MB PC-formatted floppies, too. I don't know if it can boot to them, but a modern Mac with a USB floppy can still format a floppy in the Classic's native format. I'm sure there's still some way to write a bootable image of the old Mac OS 6 or 7 onto a floppy.
SCSI stand for Small Computer *System* Interface, not Serial. The SCSI-1 bus, which the Mac Classic uses, is an 8-bit parallel bus, not a serial one.
Apple also started using IDE hard drives for lower-end Macs in the mid 90s, at about the same time the PowerPC-based models first came out. The last Macs to include an on-board SCSI controller were the G3 Powermacs & Powerbooks.
I would love to see you bring that thing back to life. Old machines like that deserve to get a second chance.
I have an old server with 2 scsi ribbon drives in it, but I'm fairly certain that I need those 2 drives to get it to boot. saving up for a vid adapter for that thing atm.
Great video ben,i remmber this was my first conputer i used as a kid... hopefuly you can get that old mac working again.
I have several iMac G3 units, and I'm amazed at how they created such a small footprint for the technology available. I would love to see Ben's take on a Hackintosh in that Mac Classic case. Also, to show how much technology has advanced since the early Apple days, you can make an Apple Pi (Raspberry Pi) that emulates the Apple II.
that is one thing I never quite understood we landed on the moon with a computer that had the processing power of a modern day $3 calculator. heck if you can go back in time and take a Raspberry Pi with you you could probably land on the moon a lot better than they were able to...... that being said why the heck is it so hard for us to go back. its not like we haven't done it before
highlander723 Money
I love Ben's show but I would've liked to see him do more research for this video. As a Macintosh enthusiast and collector, some of the stuff he talks about makes me cringe as it's so incorrect.
SCSI actually stands for 'Small Computer System Interface'. It's still used today in servers and some workstations, but there's faster drives available on Sata(Serial ATA) called SSDs(Solid State Drives) if the interface on the main board is fast enough to fully utilize their speeds(Usually Sata III). Good video btw
first let me say i love your show,
and i like the fact that you say 'kaput',
also i'm pretty suprised how many german words exist in the english language
Thanks for watching! We'll try to work in more German when we can :)
Some factual corrections:
1. The Mac Classic line wasn't the same line as the original Macintosh, it was a remake based on their newer component designs (and started well after Steve Jobs was ousted in 1985)
2. Apple moved to IDE long before they moved to x86; even the early PowerMacs back in the mid-90s used IDE
3. The Mac Classic line continued until the middle of 1995
I must assume this video helped along your meeting with the 8-bit guy. Your collaboration on the "Atari Junk Keyboard" is how I found your channel. I have been binge watching ever since.
SCSI is parallel and it therefore stands for Small Computer SYSTEM Interface.
Serial SCSI is relatively new.
Interesting facts about the old Macs, the floppy drives were SCSI, and they stored 800K instead of 720K like on PC. The drives stored fewer sectors per track near the center of the disk, and increased the number of sectors per tract on the outer tracks. They called each region where the number of sectors per track was different a speed zone, and the drive would actually change its RPM for each speed zone.
I had a Mac Classic from 1987, which still functioned as of 2009 that I salvaged from my high school. I could even access games and old student projects from it. And my mother forced my to throw it out, thinking it was worthless. To this day I wish I had stood my ground.
I am so sorry to everyone for the loss of such a historical artefact :(
Edit: It had an external keyboard & 5 inch floppy drive, with about a dozen floppys with it. :(
OH NO! I watched this video to the end, and I need to say this: My mac was outputting a similar pattern to the screen, but after a few tries it started working properly!!! Keep trying, please! It might still work!!!!!!!!
Reading your comment caused me pain lol ! I can't believe she made you throw it out !!!
NO DID YOU REALLY have to trow it away. Ah that sounds so awfull as a mac collector whehehehe ;(
Ratstail91 The Macintosh Classic was released in 1990. Many people use the descriptor ‘Classic Mac’ when they should use ‘Compact Mac’. You may have owned a Macintosh Plus, a Macintosh SE or a Macintosh SE/FDHD from 1987. The Plus (1986) has a smooth front while the SE and SE/FDHD has some ribs in the front of the case.
