hey everybody its LAN Simon and today we’re going to be doing our annual retro review that I do around the holiday season and this year I’ve got something special because a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine who’s a funeral director notified me that there was an estate auction going on that had something I might be interested in which is this Apple Macintosh plus it is 30 years old it looks like it was shipped out initially in 1987 the UPS sticker on there has a December 1987 date stamped on it and it looks very complete it’s not new in box unfortunately but it looks like it has just about everything that it came with inside the box so I figure it’ll be fun to unbox it first of all and then boot it up and maybe attach some modern hardware to it so we can play around with a few things that were popular at the time on the Macintosh and in addition to the Mac here it also came with a relatively complete in box image writer too that you can see down here on the floor so maybe we’ll try to get the printer working too why not I even found the print shop for the Mac here so we can maybe experiment a little bit with that as well so we’re gonna get to unboxing this as usual I like to make my disclaimers on the channel that’s what I always do I paid for this with my own funds Apple certainly isn’t paying for this video and all the opinions
you’re about to hear are my own and Tim Cook did not ask to see this video before it was uploaded either so it is completely like every other video we do so let’s get started here we’ll begin with the top piece of foam and on top of the foam here is a box with all of these systems stuff used to get a lot more with a computer back in the day than you do now so we have our Macintosh plus owner’s guide again this is 30-something years old here this was another big deal called the multi finder it wasn’t quite multitasking but it did allow you to have more than one application open at the same time and one of the advantages of multi finder was that you could copy and paste between applications for example this was a very big update and the RAM that the Macintosh Plus had allowed that to happen this particular model I believe has one megabyte onboard you also have a new features update it looks like they added some things to the mix since the manual was printed so this booklet gives you all of that information there you have your Macintosh utilities that it comes with so you have some information about that as well piece of cardboard here the original License Agreement yes I mean this thing is pretty complete here we’ve got a little errata to the note the multi finder manual there so it tells a little bit about the print monitor I guess this is your quick reference guide and then we also have it looks like a user group newsletter and this is Guy Kawasaki he’s now a an
independent technology consultant I actually met him a number of years ago and this was before when he was still working at Apple so maybe we’ll do something later on this thing here here is our hardware warranty thing now this is a bummer because when I looked at the listing on the auction site it came with all the original discs which are now missing I need to reach back out to them because there’s supposed to be some system manuals or system discs in here for us to get booted up with so let’s see if maybe those are hiding somewhere else in the box here that’s a disappointment because I thought those discs came with it so let’s dig a little bit further here and see what we find oh by the way I forgot to mention on the top of the box was one of the original Apple stickers that they used to give you back in the 80s so that’s pretty cool alright so let’s go a little further in here we have the keyboard and it looks to me that this might be the Platinum Macintosh plus because the original plus came out in 86 and then they changed the color for 1987 late 87 so this one might be the newer version although it has yellowed quite a bit over the years here I think so let’s take a look at the machine itself so there it is so it actually doesn’t look too bad in the front here it looks pretty bad on the back though so they must have had this near a window you can see the sticker here contrasted against the back casing so let’s take a look at the system itself here we’ve got the black-and-white display of course we have a floppy drive there’s no hard drive in this one so you have to boot everything off the floppy drive and the reason why I’m not so concerned about the system utilities is that I have a means of getting this thing booted up so even though we don’t have those disks which is unfortunate we should still be able to get stuff going here the keyboard plugs into this little phone jack connector at the bottom and they later change to the Apple desktop bus which is what my Apple two gs back there uses along with the Mac se that’s next to it so they change this after this model came about on the back we have the power switch this is a battery for the P RAM and it looks like a double-a but it is not I believe it’s a four and a half volt battery that’s slightly larger and if you have an old Mac that’s not booting up it’s likely due to this battery dying and they’re kind of
