New Zealand Vintage Computer Forums

Am very keen to start a vintage Mac collection.

Any pre PowerPC Mac, working or not. An SE/30 would be great but any offers welcome.

Where are you located brother? For someone who doesn't have any particular affinity toward Apple I've got heaps of old timey Macs that I could spare.

I am in Marton, halfway between Palmerston North and Whanganui. It probably doesn't make money sense to courier anything up from Invercargill. Out of interest, what do you have?

Mac Plus, Mac Classic II, LC III, LC 475, LC 575, Performa 580CD, Power Mac 7200/100, Power Mac 7300/200, Power Mac 7600/200, iBook G3 SE 466FW in KeyLime.

And to think, I'm actually more of a Commodore guy!

Wow, truthfully I would ask what you want for the whole lot, but I know I dont have the space, cant afford to go all the way to Invercargill to pick up (time and money) and my wife would definitely say NO!!!
So, I will start off small - what are the specs on and what do you want for your Key Lime clamshell?

Unfortunately of the whole collection the iBook is the only one I'd have to hang onto. The wife bought it for my birthday a few years ago and at present, it's the only Mac I have that can run Classic and OS X. It's a G3 466MHz with 576MB RAM, 80GB hard disk, ATI Rage Mobility graphics and AirPort. Likewise, the 7300 is the wife's first machine so I'm kinda duty-bound to hang onto it.

The rest however... if you could convince your wife to let you drive all the way to Invercargill to pick them up, help me knock over a box of Beck's and they're yours. With all those Macs gone I'd have room for more Commodores

Considering the 680x0 range of Macs, the LC475 is a box to consider for a collection. As a low cost 'Quadra' (25MHz 68040) it manages a reasonble amount of productive service for anybody persevering with System 7 or earlier. The low physical space requrements of the LC family and frugal power sipping nature of these boxes make them all a decent choice for somebody who just wants a 'Mac' for the collection, rather than a die hard fan that wants some desirable keystone piece for it's history. You get colour, 16bit sound, and reasonable upgrade path if you plan to 'fiddle'. (Processor upgrades are possible, one slot for upgrades - networking is already present on the 475 motherboard, 'good' memory sizes can be achieved etc.) If there is a flaw with this thinking, it is to be aware of monitor issues, you 'may' require a genuine apple monitor for those odd Mac resolutions, gender changing plugs and such, make the three box macs less appropriate for the casual collector. If you really want to slum it, the Mac Plus is great place to start though!

recycled wrote:Considering the 680x0 range of Macs, the LC475 is a box to consider for a collection. As a low cost 'Quadra' (25MHz 68040) it manages a reasonble amount of productive service for anybody persevering with System 7 or earlier. The low physical space requrements of the LC family and frugal power sipping nature of these boxes make them all a decent choice for somebody who just wants a 'Mac' for the collection, rather than a die hard fan that wants some desirable keystone piece for it's history. You get colour, 16bit sound, and reasonable upgrade path if you plan to 'fiddle'. (Processor upgrades are possible, one slot for upgrades - networking is already present on the 475 motherboard, 'good' memory sizes can be achieved etc.) If there is a flaw with this thinking, it is to be aware of monitor issues, you 'may' require a genuine apple monitor for those odd Mac resolutions, gender changing plugs and such, make the three box macs less appropriate for the casual collector. If you really want to slum it, the Mac Plus is great place to start though!

Some consider the Mac Plus the last Mac ever made.... from that point onward the signatures in the case casting disappeared and the designs went south. I love the Mac Plus - awesome machine. A little fragile, but a few uprated capacitors in the analogue board sorts that out.

Y'know I bought the Mac Plus off a guy on TradeMe reasonably cheap a while back, it was missing its mouse and miraculously one of those showed up by itself a few months later... but I've never gotten to the point of actually trying the thing out. Maybe it's all the scaremongery from you guys about blowing caps!

Of the whole collection, the 68k Mac that gets the most use is the 580CD. It's had some upgrades done and runs really nicely, has real Ethernet, the whole nine. I use it for keeping an eye on IRC while I'm messing around with Amigas.

Oh yeah, there's a bunch of Mac monitors here too that go with the machines. I've got a 13"ish one that matches an LC II, a multimedia 15"ish dealie that went with one of the PowerMacs and a 17"ish beefy one that went with the 7600/200, it's got a Sonnet G3 card in it too so that makes sense.

I should probably have said a higher price than a box of beers now that I'm thinking about this, but at the end of the day if I'm helping out a brother in need who wants to get collecting, I'm all for it.

Thanks heaps for the offer Carcenomy, I will definitely keep that in mind for WHEN I next visit the south of the south!

mrad01 wrote:Some consider the Mac Plus the last Mac ever made.... from that point onward the signatures in the case casting disappeared and the designs went south.

Urk! Does that make my Mac IIci a special case? http://i1150.photobucket.com/albums/o604/recycled_nz/MacintoshIIcisignatures_zps2dc7c349.jpg. Just dismantled my media PC, (yup, put a mini itx board in a small mac case, slot load dvd drive where the floppy used to live - a real life 'hack-intosh' before it meant putting OS-X on a PC), and took that photo! Damn, perhaps I should not have used the old boy as a donor now that I discover how valuable it was.

I thought the signatures were removed after the electrical emission requirements were beefed up. Apple went from the spray on silver paint to installing metal shields to achieve compliance, so it was unlikely the signatures would see the light of day in these new cases, hence they were dropped, just a practicality - kind of like some chip designs used to get 'signatures' etched on them before software design tools and silicon space value made such things impractical.

AFAIK the earliest Macs were filled with signatures which were eventually blotted out with reinforcements before metal shielding started even. But Apple had nothing - look inside an Amiga 1000, even Jay Miner's dog got a paw print in there

I am having to curtail my wishes as I do not have anymore "space". I will have to be content with 2xPowerMac G4's and G3 in storage until I do have space to setup and play - I dont even have playing space for them any more as my garage has been "converted" to store all my coffee supplies (running a coffee cart in Turakina - stop by for a brew). There we are, pre-power mac apple collecting put on hold for now!!!

Potential playing space solution - bid on and hopefully win clamshell iBook and sell 2 Power Mac G4s and a Blue and White G3. Definitely space saving there. Definitely wishing hard too!!!