vintage tech - page 5

Just a week ago, the iPod celebrated its eighth birthday. It wasn’t long before defunct versions of  the now-museum piece took on new life as something else.

Here a dear, departed iPod (dock connector, circa 2003) gets new life as a clock thanks to the addition of a quartz drive movement. It runs on an AA battery.

It costs $40 on Etsy, but creator pixelthis, who also made the G4 clock, says: “I am always looking for any kind of cool junk, computers, cameras, watches, you name it! I am especially fond of anything Apple. Let’s make a deal.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_WbL2xYquw

This is a hard one to watch: a 1984 Mac 512K meets its end in an industrial microwave oven.

Watch as it goes up in flames —  then witness the after effects of the burning on the keyboard, screen.

It’s the work of Dovetastic, aka Kenny Irwin, who has been zapping everything from 1960s telephones to gas masks  in the microwave on YouTube since February 2006.

Ouch. After it comes out of the oven, hours later, it keeps sizzling!

Need a stiff drink to get that happy face in charred plastic out from under my eyelids before it haunts me forever.

On October 3, a collector bought a rare Apple 1 on eBay for $18,000. The computer, one of about 50 thought to be still in existence, had an estimated value of $14,000 – $16,000.

Back in July 1976, the Apple I sold for $666.66; there were 200 of them hand made by Steve Wozniak. Sold in a kit,  it came with 4KB standard memory,  you could bump up to 8KB or 48KB with expansion cards. You had to add your own case, keyboard and display. (If you’d like to see one, check out the Smithsonian.)

The seller of this Apple 1, Monroe Postman, wasn’t even sure if it would still work.

So, who would pay $18,000 for an Apple I?

A  self-defined “PC person,” who believes that today’s Macs are overpriced. The collector, who wishes to remain anonymous for now, may one day launch a computer museum.

And perhaps trade that PC for a modern Mac.

Interview by Leander Kahney.

CoM: Why did you buy it?

I have been collecting vintage computers for number of years. Obviously, original Apple I is a dream for any serious computer collector and for me, this dream came through.

I have 150+ vintage computers in my collection, which I try to maintain in working order. Occasionally, I take some to local middle and high schools to show to the students. I have an exact working Apple I replica, which is always a hit. Students love playing Lunar Lander.

CoM: What are you going to do with it?

One of those days, I am planning to open a real “museum” for public and the Apple I will take one of the central places.

CoM: What does your spouse/significant other think of it?

Even though my wife is in the computer business herself, she does not pay much attention to my hobby. Obviously, $18K raised her brow, but she understood it in the end.

More pics, full interview after the jump.

Today is the 8th birthday of the iPod and yes, though it hasn’t reached even a decade of life, it’s already the object of several museum exhibits.

Back in 2007, London’s Science Museum put out a national search for a first-gen iPod — CoM reader Joe Weiss answered the call.

Last year, his donated first gen iPod, together with all the original packaging plus unopened earbuds and software to the museum for posterity.

See it in the museum, find out what firewire had to do with it and whether he regrets giving over his iPod after the jump.

The first iPod launched on Oct. 23, 2001.  It had a scroll wheel, cost $399, could store 1,000 songs and looks like a yoga block compared to later models.

This  promo for the first-gen iPod is charmingly dated (only 6.5 ounces, over 10 hours of battery life! ) — though there must be a portrait of Jonathan Ive in an attic somewhere, he looks the same as he talks about it as one of his “most personal designs” at Apple.

Also stumping for the product, among others,  are Moby (“I’m having a hard time getting my head around the fact that you can transfer a whole album on this in 10 seconds.”) and Steve Harwell from Smash Mouth (“You’ve got your own record store on this damn thing.”)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e84SER_IkP4

Unlike an 8-year-old human, an iPod that age doesn’t enjoy an increase in stamina or conversation at an almost adult level.

Mine (the best Christmas present I got the year it came out) is still in the graveyard drawer of iPods I Have Loved, however.
What do you remember most about your first iPod?

Anyone got a first gen that still works?

Apple has updated the list of products it considers “vintage” or “obsolete”  and will no longer provide service, parts or documentation for as of next month.

The Cupertino crew defines “vintage” as products discontinued over five but less than seven years ago.  (One notable exception: California residents can still get service and parts from Apple Service Providers in the state).
Obsolete products are any product discontinued over seven years ago, no exceptions.

