Macintosh II: The Mac's Major 80s Evolution
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- čas přidán 2. 06. 2024
- The initial vision for Apple's Macintosh platform was to make computers accessible for the masses. But in order to grow, Apple needed to get businesses to want to use the Mac...and as such, the platform needed to evolve.
Sources:
NuBus specification sheet: web.archive.org/web/201909262...
NuBus IEEE abstract: web.mit.edu/6.033/2005/wwwdocs...
"National Semiconductor Steps Into Add-On Mart With Card," InfoWorld, June 29, 1987.
"ROM Upgrade to Fix Bug in Mac II Bus," InfoWorld, October 26, 1987.
"For the Best of Us...", MacUser, April 1987.
"The New Macs, " Computer Chronicles, 1987: archive.org/details/TheNewMa1987
Macintosh SE photo: tinkerdifferent.com/threads/r...
"After the Split at Apple's Core," InfoWorld, September 30, 1985.
"3-D Program for Mac II Offers Color Animation," InfoWorld, July 27, 1987.
"Mac to receive Autocad version," Computerworld, May 16, 1988.
"Universities Say Mac II Nears Workstation Ideal," InfoWorld, March 16, 1987.
"Macintosh IIx Moves Ahead In Apple's Orderly Evolution," InfoWorld, February 6, 1989.
Mac IIfx photo: / looking_to_buy_mac_iif...
"The Mac IIfx: Fast Times at Apple Computer," MacUser, May 1990.
IIfx motherboard photo: imgur.com/gallery/lf6RWwJ
"Power At a Price," Macworld, May 1990.
"Apple's Special fx," Byte Magazine, April 1990.
"Mac Ripens," Computerworld, March 2, 1987.
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In 1989, I was hired at Truevision. Our team of three people was assigned to write a paintbox system for Truevision's AT Vista video card. The AT Vista was made for PCs, but TV also developed a NuBus card for the new MacII. All three of us had a Compaq PC for development, but we also each had a MacII on our desks with a NuVista card. Because of that card, our Macs supported up to 1280x1024x32 bit color. The cards also supported still image video capture. The Macs had a big Sony CRT that would display any resolution you could throw at it. Having a 16 Million color Mac before anyone else was -glorious- and it felt (and was) -way- ahead of it's time. Because of the cost of video memory, the NuVista cost more than the MacII itself. There was only one Mac developer at Truevision doing all the groundbreaking work, and he was a genius of a programmer that bled six colors like no other. Apple also deserves credit for building in 32-bit color support way before they sold cards that could display it.
Truevision was an industry darling at the time. One day, some guys from a small company called Adobe showed up to show us a new Mac image editor they wrote called Photoshop. Its features made what we were building seem a bit behind in many ways. Adobe offered the opportunity for Truevision to buy Photoshop outright, but management was PC blind and the head of engineering turned them down. Soon after, Truevision was bought out by RasterOps, which in turn was bought out by Avid. Avid got its start as a small company that based its first products on the AT Vista. All that's remembered of Truevision today is the .TGA file format. Some guys from Kodak visited us once to see if we were interested collaborating on a device they were creating called a "digital camera"(!!). They were turned down too. A story for another time.
Our paint package was really cool, written in assembly on the Vista's Motorola video controller, but because Truevision was an OEM, it's customers got angry about us competing with them and the project was killed and buried. Nascent plans to port it to the Mac were also dead, dead, dead. Interestingly, our paint app was called "Fresco", a name the Adobe revived in 2019 for their iPad paint program.
History is so cool.
I worked at a small newspaper in 1990-91, while in high school. We first got a Mac Classic, then an original Mac II. We had to go to a local computer store to print advertising for cutting and pasting as we couldn't swing the cost of a LaserWriter. When I went to college that fall of 1991 to University of Oklahoma, the ad department at the college daily newspaper had a row of Mac IIfx machines. I couldn't comprehend how one place could have so much power!
Laser printers were a fortune back then, especially for the MAC. They relied on postscript for printing too. It cost a lot of money to add postscript to a printer.
I remember you could buy a Panasonic or other "off-brand" laser printer for the PC for a couple grand. But an Apple compatible laser printer, usually an Apple printer, was a lot more.
But, to be fair to Apple, postscript printing on the MAC was a hell of a lot better than what PC print engines could do. It's faster and I believe it uses less RAM and frees up the computer.
Hey fellow Sooner! Class of ‘16 here!
It always amazes me how technology can exist in silos. Expendable income here, not there, etc. Big city, small village. It's the economic game of who has money, and when, who can sign; influence, grants, "priorities."
@@rossimarti The universities have all this stuff because they are eating our children. Things were bad then and they way worse now. At least as a gen-Xer, I could discharge my student had I needed to do that.
It's not about expendable income, it's about student loans. The top 1000 people at each college should be arrested and sent to prison for the rest of their lives without trial. If it were landlords doing this to our children, the pitchforks (and AKs) would be coming out.
@@tarstarkusz I respect your comments, and of course a large amount of money comes from tuition that only increases while I attended university. Then, there’s how it’s allocated to salaries, wages, and so forth. One could argue that injustice is “baked in” to the system. Thanks for sharing lot, and I apologize (to all) for veering off-topic a little. Money is part of every product.
