{"id":562,"date":"2015-07-03T22:40:02","date_gmt":"2015-07-03T22:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcoscarpio.com\/wordpress\/?p=562"},"modified":"2025-08-28T20:09:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T04:09:07","slug":"working-on-vintage-macs-in-the-21st-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marcoscarpio.com\/wordpress\/2015\/07\/03\/working-on-vintage-macs-in-the-21st-century\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trials and Tribulations of Working on Vintage Macs — in the 21st Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

The world is constantly changing.\u00a0 More so in the very fast-paced environment of technology.<\/p>\n

These days, you have just bought a shiny-new, state-of-the-art phone, tablet, or any gadget today, \u00a0and tomorrow, it’s already obsolete.\u00a0 So, while you were sleeping, a new feature or model is already being tooled in an unspecified factory in China — waiting to be shipped out to consumers “in just a few more weeks or even days.”<\/p>\n

I had been an Apple\/Mac head since the days of the Apple II in the late 70s.\u00a0 More so when the original 128K Macintosh<\/strong> came out in 1984.\u00a0 During those days, using them made practical sense (except for the price, of course) since the Mac – with its GUI – \u00a0was far superior to DOS-based PCs<\/strong>.\u00a0 It took Microsoft a couple of years to develop its first GUI – Windows 1.01<\/strong><\/a> or “Presentation Manager<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n

After Windows XP became the global OS standard, the Mac, once again, became the “niche-market” machine – used only by die-hard Apple fans, musicians, video editors, and “me-to-Apple-user-johnny-come-lately<\/strong><\/em>“s.<\/p>\n

Our attic is full of odds and ends of old Macs, Apple IIs (Plus<\/strong>, IIe, IIc, <\/strong>and IIGS<\/strong>), PowerBooks, and their accessories — external drives, cables, dot-matrix printers, mice, cameras, scanners, add-on cards, and assorted software and manuals.<\/p>\n

So, after almost 35 years, while tinkering with some of the units in my vintage Mac collection, I can still recall the good old days when they were state-of-the-art during their heydays.\u00a0 \u00a0I plan to sell them to new collectors so that I can finance a trip that I had long wanted to do — an overland tour across South America.\u00a0 Ala-Che Guevarra’s “<\/em>Motorcycle Diaries.”\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>Most probably, without the motorcycle.<\/p>\n

Vintage Macs have varying idiosyncrasies:\u00a0 from the batteries that power the clock and retain the System Settings<\/strong> down to how the keyboard connects to the central CPU unit.\u00a0 Only the shape or form factor<\/strong> looks similar.<\/p>\n

The original 128K Mac, released in 1984, has a seemingly plain-looking AA battery –1.5V DC.\u00a0 No, it’s 4.5V.<\/p>\n

The Mac SE used a 3.6V<\/strong> battery in 1\/2 AA battery size<\/strong><\/span>, while the Mac LC 575 used a 4.5V battery<\/strong> shaped like a cube<\/strong><\/span>.\u00a0 Good luck if you can still purchase these batteries today.\u00a0 I’ve scoured all the major electronic stores in our area for the 4.5V cubed battery and came up empty-handed.\u00a0 And, even if you chanced upon them online, be prepared to pay an arm and a leg!<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a>
An Apple Macintosh SE with the cover removed.\u00a0 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now, let’s talk about diskette drives.\u00a0 Yes, those electro-mechanical contraptions that gobble up the 3.5″<\/strong> or the 5.25″<\/strong> plastic diskettes read the information and pass that to the CPU for processing.\u00a0 The original Mac was among the first PCs to make the 3.5″ disk format a standard.<\/p>\n

The late Steve Jobs was a big fan of Japanese companies, notably Sony Corp.<\/strong>, that, during those days, Macs came with CRTs and disk drives made by Sony.\u00a0 Even his later venture, NEXT<\/strong>, came up with workstations and servers containing components from Sony, Toshiba<\/strong>, TEAC<\/strong>, Alps<\/strong>, Panasonic<\/strong>, etc.<\/p>\n

Again, the original 1984 Mac came with Sony’s 3.5″ disk drives that read\/write single-sided 400K diskettes.\u00a0 But during that era, most PCs used the 5.25″ diskette format.\u00a0 To access the PC data, you must use an external Apple 5.25″ diskette drive with a DB-9 port.\u00a0 And even before Apple came up with the ADB<\/strong> (Apple Desktop Bus<\/strong>), the 1984 Mac had a special connector for the keyboard that looked like a telephone jack.<\/p>\n

My saga that dealt with the various formats and ports in vintage Macs began when I was trying to load the appropriate OS on the Mac SE<\/strong> and the Mac Color Classic<\/strong> onto their respective hard drives.<\/p>\n

While both used 50-pin SCSI drives<\/strong> as storage, they have – you guessed it – different internal diskette drives<\/strong>.\u00a0 The former has a lower capacity 800K<\/strong> drive.\u00a0 At the same time, the latter used a 1.44 MB drive<\/strong> (Apple nicknamed it ‘SuperDrive<\/strong>‘ – for its ability to read\/write all the various diskette formats during those days).\u00a0 As expected, Sony made both disk drives.<\/p>\n

\"English:<\/a>
English: Internal SuperDrive floppy drive on a Macintosh LC II Espa\u00f1ol: Unidad interna SuperDrive de un Macintosh LC II (Photo credit: Wikipedia)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now, if you don’t have an external SCSI CD-ROM – and the appropriate CDs to load the OSes – you will have to do with loading the OSes via the diskette drives.<\/p>\n

And, where to get those 3.5″, \u00a0800K & 1.44 MB diskettes these days\u00a0is just the beginning of my vintage Mac odyssey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The world is constantly changing.\u00a0 More so in the very fast-paced environment of technology. These days, you have just bought a shiny-new, state-of-the-art phone, tablet, or any gadget today, \u00a0and tomorrow, it’s already obsolete.\u00a0 So, while you were sleeping, a new feature or model is already being tooled in an unspecified factory in China — … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Trials and Tribulations of Working on Vintage Macs — in the 21st Century”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-gizmos","category-whats-new"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Trials and Tribulations of Working on Vintage Macs - in the 21st Century - Baclaran Para\u00f1aque Rizal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Working on vintage Macs\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.marcoscarpio.com\/wordpress\/2015\/07\/03\/working-on-vintage-macs-in-the-21st-century\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Trials and Tribulations of Working on Vintage Macs - 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