LGR - Macintosh 128k Vintage Computer Review
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- čas přidán 19. 08. 2010
- The first Macintosh. Not many computers are this legendary or can make the claim that even being from 1984 its direct descendants are still sold today. But is it worth buying one to a games collector?
The Insanely Great Apple Macintosh 128 Computer System
Thanks to Killgruz for assistance and inspiration!
His rad channel:
/ killgruz
Lode Runner
Banzai
Crystal Quest
Daleks
Mac Bugs!
Cairo Shootout - Zábava
I like to see how the "soul" of this channel is still the same after so many years. Thank you for your dedication sir :)
You can tell a lot from these early videos, that he knew what he wanted to do, he just had to find his feet.
Amen
@@horseradishpower9947 I'm sure Clint knows where his feet are. If he didn't he'd be in a wheelchair.
Mid fursona
I almost can't believe hipster and banksy jokes have been around so long.
Haha, they were played-out even in 2010 :P
Years later those jokes and the channel itself have aged well XD
Well, I reckon they will be around for a few more years yet...
I just realised when he mentioned buying a bicycle
The original name Steve jobs wanted to call the Macintosh was bicycle
That GUI must have been mighty impressive in 1984.
A few years ago windows XP's GUI looked ancient compared to Mac OS 10.4 but how must this first Macintosh have looked like next to a machine with MS DOS?
This was probably as "magical" back then as Apple claims the iPad to be these days.
This was the 1st lgr video I had watched on a day off from work. 8 years later, still watching. Do not stop what you are doing Clint!
Are you still watching now?
My grandpa had the Macintosh Plus. Thanks for posting footage of Daleks. For some reason memories of that game popped in my head. So fun to see the footage here.
I look forward to these reviews every Friday night when I get off work for the week. Awesome as always, man
What a throwback! I used to work on that back in the day in the print industry.
Man, I wish Vintage computers had not gone up in price so much in the past 6 years. You can't find a working Macintosh 128K for under $1000 today.
It is pretty wild how high in value some computers have gotten!
seriously I got a vic 20 for 20$
Hipsters ruin everything.
Which really sucks when you've wanted some of these machines for that long, but were under-age at the time and your parents refused to allow it...
Really?!? I have to visit my uncle then... If I'm not mistaken he has something like this, even if it could be an SE and not a 128k...
Congrats on becoming a partner. Took them long enough lmao! I went through the same thing.
IT'S YOU
SKIBBITY BOP MM DA DA
Awesome review as usual Clint! That first ever Macintosh Desktop - whew! Anyway, doing back viewing of classic LGR videos! Looking forward to the next one! More power and God bless from the Philippines!
My Father bought me this 128K Mac in 1984 for $2495, about $2700 with tax... It was state of the art, in my mind... I burned up MacPaint, drawing 100s of little pictures, and even making a little bit of money with it... A VERY little bit... Then I started getting all the INSERT THIS DISK, then THAT DISK, then THIS DISK messages, back and forth, swapping disks all the time, 8 consecutive swaps in a row most of the time... WHAT A NIGHTMARE... Couldn't afford an external floppy at $495... The ImageWriter dot-matrix printer was $495, and would keep anybody at the other end of the house awake... It was SUPER loud... Black & White screen, when all my PC buddies had 16 colors... Couldn't upgrade the machine, as everything was soldered to the board... The whole experience was just a complete mistake from day 1, looking back now... Absolute piece of junk from the mind of Steve Jobs, and that's the way he wanted it... Absolute piece of shit with his mind set on ripping off as many people as he could...
I never understood why so many of these older computers didn't have the OS stored in ROM. It's not like you had to worry about updating your OS from the internet.
Audiomancer ROM chips were crazy expensive, mainly. Some systems did, but many did not due to the cost and manufacturing/chip supply issues.
Well, I guess I didn't think of that, I'm used to buying a 4 gig stick of memory for 30 bucks:) Still, with how expensive Macs are/were, you would expect better than having to worry about buying an extra drive or doing all of that disk swapping. Was the ROM more or less expensive than the extra drive?
