Nice teardown of a semi-vintage Mac
I remember my dad brought home the original Macintosh in december 1984. It had only one floppy drive for a 400KB disk and no hard drive. The disk drive had a really nice motorized eject system. The Mac came with animations showing you how to operate the computer and some of the programs, MacWrite and MacPaint. It also came with a cassette tape that you could play on your WalkMan. If you pressed play simultaneously with the animations, the audio and video was perfectly syncronized.
We even had a spreadsheet program that looked a lot like the later Excel. I remember plotting in all the votes given in the 1985 Eurovision Song Contest (May 4th 1985) and making graphs. As a bonus Norway even won the song contest for the first time.
This original Mac was later upgraded to a Fat Mac. The cost of the upgrade was a small fortune, and we got a nice, aluminium machined sticker with "512k" printed on it.
In '86 we upgraded the dot matrix printer to the LaserWriter which was like a neat looking combat tank. It was a super heavy, super solid and made really crisp 300 DPI printouts. It outlasted many Macs to come and was in daily use for at least 15 years.
After the first Mac and the Fat Mac upgrade we got the SE/30 with a super fast 68030 processor. We had to upgrade this Mac with a 3rd-party expansion card and I remember that the upgrade kit came with a really long L-shaped hex key (not torx) for the two upper case screws.
Then we had the Mac II cx. My girlfriend at the time got a Powerbook 150 and her father a Performa 630. My first own Mac was a hulking Quadra 900 (second hand) that was later replaced by a Quadra 840av (second hand) in the mid 90's. It had a super fast 40 MHz 68040 processor and a 66.7 MHz AT&T 3210 DSP processor. The DSP made it possible to use the silly GeoPort pod to act as a modem to connect to the internet @ up to 28.8 kbps
This computer was nonetheless the fastest Non-PowerPC Mac ever built. I spent a chunk of money upgrading the 840av video memory from 1 MB to 2 MB (giving me "thousands of colors" in high resolution video mode) and the internal RAM from 16 MB to a whopping 48 MB. Favorite game was Cyclone II.
Hmm, maybe I should get the 840av from the basement and fire up Cyclone again...