hard to get but there are some resources online to help you find the battery for it and what’s funny too is you can see what the original plastic color here is versus the back so this one might be a good target for retro brighting here on the back and if you don’t know what retro brighting is check out the 8-bit guys channel he’s done a lot of that power switches here your power cable goes there we have a printer and modem port these are both serial ports because the Mac did not use parallel ports like the PC did for that this is a scuzzy port I believe for plugging in hard drives this is a floppy port the mouse plugs in here again on the newer systems they added the Apple desktop bus which candled both the keyboard and the mouse but this this one’s it’s got a separate connector for that a speaker output here these are screws just for getting into the case which we’re not going to do in this video but apparently this is one of the devices that has the signatures on the molding underneath it here I’ll link to an article about that and this spot here is for a Kensington lock these got a lot smaller over the years but that’s how big they used to be there so that is the overall computer so now the moment of truth is upon us which is powering it up for the first time so let me go get the power cable will plug it in and hopefully we won’t get the magic smoke like we got out of the Apple two gs a couple of years ago wish me luck all right so we’re plugged in and almost ready to go here and inside the image writer printer box I found this which is an apple hypercard box complete which is awesome now HyperCard was not quite a programming language but it allowed general consumers to
essentially write their own Mac software so you can make interactive experiences you could create hyperlinks between things so you could have a card that did something and then have text that you can click to go to something else kind of a precursor to what we now know as the world wide web a lot of that was innovated here with hyper card and I’m sure you can find some videos on it to learn more inside was a sticker another one we had the full HyperCard manual here which is pretty extensive as you can see and then we’ve got some discs here and actually I think we should be able to boot the Mac off of this hyper card startup disk here this again is complete it looks like it’s 30 something years old so what we’re gonna do is pop this disc in and then turn on the Mac and see what happens wish us luck here hopefully there’s no smoke that’s a good sign we got a ding initially and hopefully the CRT will come to life here and we’ll start seeing the Macintosh boot up it looks like the disc is engaging I can hear it reading the disc and let’s see I don’t know if we’re gonna get anything on the display here which isn’t good so let’s see if there’s a brightness or contrast level here well that’s disappointing let’s see there we go looks like the display is sort of working so let me see if I can coax the display into operating and I will be right back when this thing boots up but it does appear like it is actually booting off this floppy disk ok so there is a really loose connection inside of this Mac but I did get the display to work I’m just nervous about it going out on me again because it keeps flickering so that means either it will flicker out again or it will explode one of the others so let’s hit the restart button here just to show you what it’s like when this thing boots up you can see it needs that disk we’re gonna put in that 30 year old disk now and you can see every time we touch this thing the display flickers I’m gonna be very gentle here as we’re booting things up but it’s amazing though that this floppy disk is still functioning perfectly these are 800 K floppies this was before the high-density floppies that
would do 1.4 megabytes so this is definitely old school and again there’s no hard drive in here now the retail price on this particular Mac when it came out was two thousand five hundred and ninety nine dollars that’s almost six thousand dollars today so you can imagine what this would cost somebody to purchase and this particular model of the Mac was being sold from 1986 when it came out it came out in January 86 and it lasted until October of 1990 just to give you an idea as to the longevity of this device here so pretty cool stuff so the mouse here appears to work Bill Atkinson is the author of course of HyperCard copyright 1987 here this is all working pretty well now what I want to try and hopefully the display will cooperate is hooking up this device this is called the what is this thing called the the Macintosh floppy EMU and I bought this a while ago they have a newer version now that uses micro SD cards and what this does is it connects to the floppy connector in the back of our Macintosh here and it will allow me to boot things off of this SD card and what I have on the card is a 20 megabyte disk image of a bunch of mac games and applications so let’s see if we can get this to boot up to the regular Mac finder so we can learn more about this system so I’m just going to go here to quit hyper card which will now eject the disc and shut us down and hopefully the display will continue to cooperate with us and if we have any smoke later I will certainly show it to you just like we did with the Apple 2g yes so we can have maybe a macintosh plus Yuletide log so any event let’s take a look here and see what comes up when we boot up the floppy emulator so I’ve got the floppy emulator connected to the floppy drive port of our Mac plus key I’m going to show you what this little floppy emulator shows us on screen us what I can do here is just go down to next until I get to my hard drive now I believe once I select this it should start booting up the Mac so let’s see what happens I selected that and now it’s asking me to turn off the computer again so I will turn it off and then perhaps when it boots back up we should be in business here let’s see what happens if you turn this back on the display is coming up again which is a good sign and then I think it’s