Audiomancer These early Macintosh computers were almost impossible to use without a second diskette drive to store your system files. Without that 2nd drive you might be prompted 50 or 60 times to remove the program disk and insert the system disk as the computer loaded the program.. It was a pain in the ass.
+Audiomancer Actually a good portion of the Mac OS -was- stored in ROM. The System Software disk even has extra code to patch critical bugs in the ROM regarding things like clipboard handling.
It's why emulating these things is such a pain despite Apple literally giving away old System disks on a dark corner of their website. They're useless without the ROM chip dumps. It's also why there were practically no (unauthorized) classic Mac clones, and why most emulators don't bother trying to provide compatible replacements, as the way the system software interacts with the ROM is ridiculously tightly coupled.
+Audiomancer Actually a good portion of the Mac OS -was- stored in ROM. The System Software disk even has extra code to patch critical bugs in the ROM regarding things like clipboard handling.
It's why emulating these things is such a pain despite Apple literally giving away old System disks on a dark corner of their website. They're useless without the ROM chip dumps. It's also why there were practically no (unauthorized) classic Mac clones, and why most emulators don't bother trying to provide compatible replacements, as the way the system software interacts with the ROM is ridiculously tightly coupled.
'Taking cues from the Xerox Star' is very generous. LOL.
It took cues from the Xerox Star and improved it. The Xerox Mouse was clunky to use, It didn't let you have windows under windows and was overly expensive.
My Mac take:
In the late 80's there were online dial-up services like CompuServe and GEnie. They had chat rooms.
These were the balls pre internet. People wrote little programs to.automate their chat to run trivia games.
I had an Amiga 500 which was uber powerful at the time. It had no chat programs.
I used my Amiga 500 with an emulator (yes pre-1990's had emulators crazy) to install the Mac 128Ks OS, which had chat trivia games, on my Amiga so I could run a trivia game. On GEnie.
It was awesome. When I wasn't playing Gemstone.
I just found your channel, and your content is great! I'm gonna be subscribed until the end of time itself :)
As a young kid, had a IBM 286 upstairs (my parents'), and a 1987 b/w Mac downstairs (my grandma's). King's Quest upstairs, Crystal Quest downstairs. Parents wouldn't get me a Nintendo until the 90s, but was spoiled nonetheless.
Good thing i found this review, i couldn't figure out how to power on and use my newly purchased Macintosh. Feels good to finally be upgrading from a Commodore PET to this. I can actually play games on this thing!
I have to say, not one episode of your show has been anything but awesome and I'm pretty damn sure you're the best (and easily the most overlooked) reviewer on CZcams. I also loved that right when I was thinking "hey, Evil Dead montage!" you totally threw in the "Groovy." Damn you make good stuff, keep it up!
Great review. I remember growing up with Macs of some kind (much later models I think...), and they were a lot of fun.
Lazy Game Reviews --- Your reviews are very thorough while keeping a delicate balance of entertainment. Thank you!
I literally laughed out loud seeing that URL at the end. You've come a long way, LGR!
6 years later and this is still an amazingly humorous video to watch. Those darn hipsters, ruining everything...
It’s been a few years since this video was posted, but it sure was a lovely trip down memory lane… Clint hasn’t aged a day 😁
@SteveBenway It's so worth it grab one at a nice price! For collectors it's one of those very respectable machines to own. It's just that it will likely sit there looking pretty and little else, but hey. That's fine with me.
@TheAtariJunkie Thanks. It's the little details that count!
6:00
Frankly not a bad drawing..
The only thing that's really changed about your channel over the years is the quality, which has improved substantially. Other than that, the theme of your channel has remained pretty consistent. It's pretty difficult to find channels nowadays like this one.
Wow! I owned an SE30 way back when. Can't believe how far along with come. Thanks for sharing.
You are so entertaining. Thanx
for another great video
All hail the great Clint. I bow to you witg your superior computer knowledge^^
Love the reviews! Only thing is, i wish you would do more game reviews(not so much computers). Still awesome.