Around 1991 I began using a IIfx (my colleague had a II), and I decided that "IIfx" stood for "too fucking expensive". It was a requirement, though, as I used that machine to put together the first full-colour gloss magazine made entirely on desktop computers in Canada, in February 1992. No, you haven't heard of it, but it was called At Your Leisure, and the effort of putting it together almost killed me.
I worked on the same project back then 🤔
Whoa this is like a story of the monkey’s paw? My friend down the street had one for home and student use, and naturally had none of that pain you had. But his monkey’s paw was the family fortune being spent up on various things by the early 1990s.
Which software did you use?
In 1989, my dad bought a IIci which I thought was fine at the time. It was a step up from the B/W all-in-one Mac we had. I only realized much much later that at the time he'd purchased the most powerful Mac that Apple offered - with an absurd price tag. I had no idea what was sitting in my house for years.
The Mac II was a mind blowing computer when my teacher got it in 1989, because it was used for color paint programs and particularly color printing. You should do a review on the Apple ImageWriter II, the color dot matrix printer that our school used it heavily to print their pictures every week in computer class!
Colin, the was a nice retrospective of the Macintosh II. I owned the SE because that was just easier to afford at the time. And the portability was a real plus in my case.
Looking back, I'm amazed we could actually get any work done on these. All of the Macs were slow and the screens were relatively small. And an accompanying printer and/or scanner in the early days made for an extremely pricey system indeed.
But there was initially no Pagemaker for the PC. Most of the software needed for publishing (desktop or otherwise) started on the Mac. There were growing pains but it really was the only game in town.
Jobs is an enigma wrapped in a riddle. He could be the biggest mover of technology in the larger view but a real impediment regarding necessary incremental stuff. He was a Big Thinker but not every bit of innovation that was needed required Big Thinking. Sometimes you just needed an extra port. Or a mouse...that wasn't round.
I can remember scrolling for what seemed like minutes (screen redraws), right scroll arrow, (screen redraws), on and on. I (maybe, 'we') had more patience then.
That last paragraph is a good analysis of Jobs. He was incredible in seeing the future (GUIs replacing CLIs, the computer eventually being just another device, etc.) Problem was he never understood that the original Macintosh was always going to be limiting for some people, and that there was a place for more powerful options. (Some of it was also just kind of petty: he didn't like function keys, so none of the NeXT computers ever had them.)
I love the Apple Extended II Keyboard so much I have one sitting on my desk and use it every day as a software developer. Absolute tank of a keyboard, still holding up strong.
Same here. So tough. I whitened mine with peroxide when I got it then it almost immediately yellowed again. Love it though.
Agreed, I'm using one right now and have a small collection of them. The one I'm on I replaced the damped whites with NOS Yellow Alps. It's lovely.
Completely agree with your assessment. Fortunately, I pulled a few Extended keyboards out of dumpsters years ago and still use them with G3s and G4s, they're so incredibly comfortable to use.
I like them as well, but I find that I sometimes type faster than the keyboard can register those close successive strokes.
1:30 I still have the original 5 1/4 inch Quantum 40MB drive. I later moved it to its own case, at the time I converted the drive tray to hold two 3 1/2 inch drives sitting side-by-side, directly behind the floppy drives. 4:43 The lower keyboard shown happens to be the 2nd edition of the Extended Keyboard. The original (which I own) only had a single curve from front to back, meaning the top/back edge was higher off the tabletop. 9:15 Apple sold me a drive/ROM upgrade kit for the II that essentially made it into a IIx. I kept the 800k, so now this II sports 2 drives: the 1440 and the original 800. This II is still my flagship, has a ton of software and games on it.
I had the pleasure of working on a tricked out Mac II fx back in 1990. It had a 21" color monitor, lots of RAM, a, Laserwriter, and a huge HD. I spent my teen summer days writing games in Macromedia Director, designing characters in Photoshop, and just being all in awe of such computing power.
Coming from the Commodore Amiga world, this system was at a different level. It felt refined, professional, totally out of my league, and something that belonged in a Hollywood studio.
Macromedia Director - I loved that software. You felt like you could make anything with it. Most of my experience with the software was on the PC, but still, those were happy days.
@@ricksarvas6563 The great irony is that Macs and Mac only software were used to make many PC exclusive products which led to the false impression that Macs were redundant.
The Mac II is my favorite retro mac , regret to this day in getting ride of both of mine. At the time the 60020 was a great upgrade and playing SimCity or Warcraft of them was better experience than a pc at the time. Got a 286 PC board for mine and a 030 cpu upgrade. With upgrades over the years I was able to daily drive this computer all the way to 1997 and it still useful for most tasks until 2003 or so , were there was no more upgrades and the internet finally left it in the dust.
My favorite 030 Mac, and what I believe is the best 030 Mac is a IICI. 8 simm slots. A PDS slot. 6 or so NUBUS slots. I had a IICI with a PPC 601 jammed into the PDS slot (I forget the clock speed) and a 6100 at the same time and for a lot of stuff, the II was faster.
