Where Old Macs Go To Thrive
foghorn666 writes "Still have an old all-in-one Mac buried in your basement somewhere? Wired reports that Japanese collectors are paying a premium for the 'toasters,' including $500 for a HD-less Mac SE and $1000 for a used Newton."
No one even bothers with fast FP's.
Stuff like this make me happy that I'm still holding onto old boards from some of the systems that my father worked on. I have a board of burned out tubes from ENIAC, a section of hand wired Cray 1A, and Altair 8800, and a whole room full of Tandy, and IBM boxes from the 8080 and 1810 families....
Tell me japan... How long will I have to wait before this becomes worth the shipping charges to get it over there?
Looks like I'll have to resort to dumpster diving to weather this economis tech-funk.
Know of any mac-happy companies?
Whaddabout mac-happy companies who are buying new macs and tossing the old? Send their address my way!
-Turkey
-Turkey
And I sold several hundred old macs for $1 to $5 apeice at the MIT Flea Market last year.
Someone should tell these fine people about eBay- it's a great place to pick up used crap. They can get their Newtons and SEs for cheap. Oi. If not, I've an MP2100u that I'm willing to part with for a measly $500 (including keyboard, ethernet card, modem, nice carrying case, 4 MB and 2 MB flash cards) and an SE for $100! WITH A 10 MB HD! If you're really lucky, I'll sell you my AT&T UNIXpc or NeXT cube for $2000!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
"These young whippersnappers today, they ain't even got floppy drives! What is the world comin' too? Back in my day..."
THe real story here is how the hell they got OSX to run on that SE 30. http://www.wired.com/news/gallery/0,2072,51231-339 5~3394,00.html
Confession #2: I use the poor little thing regularly. Honest. Over time, it's become my word processing machine of choice (w/ Word 5.1, of course). Some people can't write unless they're seated in front of a manual typewriter -- yes, I have one of those, too: a cast-iron Royal relic -- but me? I need my Classic.
For whatever reason, it gets me in the writing mood. Maybe it's because the experience is so focused: the WP completely fills the little 9" screen, so there aren't any distractions to worry about. No email. No IM. No surfing. Heck, not even color.
Sorry, Japan. I'm keeping my lil' box. =)
I still have an old MSX from Phillips. It runs Basic, MSX-DOS and some other stuff. Anyone an idea what to do with it? I tried to get rid of it but nobody seems to want them and I don't want to put it in the bin.. :-(
History matters..
"People care about Macintosh," Lee said. "I have no Windows PC customers."
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that MIGHT be because you have no Windows PC's for sale.
I just wish I had an SE that worked. I still haven't gotten any type of *nix to run yet.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I think that foghorn666 submitting this story is further evidence of Satan's profound influence over the Macintosh community.
My other sig is extremely clever...
I am one of those people who actually took their old mac-in-the-box, and turned it into a working aquarium. I am watching my neon tetras swim about as I write this.
"I like to wear big boy pants."
Apple Newton with soft case and all the bits for only 70UKP. I think it may still be there.
The other day, it occurred to me that in a few years time, my little 5GB iPod might be worth a lot of money to a collector. Logically following on from this, I wondered whether it might be worthwhile buying another iPod and not even breaking the seal on the box. Just keep it in mint condition.
college campuses are great sources for things like this, though the cases are usually tagged in some permanant way. just in the last few years we got 4 or 5 Mac SE/30s that were on their way to the dumpster. they all can run System 8, and have ethernet jacks. still work great for telnet, screen savers bla bla bla. anyway, point is they were happy to give em to us and even though the cases have the university logo burned in, all the innards are fine. if nothing else it's parts. we actually also just found 2 Mac 1024s in the trash. have now powered them up yet, but basically it's the second Mac ever made (first being the 512k). the jack for keyboard and mouse uses a clip like a phone or ethernet cable.
sorry for the rambling, but my point is that many universities still have lots of old Macs sitting around. if they really are worth that much in Japan, i don't see why they don't buy them on Ebay where a Mac SE goes for very little. I'm sure the origional box and/or books add some value. i'm pretty sure i still have all my sisters unopened books from her Mac SE, and maybe even some old MS software she got as a software pack and never bothered to open. anyone need a shrinkwrapped 1988 copy of Hypercard? how about MS word for mac still sealed? i also still have my Apple ][e, but i'm keeping that. i still need something to play beachhead and castle wolfenstein on (the origional one). oh, did i ramble again? sorry... just had my first pepsi in a few days....... bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
I initially picked up my 8mhz, 1-bit display powerhouse down at the local goodwill as a kind of novelty. I thought it might be cool to bring back childhood memories. When I got it home and turned it on, the happy little mac face on the 9" black and white display was somehow pleasing. I got to rummaging around and the thing had a whole slew of software on it. Word, Pagemaker, Eudora... you name it. The version of word that shipped back then is sweet (can't remember the version number).