We used to use those back in the 90s when I was in high school to do very basic programming. This brings back memories
Thanks for this video. Great job!!!
Your reviews are clear. I like it.
Love that Global Communication track throughout the video
I had as my first computer the first Macintosh the 128k Mac. Back then your choices were to use the command line interface of IBM compatibles and an amber or green single color command line with dos prompt or this new Mac with the new graphical user interface in black and white, wow it was so awe inspiring! My Mac came with keyboard, mouse, and later an Imagewriter II dot matrix printer. With this machine, you could type a letter (to be placed in an envelope and mailed at the post office), and wait for a few minutes while the Imagewriter screeched out one line at a time with a back and forth of the print head. You literally sent your print job, then went for a cup of coffee while it printed. Boy did this thing beat using a typewriter! Imagine not having to worry about typos and having to use "white out" to correct the errors. I later upgraded my Mac to a "better than" Mac Plus equivalent with a third party "daughter card" called the MacRescue. This souped up board had to be manually soldered, pin by pin to the original Mac 128k logic board by attaching the upgrade board directly to the Motorola 68000 processors' socket. It had to be done by an electronics shop with the proper heat controlled soldering stations. After the upgrade was installed I now had double the storage capacity as the upgrade provided upgraded ROM's and an 800k floppy disk in place of the original 400k floppy drive, it also provided the new SCSI interface that would allow the attachment of all kinds of other peripherals. I later obtained an external 800k floppy to quadruple my storage and did I ever need it as those game manufacturers kept making the games so large that I'd have to do floppy swaps during game-play. The other great innovation of this particular upgrade board was the addition of SIMM sockets allowing for RAM expansion. My original Mac had 128K of soldered RAM, now I could add up to a whopping 6 Megabytes with one Megabyte SIMM's!! While the Mac OS version 6.08 allowed for only use of 4 megabytes, the other two megabytes of RAM could be used as a RAM disk onto which the operating system could be transferred so that it performed at the speed of RAM rather than at the limited speed of the floppy disk drives. So hot! Imagine screaming along at a fast 7Mhz. Later expansions included a SCSI single speed CDROM (no burning capability) for loading the ever increasing game sizes, two external SCSI hard disk drives (20 Mbytes and 40 Mbytes), as well as a scanner head that was put in place of the Imagewriters print ribbon head and which could scan one line at a time to produce an 8 greyscale image fed through the printers rollers. High technology, high tech indeed! LGR and the 8 Bit Guy have inspired me to restore my venerable first computer, which somehow has survived an arson fire, and these many years since 1984. The flyback transformer needs to be resoldered to the analog board and there may be a few other component failures, but I'll upload my results at some point.
Wow I just noticed that you have Global Communication as the music bed for this video. Great taste in music!
You did quite nicely on this one Clint with what the prices are like now. Still I know as a fellow lover of old machines you likely never would. That SCSI upgrade card is likely worth a small fortune all on its own. I totally want that for mine.
love the videos, watched them all!
Great video! I recommend any that wants to play around with classic all in one Macs look for the SE, or SE30. They probably have a hard drive, can take modern floppy drives (1.4 meg), and ADB mice and keyboards are easy to find.
Your videos today have far bigger production value but this intro theme is so frakin awesome and nostalgic :-D
Oh Crystal quest! My uncle had that on his LC2 back in the day. Loved that game as a kid :)
@phreakindee I've been reading "West of Eden" which was published in 1989 and chronicles the inner workings of Apple up to that point. I was in elementary school at that time in history so the only computer mentioned in the book that I've actually used is the Apple II. Videos like yours help me get a visual on the other computers written about in the book. So thanks again.
I feel in love a similar Macintosh (probably a Classic) in 1991 when I was in Kindergarten. I loved computer lab time more than anything. Then in 4th grade I went to newly built school with brand new Windows computers and never looked back lol
Awsome, as always.