IMHO, I just think the IICI is by far the best 030 machine. It's a perfect combination of features in a nice attractive package.
Warcraft is playable on a 16mhz 68020?! My 33 MHz 68030 vintage PowerBook 180c struggles to play games it really should have no issue with, like Another World or Syndicate. It’s pretty disappointing.
@@kirishima638 Warcraft, yes... world of Warcraft, no.
@@gaziltapig Yeah I meant the first one.
@@kirishima638 The problem with laptops is they do all kinds of stuff to slow laptops down. Though, to be frank, I didn't think it would be possible for a game to run well on a II with a 16mhz 020 but not play well on a 33mhz 030, unless it is relying on chips not in the 030 machine, like an FPU
Excellent video as always. I was just floored with the prices that these Macs sold for back in the late '80s. Being an Amiga guy I was used to being able to buy a nice powerful machine for $1000 or $2,000 - seeing some of these Macs come out for $6,000 to $8,000 for some of them just floored me.
How we Amiga guys laughed. It was just so unbelievable that people would buy inferior machines like PCs and Macs.
@@KarlHamilton What is even funnier is when I hear how expensive the Amiga was to upgrade lol compared to a Mac lololololol
@@KarlHamilton And where is Amiga now? That's right. You may have laughed then, but he who laughs last laughs hardest. RIP Amiga😆
@@pauldavis5665 still laughing at Mac users on a daily basis.
I worked for Apple in early 1990s and used to repair the dry solder joints alot on the first Macintosh. The Mac II kept us busy too :)
Nice Retrospective! A minor addendum for those who may wish to use one of these: Apple *DID* in fact release an upgrade kit for the II, to allow for 1.44mb floppy drives. The kit - Apple FDHD Macintosh II Upgrade Kit (part number M0244), included a 1.44mb SuperDrive, a replacement for the IWM chip (Integrated Woz Machine, which was the floppy controller for the 800k drives) to the SWIM (Sander-Wozniak Integrated Machine) chip, AS WELL AS - Four new ROM chips, to support the SWIM, and also fix a few other lurking ROM bugs. Not only can you get a Macintosh II functional with a 1.44mb drive (I have one sitting downstairs now!), but you can also get the RAM up to either 65mb or 128mb - the total may depend on mainboard revisions - Sadly, this does require special RAM SIMMS that have onboard PAL logic - when the II was designed, there were no 30 pin SIMMS above 1mb in size, and there was also no standard for what larger sized SIMMS would look like. Apple guessed at it, and the industry went a different direction... Suffice to say, finding those PAL 30 pin SIMMS is ... difficult, and I have not found any so cannot test the limitations. While those upgrade kits are VERY hard to find, you can find people who can burn the ROM chips for you, and the SWIM chip is utilized in the IIx as well - I happened to find a ruined IIx board (battery leak destroyed the board), and so salvaged it and the 1.44mb floppy drive from it. Anyways, Thanks for the video! the II is one of my favorite machines - my first computer was an LC, which was a "dumbed down" cheap clone of the II, so I was always jealous of the II owners out there - them and their fancy-pants 640x480 graphics! *shakes fist*
Your videos are simply fantastic! I really appreciate your camerawork and the high quality footage.
The Mac IIfx was my first computer I had at the age of 8 including a custom 15“ crt and a Laser Writer 320. My mom is a graphics designer.
What year was that?
@@thegeforce6625 around 1992. Was a used machine but still cost a load of money.
@@the_tux goddamn, luckiest kid in the block! What a beast for the day.
@@thegeforce6625 well I just fiddled around with Photoshop 3 and Adobe Dimensions. Later I managed to crack PlayerPro by finding a hardcoded test serial number using HexEdit at the age of around 10. Never the less this was my mom’s machine because she worked as a freelancer from home. My grandpa also payed part of it because she couldn’t afford it all by herself. The machine hat a custom 17” color screen and a Laser Writer 320. Later we bought an external cd rom drive. The machine was sold 5 years later and I got my own power Mac G3 with a Zip Drive. Flashed a Voodoo 3 3000 card to use it in my Mac and played Unreal 1 on it. Started with system 7.5.3 until Mac OS 9.
@@the_tuxHoly guacamole. Yeah at least it was used! And you had to share it with parents! Now I don’t feel so mad at you haha
I still think the SE/30 and the IIci were the best looking Macs from that era. Eventually the LC575 and LC5200 would come out and those were also a great looking machines.
Agreed!… I have a couple of SE30s, but still looking for the IIci that I always wanted, but could never afford back in the day...
I'm so glad to have found this video! There are simply not enough CZcams videos showcasing the Macintosh II and its siblings/successors.
Visit "Jason's Macintosh Museum"? His channel has every (?) mac ever made, and he is so thorough that I doubt there is much anyone could add to the topic.
I had a Mac II in the late mid 80’s, RAM cost $300 a megabyte, then there was a shortage and my next pair cost $600 a megabyte. I used to do desktop publishing at the time and made about $50 an hour which was good money at the time.