waiting for the floppy drive to do its thing so there we go we’ve got that going and look at this our Mac is booting up off of this modern piece of hardware on an SD card that is really let’s let this boot up here now what’s really neat about this disc image is that this is something that I actually run on my modern Mac in an emulator something I call or they call mini V Mac and everything that I’ve got in there is also on here so let’s load up a game to start with here and maybe we’ll do some shuffle putt cafe which was one of the more popular Mac games back in the day it’s actually running pretty nicely over this thing I’m surprised and of course we don’t have to deal with the floppy drives on this thing now shuffle puck is one of these games that kind of defined the Mac in my opinion it was a actually pretty good graphics for the time now remember you just have this black and white display but the graphics were very sharp because it was a higher resolution display than most computers had at the time and this is kind of like plays like air hockey so you use the mouse here and drag your mouse back and forth so we’re gonna pick our opponent here that dude right there pardon the mess we’ve been really busy here the last couple of days and what we’re gonna do is basically play a game of air hockey against this guy and it’s kind of a neat experience to play something like this because this was a very good control scheme for a game which is to use the mouse like a air hockey thing and these guys were really tough as you can see here I just loved the graphics the sound of the Mac especially for a computer from 30 years ago was really good certainly the Amiga was around at that point as well they used the same processor but it was really kind of neat to see this going on about 30 years ago if you were just using an apple – like I was you know see these kinds of graphics even in black and white we’re pretty good so that is shuffle puck cafe here I’m getting killed here but we’ll switch over now to something else now this next game is Tetris and I remember when I was a kid visiting my cousin on his college campus this was all the rage and you can see what it looks like here again black and white but this was the first version of Tetris to come out here in the United States so this predated the gameboy version by a couple of years I would play a little song here which I’ll let play as we play through you didn’t have any sound effects though [Music] and my cousin was telling me this kind of shut down his campus for a while everybody was playing Tetris when this first came out I still play Tetris today but this was certainly a brand-new experience when it was released at the time actually this made a really good game boy game –
given the fact that the Gameboy also had a black and white display the music would stop and then it would just kind of start up randomly again as well but there you go that is Tetris now the other day on my weekly wrapup video I was talking about holiday lemmings and there was a version for the Mac – I had no idea there was one but here it is and it runs both in black and white and in color so let’s load it up here real quick and have a look at that you’ll see some jump cuts here just because it takes a while for this stuff to load up so stay tuned as it’s coming together now this game came out in 1993 when there were much more powerful Mac’s on the market so this one’s going to struggle a bit with this particular game although it does still work in black and white and I suspect the Mac se 30 was their target so we’ll go ahead and click here and I’ll let you hear the sound [Music] so you can see how it’s starting to slow down as more lemmings are coming on screen here so it’s not all that playable on a 68000 based Mac but I suspect they kept the black and white support probably for people who had accelerator cards in there max I believe a number of them supported that I’m not sure this one did and also the Mac se 30 behind me was a lot faster so I think that was probably why they kept some black and white support surprisingly the 68000 based Mac’s like this we’re still being sold for quite a while into the 90s so even though this one was discontinued in ninety they came out with the Mac S II after that and then the Mac classic came out I think around 93 or so so they really were selling these relatively low-powered devices for a long time at a pretty hefty price tag – let’s take a look at a few other things now this one is called a patchy strike and what
you do is fly around in this rudimentary 3d world here and try to find the tanks and blow them up as you can see it’s a pretty challenging game here and I’m not very good at it and of course you also have to control it with the mouse which doesn’t make things much easier either but there you go that is called Apache strike and this of course is the Star Wars arcade game and this was ported over to the Mac it actually runs pretty nicely on here it looks pretty nice too as you heard at the beginning there it also has some of the audio from the arcade game too so that was pretty cool to see on here and this kind of vector game worked really well on the Mac given the higher resolution display so this was a lot of fun to play here as I was doing my research on this particular video now unfortunately I can’t show you much more because the display finally went out on this thing and is not coming back on I think I got to wait for it to cool off for a little bit there definitely needs to be some work done inside and unfortunately I am not qualified to do that work without electrocuting myself these things can get a little dangerous with the tube CRT on it but what we can do let me switch it off here again is take the SD card that we were booting the actual hardware on and plug it into my modern MacBook here and actually boot it up in emulation with some software called mini V Mac and what’s cool about mini V Mac is that you can run it on your computer as well it works with the Mac as well as Windows and a number of other platforms – so let’s boot it up and see what it does so here we are on my macbook and you can see we’ve got the mini V Mac emulator here what you need to get the emulator working is a working Mac rum usually from a Mac plus like the one we’ve just been playing with and you can find those very easily online so I’m just going to click on the mini B Mac app here and it’s going to give us the ding just like we had on the original Mac and you can see it’s looking for a floppy eye now if you hold down the ctrl key you get a few other emulator commands and what I’m gonna do actually is use the magnification option to give us a slightly larger image initially it will just come out at kind of a one-to-one image of what the original Mac was from the resolution