You're absolutely right on the disk swapping. A friend of mine got one of these in 1984 and I could barely stand to use it, even with MacWrite and MacPaint. Macs in general weren't very useful or popular until the LaserWriter came out. Then they started the Desktop Publishing boom and became infinitely more useful. But the 128K Mac was more of a technology demonstrator than a computer that you could do useful work on. Incidentally, the original Mac printer was a dot matrix unit that accurately reproduced what was on screen, including fonts and graphics, but at terribly slow speed and with terrible resolution.
It's insane that their low-level computers are still being sold for $999 after all these years.
This was my first ever encounter with a computer (sometimes brought home from work by my dad). I was 6 years old and instantly loved it. I played Dark Castle, Pyramid of Ra, Shuffle Puck, and Shadow gate from what I can remember. I still think its amazing how beautifull they made Dark Castle look, even though it was black and white on a tiny screen. It was a scary game for a six year old though, and pretty hard :) good times good times
Lol, love it as usual, great review, love the comedy input too :o)
I ran across a 128k a few years ago at a thrift store for 20 dollars, but didn't bother to pick it up. I didn't realize that I was a collector of old computers even though I had accumulated a ton of them. I dismissed it as "Junk". I kick myself now about it! Great review man!
I remember that the very first computer i ever used was one of these but it wasn't this model.
It was a Mac LC 1 model that had a black and white monitor but also had its own hard drive.
I remember playing games like "Dark Castle", "Glider", "Glypha", "Hangman" and "Continuum" on it almost everyday.
A couple of years later, my father bought a Mac LC 2 which had a color monitor and an external CD drive. I used it to play games such as "Thinking Things 2", "Maelstrom", "Bolo", "Widget's Workshop", "Lemmings", "Spectre", "The Incredible Machine", "Marathon" and "Marathon 2: Durandal".
Man...those sure were some fun times. I wish i could go back to the past so that i could live them again.
My Grandpa had about 5 or 6 macs sitting on a shelf in the basement of the house. Once my grandparents moved out he got rid of half of them and the other half were given to his friends (I think). We still have two left. A mac plus 1mb and a Color Classic (Not exactly sure if we still have the Color Classic to be honest).
Wonderful review. I'm hoping to acquire one someday as display piece for its historical value. :)
like the camera quality in the intro
Loved my first Macintosh and now have a Quadra 605 which is my vintage Mac but still looking to collect more.
Oh yes,the computer that got Steve Jobs fired.
Just FYI, the original mac had full 8-bit, 22Khz sound reproduction. It just took software a while to use it.
4:13 "groovy"
goddammit you're awesome
I played so many shareware games on a MacPlus, you'd be surprised how late you could still dial into AOL on that thing. I'd love to see more B&W Mac game reviews.
Those prices make me so jealous!! That setup would probably go for triple the price at least now a days
the one thing i absolutely do not miss from my elementary school days
Woah, 7 years almost :)
Ooh dropping acid and then using an ancient Macintosh. Thanks for the suggestion!
This completely makes me want to eat cheese!
Thanks for posting Clint!!
Epic review... we had this computer in my Elementary School back in the day and the only thing that we were allowed to even use it for was word documentation... bleh, if they let us play games then on it... would have been nice. Thanks for bringing what I really did miss out on sir. = )
I used a Macintosh Classic II with Glider (this game's name was extremly hard to find), a tetris clone, a golf game and others as a 5-6 year old kid. I have lots of great memories about it (also it was in about 2003)
Ahh, Crystal Quest, so many hours of joy, the later versions have a rather …”unique” sound when you exit the gate at the end of each level… ;)
Thanks for the memory!
(Turns into typical mac user) - Curse you Steve Jobbs!
I like this system, in some respects it was very impressive for its time, great review as well, it's always cool to wake up and see a new vid from you in my subscriptions box.
We need a 2021 version of that review! 🙏
great review!!!!!!!
i remember using those at 2:12 in my elementary school. our teacher got the oregon trail on it and we played it every day after our work. i wish i had one of those
This was the first video I watched on this channel.