Hit the jump for the complete list of the walking dead, updated from the last list published in February.

The rare Apple I we noted was going to go on the block about a month ago has sold on eBay for nearly $18,000, a couple of grand over what guesstimates had it valued at $14,000 – $16,000.

And that’s without knowing whether it actually works: in the eBay description, seller Monroe Postman notes:

“I do not know if it is functional and I do not intend to power it up. If a trace on the board were to burn up due to a shorted component, it would radically decrease its value as an historical artifact and as, in my mind, a work of art (signed by the artist!). A few of the chips were missing when I purchased it and they have been replaced with the proper ones, although dated a year or two later, in some cases.”

If the buyer wants to come forward and talk about the purchase, CoM is all ears.

Thanks to eagle-eyed reader Bob who alerted us in the comments.

Although the $9,995 price tag was one of the reasons the computer Lisa didn’t sell well, showing some love for Lisa in T-shirt form will only set you back $32.

Often considered one of Apple’s flops, the ill-starred Lisa was the first computer on the consumer market with a graphical user interface (GUI) but despite this innovation the high cost, lack of software programs and general sluggishness led it to the computer graveyard in 1983 after two years and 100,000 units sold.

Bruce Tognazzini, the interface guru at Apple once said, “The Lisa was a great machine. We just couldn’t sell any.”

Show that you agree with this T-shirt, available on Etsy.

Via iPhone Savior

Here’s some pictures of the rare Apple I that will be up for auction on eBay early next week. Hit the jump for more.

As reported earlier, the historic machine will be up for auction shortly, likely next week. The owner, Monroe Postman, hasn’t announced the date of the auction.

Postman picked up the Apple I at an estate sale around 1980. He doesn’t remember the details, including how much he paid.

Back in the mid-1990s, there was one thing incredibly obvious to anyone using a Mac: Apple wasn’t ever going to develop a modern successor to the classic Mac Operating System. Despite screenshots of the planned Copland system, the ship date kept getting pushed out, and the pages of MacWeek, MacUser, and MacWorld all started devoting more time to other possible replacements for the core Mac experience. Some mentioned NeXT (the true eventual source of Mac OS X), others ludicrously suggested Windows NT on PowerPC might suffice (seriously), but the consensus was that Jean-Louis Gassee’s BeOS would be the winner.

The upstart operating system had a lot going for it: Native PowerPC support, remarkable multiprocessor optimization (this thing screamed on dual PPC 603s), and, of course, the requisite modern multi-tasking support. Though it ended up losing out to Steve Jobs, a fact almost no one mourns, a lot of us longtime Mac-heads still have a soft spot for the Be-fueled Macs that never were. The software is now mainly found on embedded devices (Palm tried to make it the next Palm OS long before the creation of the Pre) and has no real future.

But you can relive the glory days of the BeOS today, now, on any Intel Mac, provided you have VMWare, Parallels, or VirtualBox (caveat: I’ve only gotten this working on VMWare — the others should work, though). Meet the Haiku Project, an open-source effort to recreate the magic of Be for the modern era. That’s pretty much the pitch — and it mostly delivers. It’s fairly impressive for what it is, though it’s more novelty than anything else for the time-being.

Any true Be-lievers out there? Head to Haiku to get your install disks. If you’re on VMWare, just get the VM file here and go to.

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry owned the first Mac Plus, and it’s about to be auctioned off next month.

Roddenberry’s Mac Plus will join one of Michael Jackson’s gloves in an auction on October 8-9 by Profiles in History, an auctioneer of Hollywood memorabilia.

The Mac Plus — serial number F4200NUM0001 — was given to Roddenberry in January 1986. The auction house expects it to fetch $800 to $1,200.

A man describing himself as an “82-year-old antique” is putting a relatively young 32-year-old Apple I for sale on eBay in the next few weeks.

One of 200 computers hand made by Steve Wozniak, somewhere between 30 and 50 are thought to be still around. (If you’re more interested in seeing one than buying one, the Smithsonian has an Apple I on display as it’s being presented to the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto).

Back in July 1976, the Apple I sold for $666.66.  The computers, sold in a kit,  came with 4KB standard memory, that you could bump up to 8KB or 48KB with expansion cards. You had to add your own case, keyboard and display.