Hi Colin, yet again a great and unbiased video. I really like your style of approaching the topics. Definitely worthy thumbs up.
Congrats for 300k!!
I've been catching up on your channel lately and love it, thank you for all these wonderful videos! I had a IIci, 13" monitor, extended keyboard and laser printer I got my Sr year in college, 1991. I had used a IIe until college the my roommates' IBM PC or the Macs at the lab the first few years. The IIci was a beast in 1991. I did a few upgrades over the years but that system served me well for about 6 years. I stored it at my parents house as I needed PC for work... along with my IIe, an old PET and an original IBM PC I had picked up used. All them got water damage due to a leak :( I'm left now with just a TRS-80 model 4 and a NeXT System as my only retro systems. Luckily they both still work but damn I miss the IIci and the IIe...
The Mac II could come with what is widely considered to be Apple's best keyboard ever, the Apple Extended Keyboard. A spiritual successor to the AEK would be the Matias Tactile Pro 4, from Matias.
u dont need to repeat the company name after the product if the name of the company already been sayd
@@bennaambo2716 some companies have multiple brands, such as Music Tribe, owners of Behringer.
I have the 3 (not sure what 4 changes/improves), and it's a nice keyboard. Does have a very nice, clicky feel. I'd recommend it because it has modern media keys, which the Extended Keyboard lacks.
@@drygnfyre i think some Tactile Pro 3 keyboards came with genuine simplified Apls White switches, whereas all Tactile Pro 4 keyboards use Mattias White Click, since Matias ran out of Alps switches and refuses to switch to Cherry MX because Cherry MX is boring.
@@daemonspudguy If you have both, which do you prefer from a feel standpoint?
These Macs were impressive at the time and seen some around although I was pretty deep into PCs at the time. Great content!
The Mac II is still my favorite Mac. That big, blocky, imposing case, that stunning Trinitron monitor, the coolness factor of being able to turn it on with the keyboard; it was a drool-worthy computer. This thing had soft power-on, room for tons of RAM, 640x480x24-bit color graphics and multi-channel PCM audio at a time when the typical PC was lucky to have 640k of RAM and 4-color CGA graphics. There were a couple of Mac IIs scattered throughout my public education, but students were absolutely verboten from touching them. By the time I got to lay hands on one, just before I graduated, it was pretty pokey compared to the more modern LC IIIs and LC 475s in the computer lab. But I had only recently gotten my hands on a PC capable of decent sound and 24-bit color graphics, which is something that Mac II was doing 9 years prior.
Apple Extended II is STILL one of the best keyboards I’ve ever used.
I love these early Apple computers! Thank you for making this video. Being born in 1981 I was in elementary school when these made their way into my life. Looking back, I was lucky to have ample time with these great machines. I lived in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park. My school had the original Mac all in one for the teachers in each classroom. and we had 2 labs that sported 2GS's and 2E's where we got to play Oregon Trail, Wheel of fortune , and where in the world is Carmen Sandiago for an hour every day! I remember it being the ONLY classroom that was air conditioned, so it was a real treat spending time in there. When I made it into Middle School we had Mac and PC labs BUT the icing on the cake was in the old tech wing there were still about 12 Apple Lisas kicking around and one even ran software that would transmit sound across a laser beam. This was in 1994! Keep making these amazing videos!
Your school had Lisas? You went to a rich school district.
I was born in 1982. The elementary school was all-in with Apple: PowerBooks for all teachers and overnight loaning to students, scanners and Xapshot cameras for every classroom, Grolier’s Electronic Encyclopedia on CD-ROM, a few LaserWriters, our daisy chain networks, Symantec GreatWorks, The Writing Center, KidPix…
The Mac II was the first true computer experience I had as a kid, love hearing the history! Also I just got a 2002 Pedestal iMac from my brother. booted it up and looks like it works fine, except for the Airport, it works but I think my wifi is too new because it doesn't recognize it. I'll have to look to see how I can fix that this weekend. Always enjoy your content especially your Minidisk and Apple content. Cheers!
For those interested in the Extended Keyboard, you can also get the Tactile Pro keyboard made by Matias. It has a more modernized design but still uses the same Alps key switches.
I had one of the Mac II models growing up(not sure which version/revision), and I remember being enamored with it. Spent countless hours playing Carmen San Diego, using a paint program, and writing up random stories on it. So glad you did a video on it, it was such a cool machine!
I had a Macintosh II. It only came with 1mb of memory. The thing cost $5,000 student discounted. I had to borrow another $496 to buy 1 more megabyte of RAM so that it would boot. But when it did, it was glorious. And I was the envy of the school with people coming over just to see it in person. Then they got them in the Mac labs at school so - my bad. That and the horrendous Image Writer II. That grinding sound!
Very nice! Being a PC guy, I always wondered how these slotted into the lineup, and now I know! Thanks for the great video!!
Thanks for documenting this part of computer history. It would be nice to see early Mac & Apple // GS networking user interface. The workgroup idea was considerably ahead of its time with simultaneous multi-user saved sessions, shared volumes, inexpensive daisy chain cables; and we no longer used 30 copies of the same floppies, since we had 30 Apple // GS networked on two Macs (servers) both running a late version of System 6 as best I recall.