Love the Evil Dead II reference in there lol
Good review mate. You were stop on about the 128k, its great as a talking point but not a lot else. A Plus, SE, Classic, Classic 2 they are almost the same machines but can do a hell off a lot more (Ie they have HD's). Macintosh garden is a great site, it was a life saver when I was looking for games for my gen 1 I Mac
@6:08 I didn't know LGR was a AVGN cosplayer in his younger days!
The only thing I remember from having a couple of these in the classroom in elementary school was playing an air hockey game.
My mom had one of these brand new with the printer. We had it all the way up until the year 2000, only because my teenage self begged my parents for an iBook g3 in Tangerine. I remember writing every book report, essays, and many other assignments on this old girl.
I can't seem to find your computer / console review playlist :/ There my favorite reviews :) and of course I love your other stuff :)
It's listed right on my main channel page! czcams.com/play/PLFDCFCDFCF7E7ACDD.html
despite the small screen, i had typesetting coworkers who actually used Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Pagemaker on a Mac Plus. I did the same on an SE/30 for a magazine. Large screens were rare in those days and we just got used to it.
our school used to have like 20 of these piled up in storage for a bunch of years. it's a shame they eventually just trashed them. wouldve been a small gold mine.
Holy CRAP. BANZAI! I remember that came from 7th grade. Our computer lab had like 20 brand spanking new Macintosh computers and in order to help supplement the costs, they would allow students to pay money after school for all you can eat gaming, and the game to play.....was Banzai.
today we still use command line in linux and even online with building a web site and such.
the early all in one macs had a flaw where the analog board power supplies would fail and would need to be replaced.
6:12. Best moment in all of LGR history.
your chair looks so comfy. I want it.
Great coverage and very to-the-point. My only problem was(okay, is, I still have one) the disk swapping. Mine is unexpanded, no SCSI interface... yet!
Did you end up getting a SCSI interface?
@@walktroughman1952 No, never did get that SCSI interface. I have another of these machines but no real plans to upgrade it yet, this one needs to be troubleshot and I need a keyboard for it. 11 years! Yeah it has been a while.
i used that computer in high school. they replace all of them in the computer lab with the new i mac when it came out. i remember i use to play the first Sim City on that one when i was board. and loading the 2 floppy drives. Now students carry a USB flash drive.
even thogh you can get theses on ebay amazon and stuff its still amazing that you have all these old and new cmputers
I remember the first proper computer in our house was a mac classic. We didn't own it (mum had borrowed it from work) but it looked almost identical. It wasn't the same model though, because I don't recall needing to do constant disk swaps, and in fact, I'm fairly sure it had a hard drive, and that I hardly ever put a disk in the thing. Not too much after that, we ended up with a 286 instead, which we actually did own. Also some atari 800's...
KuraIthys the Classic could have a hard disk, plus it had a 1.44MB floppy drive rather than a 400k drive that the original Macintosh came with
If you go to the wayback machine you can see the root URL from the end of the video as it looked in Feb 2011 (the closest date I could find to when this video was published).
I thought it would be is family's site - like his last name is Basinger, and LGR was his personal site on that domain. Instead its just a few links to some of his stuff.
Mmm... LGR Classic... This is my lullaby for today.
That TShirt is still awesome in 2019!
Your shirt at the end reminds us all that your speaking from a DOS fan boy's point of view! :D
I just subscribed to you because you seem really cool.
CRYSTAL QUEST!! all my childhood!!
(well, nearly)
I re watched this video after possibly a decade. Still relevant.
I am a Mac lover, but I find it hard to believe that the very first of the breed launched in 1984 didn't even come with color graphics. A frikkin Commodore Vic 20 even had color graphics. And the Amiga which was announced just a year later would comfortably lay it to waste, with color graphics, better sound and a pre-emptive multitasking GUI from the outset.
but the plus was that it had a screen built in and the GUI of course
Maybe it has something to do with conserving memory. Believe it or not, color actually does take memory. That's why if you chose a higher color setting in a 90s-era Windows operating system (95 or 98), you may have a lower screen resolution to conserve memory.
