How do you like them Apples?
So what exactly is in our incredible haul of vintage Macs?
First things first, can I physically collect such a haul of Macs? I drive a Renault Mégane Grand
Scénic. This is the long wheelbase version that can seat seven, and the rear seats can be removed completely. That gives me a cargo capacity of about one and a half cubic metres, but I was still concerned that Tim’s vast collection might not fit. He had sent me a spreadsheet with the inventory and there were 16 Macs, plus eight monitors, 11 disc drives, nine keyboards and two printers.
Tim had been quite clear that I wasn’t allowed to cherry pick – I had to take the entire collection or none of it. I emptied the car of all extraneous ballast and packed plenty of rugs and blankets for padding, but in my dark heart I was secretly planning to load the choicest items first and make a quick getaway as soon as the car was full. When I saw the vast trove spread across the floor of Tim’s garage, I tried to not to betray my pessimism.
Export licence
But I was short-changing myself. All those years of practice sliding the awkward zig-zag Tetris piece into a nearly full row were finally put to good use and we carefully wedged it all in, using keyboards as springloaded screen protectors.
I drove carefully back down the M1 to London, wincing every time we went over a bump, or round a corner or past a police car. I don’t think transporting vintage Macs over county lines is against the law, but I was so giddy with the thought of our precious cargo that I kept expecting to be pulled over.
We only have a tiny one-bedroom flat in London, so there was absolutely no question of unloading all the Macs there (“but what if we just…?”, “Absolutely not!”, and so on!) so the car had to sit parked on the street in South East London until we could drive it down to our holiday home in Devon, where the collection would be housed. Peckham used to be fairly rough, but it has got a lot more hipster in the last few years. So naturally, I was concerned that this plethora of classic Macs peeking out of the car windows would be too much for gangs of roving Millennials to resist. Every morning I scurried out to check that ‘my precious’ was still safe.
Magic smoke
Finally, the following weekend, we hauled it down to the west country and I got the first chance to actually survey my catch. I have deliberately not tested every machine yet – that will be part of the fun in the months to come as each one stars in its own episode of Love Your Mac. But I absolutely couldn’t resist
powering up the two LISAs and the Apple III. These are all more than 35 years old, from a time before Apple started calling its computers Macs. It would be ridiculous to expect them to still work.
And they didn’t. In fact, in each case the addition of electricity resulted in a loud bang and a lot of smoke. But strangely I took this as an encouraging sign. Loud bangs are caused by electrolytic capacitors blowing, which are always the first things to go on old electronics. They are relatively easy to replace and judging by the smoke, were located in the power supply anyway, which I could bypass altogether. In a way, I actually hope that one of the LISAs proves to be completely irreparable, because this will allow me to replace all the electronics with a clear conscience. Fitting an LCD screen connected to a Raspberry Pi running some kind of emulator seems like an eminently good use of an old LISA, and my time.
And that’s just one project. I also want to try connecting the external floppy drives to a modern Mac, making a video wall from all the Macs SEs, printing from a serial StyleWriter, connecting to the internet using an ancient modem… it could take me the next year to exhaust the possibilities. It would be easy to write off a garage load of 30-year old computers as junk, but I feel like Howard Carter stumbling into Tutankhamun’s tomb.
The addition of electricity resulted in a loud bang and a lot of smoke. I took this as an ecouraging sign…