I do have a Mac SE FDHD with the Apple IIgs software on it that you could boot the iigs from the Mac and then run the software using the Aristotle Menu System.
@@mattcintosh2 It was a neat time, and Apple with relatively powerful Macs as servers all happened before Novell Netware and Windows “roaming user” network profiles. Log in, and any Apple // GS was set up and personalized for that user. And Macs went a little step farther with At Ease(TM) for Workgroups(TM) well before Windows cared about security, firewalls. Security is always relative and Macs with At Ease(TM) or FoolProof(TM) were better off than Widows, other than a password screensaver.
@@mattcintosh2 If time serves, make a video, blog, WordPress, or share screenshots with one of the “Mac archive” websites, just to prove Apple had a relatively elegant network setup and considerations. I am sans-hardware or I would certainly make an attempt.
@@rossimarti the lab in my elementary school had the setup from probably around 1990 to 1996 with maybe a dozen iigs and a couple iie. I had my setup working around 2005 or so, I'm pretty sure the Mac works, but unsure about the iigs. Not even 100% of the details. Can't remember if it was system 6 only, or worked on system 7 too. Not sure if I had the iigs boot the menu system, or just system 6 for the apple iigs. Didn't realize how rare that is, a youtube video might get some views
I love everything about this! I grew up with a B&W mac classic that we were lucky enough to upgrade with a Mac IIcx retired from a local school. That was my first color system, and the first system we got online, 2400 baud of blazing speed! I'm jealous of your mac II, it's also spec'd just like our cx, 16mhz/8mb/1mb video!
My dad worked in a school district in California (we were only a few miles from Cupertino, actually). Apple had been getting their machines in schools for a while, and when the Mac II came out, they donated some brand new machines to some of the local school districts, most of which had no idea what to do with a "business mac". The school district let my dad take the brand new Mac II home, where it promptly became a fixture in our living room. I had previously used a TRS-80, and had used an Apple II at school, but the Mac II was like something from a different universe, and it was the machine that cemented my love for all things Apple. I must have used that thing far more than my dad or any other adult ever did until the day came when we had to give it back to the school district. Hypercard stacks and video games were vastly more interesting than my school homework, I can assure you.
Boy do I miss those days of lugging CRTs around! Fun times. Great video Colin.
Nice computer. I love your videos since here Mac was imposible for the price so they were and still are a mistery to me. So this helps for it. The retrospective touch also helps a lot to put on context.
Brilliant documentary.
That Apple ADB keyboard was one of the best computer keyboards ever made. Pour one out for the Aircraft Carrier keyboard.
It's actually possible to upgrade the drives to 1.44 meg ones, and was offered as an upgrade by apple
Did the ROM's have to be upgraded to recognize the new 1.44 meg drives?
@@marcusdamberger I haven't done it to a Mac II, but I was able to do it to a Mac SE. (a SE FDHD died, and I had a SE, so I swapped the HDD, Floppy and the ROMS, and it works fine)
always a pleasure to get back into apple's history
We only had a Mac Classic at home, even tho my dad was a Mac sales/systems engineer for a reseller. I'd drool over the higher spec machines -- sometimes he'd bring some home for testing. (Ex. Mac Portable and early PowerBooks, early PPC machines, etc)
Not sure if I ever spent any time with a Mac II. I might have seen on at either his office or my mom's on the rare occasion they'd bring me in. My mom worked for Paramount Cards and they had Macs in the graphics design dept. I definitely remember seeing an SE or SE/30 with an expansion video card and second monitor, but I think they also had some Mac II's.
Ah 1991, an age when expandable workstations were scarce and very pricey and I was scrambling to buy my first computer. Couldn't afford a IIci, read a lot about the remarkably powerful IIfx, and felt lucky to find a used IIx loaded with RAM. Even after upgrading with a DayStar 040 processor, 320MB hard drive and a somewhat decent Radius card over the following few years, that IIx was a still compromise - and an expensive one at that. It was a computer that was larger than it needed to be and just couldn't deliver the performance I thought was needed, also waiting for it to process and render was a frustrating occupational hazard.
The IIx is not remembered fondly here. I still regret not holding out for a IIci in those days.
I remember using these during my elementary school years. I surprised my teachers because I knew how to proficiently use all the computers at school. I thought that it was easy. It also helped because my parents always had a home PC in one form or another so I grew up with / around one. I didn't know much about how the internals worked until later. Looking back on this time period, it seems insane how little storage space computers that came with the computer and how small OS install sizes were.
Ahhh that extended keyboard... I knew it well 🥰
The Mac II was the first Mac I worked with. It had an internal hard drive and a 800 k floppy. We also had a Mac SE with two 1.44 K floppys. When we replaced one of the floppy drives in the SE, I was allowed to buy a rom-upgrade for the Mac II, and put the 1.44 floppy in that system. It worked great.
Great vid. Would love to hear your thoughts on the Amiga 3000 which was one of the Mac II’s main competitors in the creative industries.