Very good video´s, i had also a Mac Classic i find in on a Recycling yard and was also Kaputt ;) Nice greetings from Germany
Thanks for watching!
We're in like flynn!
The drive is a Connor CP3040A, a 40MB drive. Remember I had one, an IDE version instead and was very happy with it because it was the first drive I had that operates silently (no Space shuttle that just takes off). 40MB was allot in the DOS-days and Win 3.11 days. Also installed Win95 on this drive with use of drivespace (compression) and second harddrive for data and swap file. Great memories.
The " kaputt " on this show makes my day. Greetings from Germany!
The rock paint finish pleases my eye.
4:55 IIRC, the first Mac to use IDE was the LC/Quadra 630 which was released in July '94. Most Macs had external SCSI ports until the switch to USB, but the internal interfaces were IDE.
Nice "exploded View" Ben. Brings back memories of fixing these things.
FYI..SCSI is actually Small Computer Systems Interface. SCSI is actually a parallel bus not a serial bus. :)
Thanks for watching and for the info!
We just can't stop saying "kaputt" around here! Greetings from Germany. The Show is great. You have much Ideas.
Spiders? I heard those old macs were full of bugs! (Grandpa joke.)
1. The battery is a 3.6v 1/2AA Lithium that you can find at most Mac enthusiast stores. My PowerMac G3 still uses one and requires me to change it every other year.
2. I see that there are IDE-to-SCSI adapters out there. Maybe you can use one of those coupled with an IDE-to-SATA adapter to use SATA hard drives on the Mac?
3. The first Classic Mac only had 128KB of RAM and no hard drive at all. So this is definitely a newer model.
I'd like to pick one of these up for a project I've been conjuring up in my head. Could I gut one of these and put in say a Raspberry Pi, and still use the CRT display? I'd like to make a home server terminal with a retro feel.
I remember my first time taking apart a classic mac a teacher gave me. I didn't know much about CRT displays at the time so you could imagine my reaction upon trying to lift the anode cap and accidentally touching the anode which still happened to have a charge. Thankfully it wasn't lethal but won't be something I'll forget.
"Why we need to shop a pet:
1.it's cute
2.fun time
3.CUTE!!"
hahahaha
I really hope he's not joking about the Dave quote generator xD I would love to see that!
Reminds me of a Mac classic I got for nothing. thing had a HDD and 2 floppy drives along with the max RAM expansion count. It was still a B&W screen but was fun to play around with until stepdad said it had to go to the trash 10 years ago. Wish I still had it...
i have 2 working apple mac classics, one boots right up properly, the other comes up with what seems to be an icon saying to put a disc in the floppy drive, so im guessing it lacks a (working) hdd, ive not bothered looking into it too far as i only have one set of input devices,
i also have a working NEC APC III running dos 2.1 or 2.2
Yesss a Dave quote generator looool
This is awesome. Great video =)
Ben, your best bet is to get a miniscribe hard drive that would normally come in an SE, they are stepper motor HDDs that usually never die. The Worst that could happen is the heads comming out of allignment, but thats fixed with a low level format.
Can't wait for the Dave Jones quote generator now!
Hey, Ben! I was wondering if you could explain/show me how I can install Linux Ubuntu on a raspberry pi for my school project. Any help is appreciated!
I think the form factor like a tv is much more practical........they should go back to a boxy design with the power button and DVD drive at the front of the computer.
We've had 3 Imacs at work with SD cards put into the slot loading DVD slot accidentally which is just below the SD slot at the side of the mac. Now I can't get them out. You may say people are stupid but this has happened 3 times now. Makes you think.
Also because the power button / USB ports are behind the Imac people invariably end up turning the computer one way to be able put a USB stick in (as they can't see around the back ). This suddenly strains a power lead that has been cable tidied up previously! Then they can't find the power button to reboot in the event of a hang - as it's also around the back hidden. Don't mention ejecting a DVD drive without a keyboard!
Makes you wonder if we have progressed since The Classic. Anyway well done for the teardown Ben.......they are lovely machines.
hard drives back the were much lower density. You could probably take it apart and see if you could get it to spin up with little risk to damage.
It's weird to see how different and yet how much of the same older computers are.
