After 20 Years, Maryland Man’s Mac IIci Finally Dies

By Leander Kahney (11:21 am, Jul 01 2009)

MacMedics upgraded a customer to this screaming fast (not) PowerMac 5200 when his Mac IIci died after 20 years of faithful service. Picture courtesy of <a href=

Apple rightly has a reputation for making quality gear. The company doesn’t make junk that breaks down in a few months, or even years. Or even 20 years.

MacMedics, a repair shop in Millersville, Maryland, recently serviced a Macintosh IIci, which was on the blink after two decades of faithful service.

Introduced in September 1989, the Mac IIci is one of the most popular early Macs. It was the first to have built-in color video, three Nubus expansion slots, and a 40 or 80 MB hard disk. It originally sold for $6,700.

The machine was putting up funny patterns on the monitor. The client thought it was the screen, but it was actually the main logic board. He’d been using the machine for 20 years — 20 years! — and had no interest in upgrading to a modern Mac.

The client had some software that HAD to run on system 7.0.1, so MacMedics set him up with an old PowerMac 5200 (circa 1995). The 5200 features a blazing fast 75 MHz PowerPC chip, a whopping 8 MB of RAM, and a 500 MB hard drive. It comes in an attractiveÃ‚Â all-in-one beige case that includes a 15” color monitor.

MacMedics had to rescue the customer’s data. He’d not performed one backup in two decades. And here’s the best part, he had only 2.2 MB of data to rescue.

“HereÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s a tip,” says MacMedics. “DonÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t wait 20 years to make a back up.”

57 comments »

About the author

Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve’s Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. Leander has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Guardian in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

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Posted in Apple, Hardware, Humor, News, Vintage Tech |

Beluga-Love
I just got my old Mac SE back, bought it ’93 second hand, sold it to a friend in ’97 when I got my, then amazingly fast, 7100. My friend finally bought a new computer in 2008 and kept the old SE in storage until I collected it from her a couple of weeks ago. The darn thing fired up without so much as a whimper, the glorious 9″ b/w screen still crisp, a gigantic 20mb hard drive and all of 4 megs RAM to run Word version 5.1 with lightening speed. Just a total classic.
Victoria
May it rest in peace.
Will there be a memorial service?
I’m serious – for a computer to live this long, is unheard of (at least for me).
http://www.macmedic.com.au Adrian Franulovich
I’d say the capacitors on the motherboard are the issue, worn out and leaky. Just replace the electrolytics with some of the same rated tantalum caps and it should keep going for another twenty!
ben
I’ve had two macs burn out this year already. An Imac… not three years old, and a two month old mac mini. They don’t make em like they used to. I had a G3 Beige that just got retured two years ago…that was a solid ten years!
agghtea!
That’s nothing… I still have a BBC Model B (purchased by my parents) from 1984 – still going strong and used for “grunt” BASIC command line programming! Although total of 0.0 Mb directly stored programmes (no hard disk drive) and have been through several 5.25 drives in my time.
That said, the beige brick may outlast me, my children and even time itself!
blank
Jobs is cursing this guy cause he didn’t get his money’s worth from him like the guy got out of his computer. Good news is he spend the same amount of money on a Mac Pro.
http://www.gatelatch.net Gate Latch
the best soldering iron tip are those that are made up of iron coated with copper;**