The Mac II was amazing at the time. I started using PageMaker and MultiAdCreator on the machine, and loved it.
I had the joy of using both systems the one you showed at the beginning (no color) and the main one
Love You Apple Macintosh...RIP (1985-1997) :(
My IIfx came from the dealer with 1.44M and 800k floppy drives fitted so it's definitely possible to have a modern drive in at least whatever ROM revision I have.
I think there may have been some slight ribbon cable rework done to make it work, never looked too closely at it since I assumed it was a common setup.
With dual high performance graphics cards and a token ring network it's shockingly usable even for web browsing.
The IIfx is a completely different motherboard from the II, not just a faster CPU and new ROMs. The IIfx has the SWIM floppy controller by default which supports all 3 Apple floppy capacities (400k, 800k, and 1.44m). The Mac II came with the IWM floppy controller which only supports the 400k and 800k floppy capacities. You can put an 800k drive in a Mac that has the SWIM controller and it will work fine, albeit at 800k capacity. The Mac II has its IWM socketed so you can replace it with a SWIM so it can support 1.44m disks. Apple included the SWIM controller in an upgrade kit for the Mac II.
The IICI, is, in my humble opinion, the best 030 MAC you can get.
Had one of those pass by my job at a refurbishing place, by far the oldest computer i had seen there. Sadly we could not do anything other than power it on, i had to explain to my coworkers about SCSI, as they thought it was IDE. I would've maybe kept it if i could but we had a very strict rule about not being allowed anything. And it was going straight to ewaste brokering because it was "obsolete", but i would say it's a bit different than the usual Core 2 Duos on that pile. What a waste
@@Nukle0n They are really strict about that stuff. I had a coworker take a computer home with him that was scheduled to be recycled (we both worked in the IT dept). Instead of putting it into the recycle pallet (it was a lot of computers and monitors), he simply took it home. Basically he trash-picked it.
He got arrested and charged with embezzlement of the computer because it was in his control as a trusted agent of the company.
It was told to me (and I have no reason to think they were lying) that there is a paper trail of a computer. If a computer they owned turns up somewhere like a dump, the serial number goes back to them and they can get huge fines for improperly disposing of the "e-waste"
@@tarstarkuszWow, I’d like to be in his shoes and try that again today. You could make a high profile fight about it and get a ton of public support.
This period of time & these machines are under-appreciated for their influence. Some focus solely on the hardware and are challenged to understand why they were so influential, instead of focusing on the people and industries that saw the possibility the hardware and OS offered. These machines had a knack of making people think about "possibility," and were a catalyst for a huge change in the way industry viewed computers in the creative and scientific workplace.
Still amazed to see the Mac II footprint, gives the impression of a cleanly designed power-house system that ran excellent fine-tuned elegant software. The insane price tags placed it on a pedestal status for mere mortals.
Oh, the Apple Extended Keyboard! Legendary.
Interesting fact, that NuBUS is open standard, thank you!
I just got my hands on an old case for one of these. I'm hoping to rebuild it into a working machine someday
So, funny thing about the Mac II and the 800k floppies. Natively, you couldn't use the full capacity of the drives due to the ROMs as mentioned in the video - they were limited to the 400k floppies. However, back in the day, I purchased what at the time was an older, used Mac II for very little money. In this Mac II (my favorite Mac of all time, BTW), I added a pair of Radius Rocket cards that I picked up used for ~$100 each in the local WantAd, plus a 800k drive from a more recent dead Mac that I also had. Each if these cards had an upgraded ROM that would support 800k floppies - but only if you were running in the Radius Rocket desktop instance. It was clunky, but it worked.
The II usually had either a 3.5" Sony SRD series hard drive (generally 40MB, also common in the SE) or a 5.25" Quantum drive (40MB+). The Sony drives were notorious for developing stiction and most were replaced under warranty decades ago, but there may still be some of the Quantum drives going.
There were two major upgrades for these (outside of logic board swaps or third-party CPU accelerators): the 68851 MMU upgrade (for virtual memory usage, ideal for A/UX) and the FDHD Upgrade. You could also replace the original 68881 FPU with a 68882 for improved performance.
I LOVE these machines. The Macintosh II is what got me into collecting vintage Macs a few years ago. Having only a CoCo2 at the time, my uncle would bring his Mac II home from work over the weekends, and my young mind was BLOWN. I was hunting a IIfx and found a II. When I opened it up, it had been upgraded to the IIfx! I now have two IIfx machines and one II among my collection. With the SCSI2SD and the Floppy Emu, I have a lot of fun with them. If I could only get my Ethernet card to work... still trying to figure that one out. Why? Well, why not? ;)
Since the 68020 has no PMMU (paged memory management unit), the Mac II can't use virtual memory, adding to the Mac II's disadvantages. Also, it can't run any Mac OSes past System 7.5 or 7.6, due to this same limitation.
7.5.5 because the Mac II ROM isn't fully 32bit.
There was a separate Apple-custom MMU chip--I think it was called the “HMMU”. Not as powerful as a 68851, but it could do some page remapping.