The 'Classic' was a much later model (sold in various models from 1990 to 1994) than the original Mac (128KB) and Mac Plus (512KB). The original 1984 Mac's had the memory on the motherboard and no SCSI port and no internal HDD. The 1984 Mac's had the signatures inside the case. The case and the screen were much smaller than the model in the video.
omg the sound recording is top quality
The "classic" Macs that Ben is referring to are the Mac 128K, Mac 512K, Mac 512KE and Mac Plus. Those are the actual models. The Mac Classic, the computer in this video, was a distinct model, not a "classic" Mac. There was also a Color Classic and the Mac SE/SEII. The SE on up, including the Classic were massive upgrades on the original Mac hardware, in a similar case.
Hi, don't want to point out the obvious, but SCSI is Small Computer System Interface and not serial - 4:48
Awww maaaaaan! This is bringing back memories, the inside of that looks sooo sooo similar to the xt at PC cases I used to pull apart in my youth! That harddrive is a 90 model from the looks of it, I saw a crapload of them. (ps I had a c64 growing up too) I never really dealt with mac but I went from c64 to xt, to at, and worked my way up step by step! I still have a dos games with dos 6.4 + quickmenu (running via dosbox fully set up) from the late 80's early 90s. My favourite game from that era was Commander Keen. From before, c64 My Little Computer Person (What Sims was based off). What was everyone elses??
Fyi, I made my 1990 prediction right after you said you didn't think it was early mac but before you read the mother board. So woot me I guess. The Z chip might be a graphics co-processor.
SCSI = Small Computer System Interface and it is parallel. You can use any parallel SCSI hard drive. I even used a newer SCSI disk with an adaptor.
I have one these computers too but I have a small problem I do not hear the sound loud. The only way I could hear something very faint was by using headphones and having the volume to the max. Could you figure out what could be the problem??? I removed the board and I could not see any corrosion or leakage.
How did you clean those components? What is the best way to do that :)
Hooray for hackintosh architecture for turning a windows pc into a Mac pc
AWESOME holy grail reference :)
Hey Ben, When you fix it the Mac, can you make a video about how you fixed it
Lol, it looks like that Mac is lined with Rhino-X spray on truck bed liner haha
I was thinking the same thing
You can boot the mac classic via the keyboard, even though there is no HDD. the key code is command, control, x, and c
You are awesome *****!
Hi josh :D
What would josh dew with this computer? Probably find a way to install Linux or Cyanogen mod on it. HI JOSH!
Polar Punch exactly!!
@wwjoshdew YOU JUST MADE MY WHOLE WEEK! IVE NEVER HAD SUCH A WELL KNOWN AND WELL RESPECTED UA-camR REPLY TO ME! THANK YOU! Also, as a gamer just trying to get into PC gaming, do you think I should get a gaming laptop or desktop? Thanks!
Polar Punch desktop! Check out iBuyPower. ;)
Would it be possible to upgrade this mac. And by upgrade I mean making it a modern gaming computer and run W7.
There's more problems than just the HDD, notice the greenish electrolyte leakage from the SMD caps on the mainboard. It already started to corrode some pins and traces. This is a common problem for old Macs (or any system that used the bad stock of old SMD electrolytic capacitors back in 1989-1993 or so). You *must* replace them with new ones and clean all the electrolytic gunk with isopropanol alcohol or something. If you want it to last, replace them with SMD tantalum caps instead.
There might be broken traces, so if you're not in for an hour or two of inspecting/rework, you might be better off bying a recapped mobo on ebay.
You're definitely right about the surprising relationships between tech companies over the years - Every time I've opened a Pentium 4 era Intel test unit, it had an ATi branded GPU. And AGP - Fancy!
Intel's Oregon farm of Dual Socket, Pentium 4 1u blade servers also all used ATis Professional chipsets. (Not very hard to figure why this relationship stopped.)
I have 2 of those old things, I used to run 1 off a inverter from 12v, I would get about 3 hours at a time of use from 1 12v deep cycle battery.
Not too bad for just keeping records on, like a day planer or calender, these retro machines can still be useful.