And then I found the games. The games they made back then were perfect. Simple, fun, and addicting. If you have never played the game Crystal Quest, you have not lived.
Eventually I became obsessed with getting the thing on the internet. I searched on e-bay for a network card that would work with the thing (well... actually i needed an external scsi box). I finally found one that would work, but the next day at work, i stumbled acroos the same box in storage. Some hours later, the mac classic was on net! Problem is, only mosaic www 1 ran on the thing (it runs system 6), and it's unusably unstable. So my good friend lynx came to rescue. I simply telnet to my linux box (sorry, no ssh for this puppy) and surf away. I actually use it to code on when I'm getting really distracted by other more full-featured computers.
At any rate, I highly suggest even the most hardened anti-apple among you to pick up a mac classic, an SE/30, or any of the compact models and see what you can do with it.
wiki = _[^o^]_700 YEN
not
700 USD
Who'd be that crazy?
we actually also just found 2 Mac 1024s in the trash. have now powered them up yet, but basically it's the second Mac ever made (first being the 512k).
:)
BZZZZZT! Wrong!
The first Mac ever made was the Mac 128k, the Mac 512k, or 'Fat Mac' was the second. I think what you probably got is a Mac Plus, (which is the third Mac made) as tons of them were sold to educational institutions as the Mac ED.
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
No, it's dollars, they converted the amounts.
We're talking several tens of thousands yen per machine here.
But then, if you had read the article you'd have known that anyways.
maybe if i sell my PB140 and my Mac SE Plus, with carrybag, ill be able to afford to continue college next year.
I want 2D games back.
If you're going to correct people, correct them correctly.
The third Mac was the 512kE.
I used to work at a used Mac shop in Akihabara (the famed "Electric Town" in Tokyo), and we got some strange requests.
Customers would walk in asking if we had part# 20980928-2398T (or something like it) which would turn out to be the tiniest little plastic part in a Rev A PowerMac 7100 (or some other small unimportant looking part), which the guy would be willing to pay 1000 yen for (and then would go on talking about why it's so special, as opposed to the 20980928-2398Q).
Or people would come looking for a "rare" Apple ADB mouse which was manufactured at a specific plant (and after digging through a box full of mice, inform us, with obvious disappointment, that none of the 50 or so mice we had were from that particular factory.
Personally, I found it all quite comical... and scary, at times.
---
Open Source Shirts
I thought the highest the SE/30's could go was 7.6.whatever the last update was...
One of my favorite moments this past year was grabbing a Mac SE from company 'surplus' and setting it up on my desk, turning it on, and finding it still running system 7.x like a champ. It's amusing to glance from the two Mac OS X servers on one side of the cubicle -- dual 800Mhz each, 1GB RAM, many fine GBs of hard drive -- to the lowly Mac SE with 4MB of RAM and 40MB HD.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Why give away your old Mac if you can get more use out of it as a Linux server, YDL would be a good place to start.
Besides, what the exchange rate between Amercian and Japanese currency?
I think it would be really cool to "upgrade" it to OSX like in this article. I wouldn't tear into my old Mac Plus, but I'd love to buy a used one and upgrade it.
Here's the link to the picture of a Mac SE running OS X. I'm psyched. That's really cool. Beige all the way. ;-)
Anyone have a link where we can find out how to do this?
...the floppies themselves used to be bigger than these superflat-TFT-equipped ultra-slim notebooks!
...luckily we found out there was a 400V outlet in the basement we could wire to power the three washing machine sized computer and hard drive units. (And yes, there must be someone out there looking after me, as I'm still alive!)
Back in those days I used to curse my flats fuses for being 16A only, as I couldn't boot the PDP-11s hard drives as they were too much to handle for the fuses...
But still, I'm quite happy with my PB Titanium, as I can run all the emulators I want on it - and now I can fit all these relics in my backpack too...
If all else fails, pull the plug and get out...
The Life is out there...
$500 for a Mac512K?!
;)
:D
someone gave me one for nothing earlier this year
obviously if i become destitute i can sell my retro mac collection in that shop
... that I sold my Colour Classic on eBay for just 125 Pounds last year...
That was classic intercourse!
that way lies madness
That was classic intercourse!
Where do I sell it?
:)
I have Word 4.0 on it and 80 meg HD and 8 mb of RAM
I am willing to trade it for an iBook!
This
SE/30 isn't even 32-bit clean. It can run up to System 7.5.5 with Appearance Manager. It can't even run 7.6, and it surely can't run 8, because 8 requires an '040 or better.