Guesstimates say the computer could fetch between $14,000 and $16,000.

The seller wrote in to San Francisco Chronicle tech columnist David Einstein about how he might get publicity for the sale.

Einstein replied, “I don’t think your computer is valuable enough to spark much general media interest before you sell it.”

Alas, he underestimated the Cult of Mac.  Mr. Antique, we want to hear from you!

Assembly 2009 is a gathering for programmers who love to write low-level code. Basically, any cross platform language has a level of abstraction from the hardware that prevents you from running truly optimized code. These folks love to get the most out of any chip.

That’s in abundant evidence in this clip, “3 1/2 Inches is Enough” by Unreal Voodoo. It’s a drama starring two modern laptops and an earnest classic Mac that was rendered entirely in assembly language on a Mac Classic II — presumably running a 68030 16 Mhz processor. It’s beautiful, and it’s got a great beat. Nice.

Unreal Voodoo via BoingBoing

If you’re running Leopard, hit Command + Shift + 4 and then the space bar, and you’ll see an icon of a camera that harks back to Steve Jobs’s days at NeXT.

The decades-old icon is one of the last visible vestiges of NeXTStep, the old operating system that laid the foundation for OS X in the late ’90s.

The camera icon looks dated, but it’s pretty good by today’s standards. Look at some of the Windows icons from the same period.

The NeXTStep camera can be found in the Resources of the Grab tool (in the Utilities folder) and comes in several different versions with eyes, stopwatches and camera flashes.

Other holdovers from NeXT in Leopard include various system sounds, including Basso, Frog, Funk, Ping, Pop, and Tink, as one commenter notes at Robojamie.net, which first pointed out the camera icon.

And as another commenter says, there’s another old icon in: /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/NSMultipleFiles.tiff

It doesn’t seem to be used anywhere though.

Steve Jobs founded NeXT in 1985 after he was booted from Apple. He had the company build advanced workstations, hoping to drive Apple out of business. But its black magnesium NeXT Cubes were too expensive except for select clients in academia and the CIA. NeXT eventualy dropped the hardware to concentrate on the its state-of-the-art software and operating system, which Apple bought in 1996 as the foundation for the Mac OS.

Apple got a lot from NeXT: Jobs came on as an adviser, and eventually took on the CEO role. A lot of Apple’s top executives came from NeXT and so did  lot of its technology. As well as basing OS X on NeXTStep, Apple has built a lot of its online offerings on NeXT’s WebObjects, including its first online store, the iTunes Music Store, its DotMac website and the iPhone App Store.

Love the Exploded 128 Mac tee but find there are only so many places you can wear it? You can hang up your Apple love with Garry Booth‘s take on the inner workings of this milestone Mac, it’s part of a trio of retro-Mac posters.

You can also deck your halls with “Macronaut,” Ray Frenden’s space-age voyager who looks like he’s lost Command or create a den of antiquity with  Gary Gao’s “Mac Ghosts,” specters of computers past.

This is a limited run of fewer than 100, offered at a package price of $39,  so if you’re interested in the Mac Poster Trilogy, make a move.

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.

Our friend Roger, the t-shirt designer from Brighton, U.K., has another Mac-related shirt for us to check out.

It’s a classic skull design, made with the keys from a pair of Apple keyboards. The white keys come from an extended white Mac keyboard; the black keys were taken from the original iMac (the one with the half sized F keys). Says Roger:

“I could say it depicts the obsolescence that all computer equipment faces, but really it’s just skulls make great tees! What Mac geek wouldn’t like to see a design featuring Mac keys, and only only closer inspection can you find the classic Apple command key.”

Hit the jump for a bigger picture of the skull — and the elusive command key.

You can find Roger’s skull tee here, available in a range of colors.

The designer of the brilliant “PhotoShoplifter” t-shirt (see the pic after the jump) is back with a new design honoring old Macs.

Roger of RubyRed T-shirt Designs has created the “Sad Chimes Rest Home” shirt featuring three vintage machines that are loved but no longer used.

“Old Macs deserve more than ending up on the scrapheap after a life of creation and innovation,” Roger says. “Be sympathetic to your old Apple in its time of need, send it to the Sad Chimes Rest Home for retired and redundant Macs. A place where the Mac Classic and the G3 iMac can reminisce about operating system developments.”