FWIW: the Mac Classic is really the 3rd, and last generation of the compact B&W Mac. The first generation model is the original Mac, the one with the signatures in it. It housed the original Mac 128, the 512/512E and the Mac Plus. They produced this in the original Tan and the later Platinum. It had no capacity for official internal expansion. The 2nd gen compact Mac was introduced with the Mac SE and had power supply improvements and internal capacity for expansion, either a 2nd floppy or a hard drive. The much heralded Mac SE/30 was the first compact to not run the Moto 68000 CPU. The 3rd generation compact was a major effort for cost reduction and was for a long time Apple's greatest seller in terms of quantity. They offered it in a 68000 and 68030 version, all with internal HD's of 20-40MB size. They made one color compact, the Color Classic, but it had a significantly different case. Good stuff Ben!
Hey! You said "look at that diode jumping from there to there- that's a rework!" Does that mean it was an error in manufacturing that they manually corrected?
Good video, but when are you finally going to make a ps4 or xbox one laptop?
It did have a hidden ROM and will load into system 6. The classic was around early 90s and came with a 2mb ram 20hd or a 4/40. It was one of my fave macs. The orig 128k had the same 68000 processor with no HD.
I have a suggestion for a project. make a tablet HID for desktop like turning a nexus into a drawing pad or keyboard or macro pad. Im stumped how to do it. although its probably in front of my face. i just want a nice set of macros for my desktop on a tablet so i wanna see how you would get the hardware.
Ben you're a fuckin man lol this is turning into one of my favorite shows, ever, not just on youtube im including shitty cable t.v. Everythings great, the acting, production quality, the show setup, and the content is right up my geek alley. good freaking shit guys.
Thanks for watching!
Ben saying "Bewdy", now that's moving!
and I tore down an iMac G3 lime (the rarest color) because i thought the crt had corrupted the unit, but it turns out the hard disk motor was jammed and smelled like burning plastic every time it was turned on, and nothing showed on the screen. But the day before, the screen was fine, but the no hard drive screen appeared. So your mac and mine had a similar fate
Is there any way you can take the small case of an old mac and put in a mini itx motherboard and other small components, and run bootcamp on it? If so make a video that idea seems etched in my brain right now and really cool!
Those 1990's Macs used 1.44MB floppies. You can still download the System 7.53 OS disks from apple's ftp site and write them on a PC and boot it.
"...so now they're basically PCs with a different operating system."
With the new Apple silicon, that's looking to change!
This could have a been 60 minute episode with in-depth info on every little thing inside :( ... it was still great
Interesting paint job :-)
The Ben Heck Show
9:05
Do i hear phone vibrations in the background?
Ben, that paint actually looks a lot like the color of the Pixar Image Computer did you realize it
FleckStone Paint ahh I remember those days!!!
I've just bought an iMac G4 all in one for £30 ($40) with keyboard and mouse, it's fully working too
It's interesting that the hard drive is mounted upside down. They are not really designed to work that way..
I did a little search and found out that the AMD AM53C80 chip on the motherboard is the SCSI controller chip. I never knew AMD made stuff like that. Also, that was truly back in the day when computers didn't need heatsinks on their processors...how times have changed.
EDIT: I want a Mac Classic.
Wonderful memories of when 4mb of RAM and a 40Mb hard drive was enough to get online with AOL 1.0a, not to mention the fun of BBSing...geez, I'm getting old.
I have the team signatures on mine!😁
Wow, 2 movies? So you've got Jobs (coming soon) and the Pirates of silicon Valley.
SCSI = Small Computer System Interface. Not "Serial Interface". Now there are SAS drives, but back in the days of the Mac Classic, SCSI drives were parallel.
I really like this, you should do more computer videos.
OMFG WHOLE TIME I WAS THINKING "MAN DAVE JONES DID IT ALREADY". THEN HE SAID "BEAUTY". I JUST DIED LAUGHING AND NOW I'M A GHOST COMMENTING ON THIS VIDEO.
Likely any SCSI-2 hard drive smaller than 2 GB will work in there. I know there was a 2GB ceiling for a while on 16-bit OS's, which likely is a limitation of that old thing. I know it used that hybrid 16/32 bit Motorola processor. Also, that original hard drive was 40 MB.
Oh and the Mac Classic came out in 1990 :P The original boards afaik had 1990-1991 on them.
Avast made a serial to Ethernet adapter for these. I thought it would be too slow back in the day but I was very impressed. I'd like to see if this would have a chance in the Internet. CRT is black & white not gray scale, so that's a no on internet I think.