Sorry for the 2-years later reply... but just look at the Macintosh II, that thing basically cost twice as much as a Mac Plus because it had more RAM, mandatory hard drive, a faster processor, and a 8-bit graphic card + the cost of the RGB monitor. The GUI needs a lot of power.
They could have done a colour Mac from 1984 but it would have cost a fortune, and they would have sold very very few.
It was meant to be a business machine, the Amiga was still mostly made out of discrete breadboards when the Mac was already on the market, and essentially it was a shrunken Lisa; it even uses the same screen mode from the monitor's point of view, just running a slower pixel clock to give a reduced horizontal resolution, and I think it might in fact format its discs the exact same way even though they're a different size.
What it was competing against wasn't the multimedia dazzlement of the Amiga (which was pretty much designed as a games console that happened to have a keyboard and floppy drive bolted on, a mouse that could plug into one of the joyports, and discs that included a GUI), but the IBM PC and all the endless CPM clones that were around at the time - all with monochrome monitors, mostly green or amber on black, mostly textmode only, or using a somewhat wonky 640x200 (or cruder 320x200) graphics resolution, if indeed not 512x256 or 512x192 - as well as being an upgrade from their own Apple II (the best it could muster, on a monochrome display, being 560x192) and the Atari 8-bits (384x192 typical max). And depending who you believe it was also either partly aimed at taking the fight to the Atari ST, or the ST was intended to take the fight to the Mac, with its top screen mode also being a high-rez progressive monochrome on a special monitor... though Tramiel's boys somewhat got the jump on Apple by using a 72hz scan and 640x400 resolution that trounced not only the Mac in both dimensions but also the Lisa on sheer pixel count.
IE colour wasn't seen as too important for business uses at the time; they were going after execs who wanted a "serious" computer to do word processing and spreadsheets and stuff on, but didn't have the desk space, the technical mindset or the sheer time and spare effort needed to install and then get to grips with a more common micro of the kind that existed before then. So, high rez mono display (gives finer detail but doesn't use any more memory than e.g. the 256x192 16-colour of an MSX, and basically the same as an NES would if its 256x224 was an 8-colour bitmap; colours other than black or white not really being too important for the uses to which it would be put), mostly black on white to make it seem more like paper instead of a machine, with a friendly and easy to use mouse-driven GUI (they didn't even include any cursors on the keyboard at first, or more than one control/alt type key, to encourage near-exclusive use of the mouse for everything other than actual text entry, and the single button made it universal for left and right handers), in as compact a box as they could manage to mean it could fit on even the smallest and most cluttered desk without monopolising it (whilst I rag on the screen rez, it was a good fit for the actual tube size; with just a minimal amount of border it equated to a true 72dpi, meaning font pixel height correlated directly to its point size, and WYSIWYG stuff was a breeze to program - and from typical desktop usage distance, with the computer pushed towards the back instead of the front of the desk, and the user not craning forwards, unlike the more modern close-range setup, 72dpi actually seems fairly refined even though it looks terrible if you *print* at that size).
It was extremely well designed for the market they intended to capture... it's just a pity they didn't put a double sided drive and more memory on the motherboard from day one. Or indeed looked for slightly larger tubes of the same depth, so the box would be the same width as the keyboard and, together with the greater RAM provision, could then have supported a higher basic resolution... at least 512x384, if not 576x400, or indeed 640x400, even 640x480. But enough people bought it even so. After all, 512 is still *just* enough to provide 80-column text (at a sparing but still readable 6 pixels per column, as used on various other 80s machines) plus a scrollbar and window border...
These were business machines so there was no reason for color, just like the ibm line
lmao that MS-DOS shirt is bodacious and gnarly at the same time!
3:58 you should try running system seven. the requirements are two megabytes and a scsi hard drive.
I always loved the updated version of Banzai for the Apple IIe, "Airborne!"