I bought one of these when I went to grad school fall of ‘87. Favorite computer I ever has. Lots of hours of Strategic Conquest too. Think was $5,500 when I started and got $3,250 for it when I graduated.
I had a IIvx my mother bought from the good guys in high school. It had a 💿 for software installation. I believe this was 1997.
Nice Collin 😃
My school had an Apple Extended Keyboard II just hanging around in one of their cabinets. I wanted to take it home, but was too shy to ask... only to find out they'd thrown it out about a week later. Ouch.
When I had an LCIII in the mid-1990s I found one in a thrift shop. That was a special find!
Man, that sucks 😭
We were still rocking the original Apple Macintosh in 2004. At my elementary school let's just say we were just a wee bit underfunded.
From a quick google search this machine and the Amiga 500 were released about the same time. This is a great looking machine - it would look great on a desktop today. Never owned one, but could only have dreamt about it back in the day. But geez, for the price my Amiga 500 "games machine" sure delivered in terms of price to performance - particularly when compared to this machine.
The Amiga benefited from a set of hardware coprocessors for graphics, sound, scrolling, sprites etc. It was a better machine in many ways. That Mac had to do everything in software.
Of course that same hardware would doom the Amiga but anchoring it in place; developers had to make software with the 1000/500 as a baseline so could not take advantage of newer models without losing customers.
It’s probably been said in thw commenta already. The Mac II could be upgraded to the HD 1.44 drives but required a flashed ROM and an upgraded SWIM chip.
Additionally, another base hardware upgrade replaced the 2 soldered in batteries with a daughtercard that held 2 of those classic mac internal batteries.
Other upgrades included a CPU swap with a 68030 with 68882 FPU and an upgraded PMMU.
The Mac II was, at the time, my favourite Mac. It wad built like a bloody tank!
Had such a machine for a while in the 90’s sad that I do not have it anymore…
My brother in law had this bad boy tricked out with an 68040 processor, 24 bit color output, 2x 4 GB harddisks, 100Mb/s Ethernet and 480p video I/O. It was the Mac Pro of its day, very much designed to be a modular workstation.
We all use the descendents of Macintosh IIs now, not Macintosh.
Yes I had the color monitor it was made by Hitachi built really well !
HD is a replacement, it shipped with 5,25“ Quantum 40 MBs. also the Extended Keyboard II in this video also isnt period correct, its a couple years too late.
The IIfx was the first serious Mac that could challenge the industrial computers of the day. We always had apple ][ , //e to run tests and we bought the Mac when it first came out and used it for office tasks but the IIfx could actually do some real work that allowed us to repurpose more expensive computers. Before Adobe and postscript took over we had a large format vinyl cutter system running on a IIfx running software called "Vital Draw". I've never seen anything on this company VITAL LASERTYPE, INC. but they were before all the DTP you have heard of before. I kind of laugh when people call these machines expensive as we bought Apples to save money over the DEC and SGI that did most of our work.
Even though we were solidly in the iMac era at the time my college’s computer lab had a suite of older Power Macs in the back, one of which had an AEK. To this day I lament the fact that I didn’t ask if I could take it off their hands, since they treated those computers like trash. Now the keyboard’s worth more than the computer is!
No feet on the side to place it vertically? Or would that interfere with the operation of the floppies?
I realize that vertical cases weren't much of a thing back then outside of Japanese stuff like the Sharp X68000, but it would limit the footprint a little.
Tipping the system onto its heaviest side (which contains the PSU) would not have worked out, as the PSU happens to exhaust hot air from that side. If put onto the other side, the Mac would have needed a very hefty cradle to keep it from tipping over; and, moreover, the user would have needed a tall monitor stand to compensate for the fact that the computer itself then couldn't double as one.
I had a Mac IIsi during most of the 90s. It was great.
1:32 There was a “stiction” problem (if anybody remembers what that was) with some of the early 40MB drives for the Mac II. I know it happened with the one I got. Apple offered a free replacement, and that could have been what happened here.
I earned a fortune putting those (and other HDDs) in the freezer then give a sharp (but not too brutal) smack on the side So they could recover data otherwise lost.
My first Macintosh was a Mac II and I still got it and now I got plenty of other models. Kind of fun to collect. What do you think?
this thing really looks brutalistic, not what you would expect for an apple designed computer
This is a great fucking channel.
Lusted after the IIfx back in the day, but it was prohibitively expensive. Decades later, I managed to snag a Quadra 700 which is my all-time favourite classic 68k Mac design.
It's worth pointing out that the original mac always supported color, or rather 8 colors, but you needed a printer to see them! It wasn't until the late 80s that high resolution color displays became affordable. The fuzzy color monitors we had up until then were good enough for games and text processing but not DTP and design. The Mac II introduced Color QuickDraw which supported millions of colors if you had the VRAM. PCs back then were limited to CGA and EGA graphics at around 320x240 resolutions with weird non-square pixels and text vs graphics 'modes'. Even the original mac's tiny display had a higher standard resolution. The printing industry was almost exclusively B&W where high resolution, square pixel, black-text-on-white displays were more critical. All of NeXT's machines were B&W/greyscale too.
