Mac Restoration

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Not related to linux or unix at all, this is documenting my efforts to get a pre-PPC Macintosh back into use.

Why? These era macs were the first computers I used that I enjoyed and they are the earliest personal computers that have all the elements we now associate with personal computing, including: TCP/IP, thus can get on the internet, Sound, Video, Digital Cameras, Games.

Contents

[edit] Quadra 630

Quadra 630 with Motorola 33Mhz 68040 cpu and 20 Mb ram. It was the last Quadra and the earliest mac with an IDE hard drive. Note the Quadra 660AV and 840AV were produced before this.

Originally didn't boot, but had a TV tuner, A/V card and ethernet card. It surprisingly didn't have a CD drive.

After acquiring a Performa 630CD, which is almost the same computer with a 68LC040 cpu, I added its CD drive ( 2x I believe ) to the Quadra, and the Quadra booted. I assume the Quadra must have had an external scsi CD drive or for some other reason the scsi chain was not terminated until I added the CD drive.

Once it booted I was able to determine that Mac OS 7.5 was installed and the tv tuner worked - I could pick up the last remaining analog tv station in town - and there were indications that it had

Helpful links:

[edit] Hardware

[edit] Battery

Purchase from eBay

[edit] Hard Drive

Replace hard drive with Compact Flash card Compact Flash to IDE adapter and 1 Gb Compact Flash card from buy.com Not all CF cards will work, need to find those that are ATA compatible.

[edit] Floppy

I researched to see if there was a way to use digital media on the floppy bus. I found the following Floppy Emulators:

and an interesting bit of history on the importance of the first Apple floppy drive:

[edit] CD

See if there is a more recent SCSI CD drive, particularly one that will read CD-R and CD-RW that will work with this. I don't think its possible to do CD burning, but more research is needed.

[edit] External SCSI

There is an external hard drive, cd drive and zip drive that can be used with this computer. The key is getting the SCSI-1 to SCSI-2 cable for the first connection.

[edit] Memory

[edit] Motherboard

[edit] Power Supply

[edit] AV Card

[edit] TV Tuner

[edit] Ethernet Card

Comm Slot 1

[edit] Software

[edit] Operating System

I was able to get an unopened copy of Mac OS 7.6.1 on CD from eBay

Possible other operating systems that will run on this:

[edit] Applications

Mathematica- I purchased Mathematica 1 from eBay. I'm looking for a copy of 2.2

[edit] Games

  • Sid Meier's Civilization
  • Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon
  • Civilization II
  • Guns or Butter

[edit] Networking

I got no indication that the NuBus Ethernet card was working, so I got a Comm Port Ethernet card (unopened) from eBay for $16

Getting networking enabled *and* usable was re-living doing the same thing in the mid-90s: difficult.

After getting the drivers installed from floppy, I then had to figure out which one actually worked: there were two installed one for two different chips that were used on this network card. I ended up setting up dhcpd on a linux box so I could monitor if the dhcp handshake was taking place. Once I could reliably get an ip address, the next step was to get applications that would use tcp/ip. Telnet, ftp and web browsers were not bundled with the OS - thankfully tcp/ip was - and many of them are larger than what will fit on a floppy.

I was able to get Fetch ftp in this bundle:

The next important step was to get decompression software. Almost all old mac software is within Stuffit archives.

I was able to find a copy of Stuffit 4.0.9 on the external hard drive which would fit on a floppy, this was sufficent to unstuff Stuffit 5.5

Speed on private network to a linux desktop with 10/100 switch averaged about 100Kb/sec - about twice the maximum dialup speeds.

[edit] Emulation

Basilisk II

I've only gotten networking enabled on the OSX version with the JIT compiler:

[edit] SE 30

I also aspire to restore an SE 30 to working order

[edit] NeXT

While its unlikely due to the rarity of parts and software I'm also fond of NeXT computers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXHFfc3btCI

NeXTStep OS is the predecessor of OS X

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