Super-Cool Macintosh Page

Macintosh Classic
Not much to say about this computer other than it has the classic Macintosh look we all know and love. I found this in the garbage after a town-wide garage sale (at another garage sale a couple of months prior, some idiot was trying to sell one for $50). Maximum memory is 4M, so it's fairly useless, but none the less, I loaded an ancient version of Cubase on it and it seems to do MIDI just fine.

This was used for approximately 5hrs total in the 5 years I owned it....it finally ended up back in the trash...

Power Color Classic
Ohh-ho-ho!, not just a Color Classic, but a POWER Color Classic. Lowend Mac gave the Color Classic a road apple because it was one of the worst macs ever made - they were absolutely right. This thing was just painfully slow, slower than a Mac Classic (which also got a road apple). Like the Mac Classic, this was a very popular computer despite its poor performance. The 9" color screen provides an unusually sharp image. The case is slightly taller and deeper than a standard compact mac and this computer weighs a porky 22 lbs. But...whoever designed the case deserves the Nobel Prize for Industrial Design - very sexy design that would not look out of place next to the Pinin Farina at the MoMA.

So what does one do with a beautiful yet severely crippled machine like this? Turn it into a Power Color Classic! There are several ways to do this modification, but the results are always astounding. My PCC uses a Powermac 5200 motherboard (another road apple) because it does not require as much money or modification as a newer/better motherboard does. Because the motherboard supports IDE drives, it also has a 1G HD. The monitor resolution was upped to 640x480 and memory is now 72M. I won't go into detail about the modifications because there are already a few swell pages on the subject, but if you have a Color Classic sitting around and if you're technically inclined, then you might want to give this a try. Check the links below.

This computer was later sold for a handsome price.

Powerbook 540c
The Powerbook 500 series are probably the most elegant looking apple laptops ever made! Five 500s were made - 520, 520c, 540, 540c, and the 550c for the Japanese market. Gentle curves and neat-o bullet hinge caps give it a unique architectural look. Not only does this laptop look cool, but it's quite ergonomic as well. This was the first notebook computer to employ a trackpad mouse and built in stereo speakers. This is also the last 68k notebook made, but was designed to be upgradeable to a Power PC processor. It uses two very expensive batteries but can go for about 5 hours between charges. The 540 also came with a built-in 19.2k Fax/Modem for blisteringly fast downloads. Ok, it's not the absolute coolest laptop ever - the screen is small and it has no FPU which limits my choices for music and math intensive software, but otherwise it's a much more practical replacement for the SE/30.

This particular notebook sits and waits for a new power supply - I'm already on the 2nd one in three years.

The PowerMac 6100/60AV
Lisa purchased this computer from a work mate for $450 in 1998. We thought it was a good deal, as it included the AV monitor, a printer, an extra keyboard, all the original documentation and software, including Photoshop.

I find this computer ahead of it's time in many ways. The AV versions have two really cool things: 1) The AV monitor, which have built in speakers that sound remarkably good, and 2) The video card which can capture video from a VCR and can drive a separate display with more resolution than the AV monitor. This computer was designed to be a budget multimedia workstation (in 1994, multimedia was just a buzzword) and I believe, through the now limited speed and processor, still pretty amazing.

This computer is now used as an occasional file server and sometimes to record LPs.