It was the introduction of VGA with the IBM PS/2 that set the 640x480 standard but it wouldn't become common until much later.
The original Color QuickDraw of 1987 only did up to 256 colours at a time. The “32-Bit QuickDraw” enhancement of 1988 added support for direct rendering with “thousands” (15/16-bit) and “millions” (24/32-bit) of colours.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Ah thanks
Correction: At 7:35, the Mac IIx came out in 1988 not 1989.
Mac II was great machine, not because of color support, but because of expansion bus (Nubus). Color graphics card was just one of the expansion option. But personally I like it because it enabled 20 inch large/high-res black & white graphics and monitor. It is good to work on large documents and also ultimate machine to play SimCity (Original).
I wish they still made a desktop like the 2fx expandable
I bought a used Mac II in about 1991, then later traded it in for a IIci. A friend owned a IIx. I'd always wanted a IIfx, but it was never practical or affordable.
Connectors. A sort of prophecy though, cutting edge, but cheaper alternatives won out. I'd imagine the connector came with a liscesing fee, which apple replicated later... They did need to regain market share at the time, but chose to capitalize on it later.
To this day.. would love to have a IIfx
Man those goddamn NuBus slots with their pins. Idiotic!
Back when they came out I lusted after the IICi, IIFx etc, but couldn't afford them.
When the first dotcom bust happened I started finding various Mac II models just tossed out with the trash all over San Francisco and downtown Oakland.
Ended up with a couple IICi, a Performa, and a IIFx. Also a portrait display and a couple 3rd party monitors and peripherals.
IIRC the IIFx had some tricks up it sleeve beyond more ram slots. Higher ram bandwidth due to some kind of interleaving or dual ram busses?
Had a friend at a digital service bureau that I would hang out with after work while he set up jobs to render overnight.
He'd always reserve the IIFXes for the biggest jobs because "they had the fastest memory throughput".
Sorry that was 30 years ago, and that is all I can remember.
Also acquired the precursor to the iMac, the All in One. Basically an iMac with expansion slots that was only sold in education channels.
It had a blobby square profile, with a smoked grey upper chassis. Looked like a Frankenstein iMac.
The one I found had a Sonnet CPU upgrade and was kind of useful even until 2006 when I jumped several generations to an Intel Mac Mini.
I kept those old Mac II series computers around for a few years running Yellow Dog Linux as a primitive render farm/Lan party gaming system.
It's kind of funny when you see an OG MAC or MAC SE/30 next to a more modern computer now. How did anyone do DTP or spreadsheets on those tiny 9" screen?
I had to rewind to make sure I heard it correctly: 128mb of RAM in 1990?! I didn't have a computer with that much RAM until 2001!
If you had money like Bob Page back then, 128 MB RAM was nothing.
I have, sitting just next to me as I type this, a Macintosh IIfx with 128mb of RAM. It is HILARIOUS, but there are of course, a couple of caveats - #1: the RAM is special. It's a 64 pin variety, on the same footprint as a 30 pin SIMM. the only other place I've seen it used was with Laserjet printers, so finding it is.... difficult. ESPECIALLY finding the larger sizes to enable 128mb!!! Second: The macintosh IIfx ROM does a memory check on boot, and with 128mb that .... takes awhile. So you press the soft-power button, hear the chime, and then .... nothing happens. The ROM doesn't even fire up the video cards or send video signal to the display until after the RAM check completes, which takes about a full 2 minutes or so! I thought the RAM I got was faulty initially!
@@Doccers42LOL that is amazing to hear. I have a 1.5TB Mac and it’s the same story except you do NOT get the chime first. That comes after.
Always wanted a Mac II…
I always lowkey wanted a IIfx because it was released the same day as me. 😂 but I bet finding one that’s doesn’t cost the same as a used m2 MacBook and In working order would be a total challenge.
Anyone else find themselves watching the same video every now and then?
I've heard about a guy who used this computer to "push buttons on a keyboard".
I had a IIfx once, trying to do anything useful with A/UX drove my UNIX loving mate completely insane. Sadly the machine was killed by a leaky battery while being moved interstate.
I very much enjoy that one could upgrade the motherboard and go from an Apple Mac II to a IIfx, via an Apple kit.
Maybe that was the last time one could upgrade a Mac so fundamentally :-)
'the company abruptly changed direction...' this was because of john sculley. the best times for mac computing was when sculley was ceo. those were the most innovative engineers apple ever had. Mac OS 7 was way more intuitive and consistent UI than NeXTStep and iOS. and then there was gassee and BeOS. multiprocessor multitasking. oh what could have been.
Now I understand from were soldered batteries in airpod and iPad are come from
mac has evolved so much, the M2 chip is solid. apple computers have evolved so much in the past 40 years
Somewhat ironically, the Mac today with its custom silicon probably brings the Mac closest to the vision Steve Jobs always had for it, which was it to be an appliance. I can only imagine the M1/M2/M3 is exactly the kind of thing he would have loved to have seen.
You put great effort in the filming of your videos, is there some reason to why you don't clean the computers first? They are more than often dirty and disgusting, not a pretty sight...