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Early Apple Employees Auction Killer Collectibles

If there’s a good thing about the recession, it seems to be bringing some fine Apple memorabilia out of storerooms and closets.
Cliff and Dick Huston — ex-Apple engineers, for the record employees 27 and 25 — have decided to part with a treasure trove of Cupertino collectibles by auctioning them on eBay.

What’s on the block:

Apple [...]

Video: There’s Sexy Technology, Then There’s This…

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You’re all going crazy with your iPad ordering. Meanwhile, over on Vimeo, BrewBeau has some craziness of his own going on.
BrewBeau writes: “I’m a recent PC convert who waited patiently while Apple worked out the kinks with their latest iMac release of the 27″ Intel powered 2.8GHz quad core i7 iMac. It’s a thing of [...]

Bottom-Feeding Jeweler Unveils Despicable Diamond iPad for $20,000

We all know the wait for the iPad, at least in the U.S., will be over on April 3, right? Wrong. True connoisseurs know they need to wait until June 1, when Mervis Diamond Importers will unleash the hideous and despicable Diamond iPad on the world. It’s a bejeweled and bedazzled monstrosity boasting 11.43 carats [...]

iPhone App Magnets To Appify Your Fridge

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If – like me – your fridge is black, then these shiny iPhone app fridge magnets from Jailbreak Collective will look very smart indeed displayed on the door.
Just 13 bucks gets you a set of these icon almost-replicas. I say almost because if you look carefully, you’ll see they’re not identical to the Apple originals. [...]

Retro Mac Hacker Puts Mini Inside Disk ][ Drive

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Wow, here’s a fantastic hack from the RetroMacCast forum, in which contributor Charles Mangin creates a new body for a Mac mini – using the body of an ancient Apple Disk ][ drive.

The drive door works, so you can open it up to slide in a DVD. The power switch is authentically mounted at the rear, and the "IN USE" light on the front flashes up when the mini is, you know, doing stuff. Superb retro-modern hackery, I love it.

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The Disk ][ was an external drive for 5¼ floppies. Released in 1978 for just shy of 500 bucks, this little beast was aimed at Apple ][ owners who wanted to upgrade from cassette tapes for storage. Those, kids, were the days. When floppies were actually floppy. And 114KB of storage per side was considered *plenty*.

Charles has got a Flickr set with more photos and details. Our thanks to him for permission to use the pics, and to James from RetroMacCast for the tip.

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About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He is a columnist for PA, and has written for the BBC, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, MacUser, Macworld, and The Morning News. He has a blog you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

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18 comments

    It is almost as if the designers of the mini had this mod in mind. The fit is remarkable! Great job Charles!

    I like the ingenuity of the modder!

    That’s really cool in a very geeky way. I particularly like the rubber feet marks on the top that are from the other drive that must have sat on top of this one.

    My first computer was an Apple ][ plus with dual floppies and a 16k memory expansion card to bring it up to a whopping 64k.

    I did some rough calculations and my current Mac Pro does 25,600x more CPU cycles per second and it’s got 18,700x more memory.

    That is flippin’ sweet! :-)

    I guess I’ll have to build a square wheel to top this.

    Are you kidding. With the potential out here…. who gives a crap whether some moron can put a mini in a piece of sheet metal. Now if this kid can get a mini in a can of Spam then bring it on.

    Finally! A case mod that I truly like (although some of the steam punk ones are pretty nifty).

    The actual capacities were 113.75kB and later 140kB. Can’t believe wiki is wrong on this.

    Anyway, cool hack!

    Cheers,
    Nick.

    I may have to give that a go…it would take me back a few years. Of course, my Apple drives were bought surplus years after my ][ was mothballed…all us cool kids had Rana Systems drives and had hacked the Apple DOS to allow extra tracks gaining some 30k of storage per disc…they were $5 each at the time so that was a HUGE gain!

    114 KB was never “plenty”, but it was what you had.

    That rocks! I love love love the ol Apple ][+ //e, ][gs days! I owned one of each... one of the best memories was when my grades slipped, mom took video cord away from me for the //e, I found out it was a RCA speaker wire! If there was a way, we'd figure it out!

    Now if the newton would come back!

    is there something we CAN’T fit some model of mac into? i mean, i’ve seen everything from macbook pro’s made into miniature g5’s to mac mini’s made into B.A. all-in-one’s!

    Now if he can turn a, non-working of course, Apple II into a keyboard, and a, again non-working, Apple monitor into an LCD screen then he’ll have somthing!

    @Sleeping_with_cyanide:

    I’m holding out for a mac pro in an altoids tin myself…

    i’m working on that, actually :)

    there’s enough space inside a II or plus to hold a pretty large RAID, too, tho i think i’ll try with a IIc. it won’t be as authentic – most IIc owners bought them with the updated Disk IIc instead of the Disk II…

    on the other hand, i may just try and wedge the mini in the IIc where the floppy sits…

    . . . and the next step would be a real Apple ][ running with an LCD monitor http://ferdimh.homelinux.net/a2/a2vga/#how , replacing the ol' keyboard with something a bit more modern http://seb.riot.org/appleII/keyboard.sml , and a smidgen of Ethernet from http://www.a2retrosystems.com/products.htm

    Put the mini 5 1/4" beside an intact 5 1/4" on the top of the ][, add a litle KVM magic . . . . .

    Good one!
    ;)

    3õ

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