More of Roger’s work after the jump.

Following the trend that allows devoted folks to wear the innards of their favorite devices outwards, here’s an exploded  Mac 128K T-shirt.

After the exploded iPhone (steampunk and regular versions), the 25-year-old computer’s insides hark back to another era.

The work of artist Garry Booth, the nostalgic tee costs $18, find it online here.

Were you aware there is an annual conference devoted to the Apple II computer? And that it’s been held for 20 years?

Make plans now to be at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, MO from July 21 – 26 for, yes, the 20th annual KansasFest, a computer hoedown all about Apple’s iconic Apple II computer.

The keynote speaker will be Jason Scott, webmaster of
TEXTFILES.COM, director of “BBS: The Documentary”, and caretaker of Sockington, the cat on Twitter with over 300,000 followers.

KansasFest 2009, the world’s only annual Apple II conference, invites any and all Apple II and Macintosh users, fans, and friends to attend what oganizers call the “summer camp for geeks.”  For photos, schedules, presentations from past year’s events, and inquiries, visit the event’s Web site.

Times are tough for Blair Saldanah.

“My wife needs medical care; and we don’t have health insurance,” he explains on the website he just put up, where he is selling quite a collection of Apple memorabilia, including posters, brochures, cards, stickers, manuals, annual Apple fact books, t-shirts, even a vintage Apple ProMouse that was Steve Jobs’ gift to attendees at the Macworld New York keynote address in 2000.

“Don’t be intimidated by the prices!” Saldanah writes on the portal page. “Most items have some bargaining room built-in, and we’ll do quantity discounts too, so find what you want and let’s talk. You might be suprised!”

That’s a good thing, too, because — for example — he’s got eleven t-shirts from various Apple Store grand openings priced at $200 each.

These economic times are difficult for so many people and one never wishes on anyone the need to sell things near and dear to them in order to raise funds for medical bills. We wish Saldanah and his wife the best.

This doesn’t look like the simplest DIY project, but one creative Mac fan turned an old G3 into a house for an old Sega Dreamcast.

The project, dubbed the iCast, started out while doing a workshop cleanup: handy person logicdustbin realized that among the spare parts were a few G3s and an LCD monitor.

Once the Mac was gutted, the LCD fit inside nicely.

Then “it was an easy decision to slap a Dreamcast inside,” logicdustbin wrote on the  www.cgcc.ca forum. “The hard part was figuring out where to place it. I didn’t want to cut a big hole in the side of the case… but I ended up doing a ‘PS1 upside down mod’ – its not great, but it works pretty good.”

In final analysis, logicdustbin concedes: “A lot of work went into this, like getting the original power button to work for the new monitor and adding a power switch for the DC, then adding a sound amp to power the iMac speakers…it was all pretty fun to do and it plays just great!”

Step by step, with pics here, check out the video of the working iCast here.

eBay officials took down an auction listing for a pre-release beta copy of the first-generation iPod Tuesday after being informed by Apple the attempted sale would violate the company’s intellectual property rights.

Mike Evangelist, who writes the WritersBlockLive blog, “was one of a bunch of internal testers for the iPod,” according to a post describing the result of his attempt to sell his device on eBay. After internal testing for the iPod was completed, all the beta testers were given opportunities to turn in their beta units in exchange for an official first release device, but Evangelist never did.

Facing “some unexpected expenses,” he figured selling the rare piece of Apple history on eBay would net him several hundred dollars. “There was great interest in the auction before it was pulled,” he writes, adding “I expected the final price to easily exceed the $450 reserve I had set.”

After the auction unexpectedly disappeared,he received a note from eBay saying “The rights owner, Apple, Inc., notified eBay that this listing violates intellectual property rights. When eBay receives a report of this type of violation, we remove the listing to comply with the law.”

So now Evangelist is just selling the thing through his website. From the several pictures he has available on the site, it looks to be in great shape, too.

At press time, the device remains unsold, with a high bid of $700.

Via EdibleApple

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.

In the last of our stories from owners of original and classic era Macs, we talk to Nigel Curson. His Mac Plus has seen action as a desktop publishing workhorse, early internet client, and now toy for kids. And it’s still going strong.