First post, by WhatANerd
- Rank
- Newbie
New guy saying hi
Hey everyone, just thought I would introduce myself. I've been lurking for a while, but your enthusiasm for old junk is infectious, so I just had to join and share!
I started getting back into vintage stuff a few years ago, just before Steve Jobs passed. I was born in 1983 and have always been a PC guy; my first was a maddening Tandy 1000RL that I hated and sold off, but somehow ended up in possession of once again 20 years later. However, I had secretly lusted after a Macintosh Quadra 700 ever since seeing Jurassic Park on the big screen when I was a kid. After much deliberating on whether or not I should go looking for obsolete computers to tinker with (the sickness begins!), I finally found one for free on Craigslist - owned by a former Eastman-Kodak employee to boot! When he retired after many decades with the company, they allowed him to keep his workstation. He was still using it up until he posted it on Craigslist, except that now it was throwing out memory errors. Rather than listening to his wife and carting it on down to the e-waste recycler to be slaughtered after years of faithful service, he decided to humanely put it up for adoption on the interwebs. I can't say I blame him. It turns out that the "memory errors" were caused by the original PRAM battery finally dying.
So great, I finally found the computer I had been lusting after since childhood. The only problem was that the system was 2,300 miles away in Tennessee (I'm in Los Angeles).
The gentleman generously allowed me to have the complete system, printers, CD-ROM drive, Magneto-Optical drive, and a huge box of parts for free, provided I pay for shipping. I must have had five or six boxes show up! Unfortunately, a certain earth-colored shipping company dropped the monitor box and cracked the huge, rare CRT beyond repair. There was a silver lining, though: the amount of money I received from the insurance covered the entire cost of shipping the parts! 🤣 The former owner was ecstatic to know that his old Mac was still going strong after a new battery, and was now being taken care of by someone who could really appreciate it.
Anyway, here's a pic of that system (at the man's house). You may have seen my Youtube vids where I pit it against a similar PC from the era.
Gah, I wish the monitor had survived! 
Shortly after this, I picked up various other systems and built a few that represented the PC era I like best: from '89-'95.
I was thinking of starting a new thread every few weeks detailing the systems in my sig.
This Quadra is loaded - 68MB of RAM, SuperMac Thunder/24 3MB graphics card, 2GB hard drive, and it even has all of its original feet!
- x86: Tandy 1000RL (HD+768K), Tandy 3000HD, 486DX33 VLB, 486DX50 VLB, Packard Bell Force 1998CDT (Pentium 133)
- 68K: Mac Plus 1MB (early), Quadra 700 (2), Quadra 950, Quadra 650
Clock multiplication is too new for me, as you can see!
Gemini and archsan: you guys sure have me pegged...so far, the farthest I've driven was 80 miles (one way!) to pick up a like-new Packard Bell. PACKARD BELL of all things! A few years ago I wouldn't have taken one of those if you came up and left it on my porch!
. Not to mention we don't know what kind of hard drive it has. But it's interesting to see them compared as complete systems, nonetheless. The Quadra 700 at 25MHz just barely eeks out a victory in this particular case of launching an app. I'm sure the IIfx is faster at other things, though, especially with processor direct cards.