standpoint and of course we have a lot more resolution now now I’m gonna go and grab the disk image that we were booting the real Mac off of or just a few minutes ago and drag that into the mini V Mac window and you can see here it just loaded it right up and everything is exactly where we left it I did it was about to start loading some print drivers in before the display died on me here but if we were to get this Mac working again I can take everything from this emulator and just use it on here I could even start working on a document and move it back to the emulator so it really is a neat way to move things back and forth and you can see here we’ve got all of our games on there that we looked at before which I thought was pretty cool so this is a fun way to get your old Mac stuff running even if you never had an original Mac you can start loading up some of these games and getting kind of the experience of what the original Mac was like to use was something that very accurately emulates it now emulating the Macintosh on modern hardware is not for the faint of heart it can become a hobby in of itself but I have found that mini V Mac the emulator we were running before is probably the easiest way to get going with it and there are some ways to get started without too much pain so the first thing you need to do is go to the mini V homepage and I’ll put a link to this down below in the video description there are some download links here you can go over to the standard variations and you’ll find a version of mini V Mac for just about every computing platform you can think of I think there’s even an Android build and I know there’s something now running on the mr.
Project as well in FPGA so you’ve got a lot of options here and then what you should do is head over to the Mac repository or actually the Macintosh repository dot org and they’ve got pretty much every piece of software you can imagine for the old Mac platform and you can download one of these ready to go disk images and we’re gonna do this one here this mini V Mac OS 7.5 3 ready to go now I’m going to put a link to this right below in the video description so you can find it yourself but you’ll have everything you need to get started here so there’s really no pain here whatsoever at least to start out with so what we’re gonna do here is just go to my downloads folder you can see that I’ve extracted this you even have the ROM file in here if you need it they will have a version of the emulator that’s probably out of date so I would still go and get the emulator from the main website there so we’re gonna boot up the emulator and watch how easy this is now that we’ve got our Mac here looking for a startup disk we’re just going to grab disc 1 up sorry disc 1 dot dmg right here it’s a 262 megabyte file and that’s going to boot up Mac OS 7 point 5 point something or other and here we go we’ve got the operating system loaded up I’m just going to zoom in a little bit here on the screen so you can see it better and what’s cool is that you got kind of a nice little collection of stuff you can play around with so if you go into apps here you’ll have a few familiar applications you may have used in the past even hypercard that we booted up on the original hardware a minute ago is on here and you can start playing around with some hyper card stacks for example so cool stuff to get going and then you can get more software and drag that in as well but here’s the problem you’re going to come across a number of files on the Macintosh repository org that are stuff it files and you’ll know they’re stuff it files because they will end with a dot s i T like this one here but they also have versions that will contain disk
images that are easier to get working in mini V Mac now normally when you were downloading stuff back in the good old days on your old Mac you would download one of these stuff at files open up stuff at expander and those files would decompress just like a zip file would on a PC or now a Mac and modern times but for whatever reason these stuff at files don’t seem to be transferring over to mini V Mac in a way that stuff it can read them the Mac used to put on some different file extensions onto these files there was like a resource fork that would get into the mix and for whatever reason it’s just not working for me and I tried everything so what really when you’re out there looking to download stuff I would again look for the zip version which usually contains a disk image so let me show you what that looks like with shuffle puck that we just downloaded here so I downloaded the shuffle puck zip file not the si T file and inside there was a folder with two disc images actually there were three but the third one I don’t want to show on camera here so we’re going to go with the this one which is the actual game and if I drag this over to my mini V Mac window you’ll see that it mounts it as a floppy disc right here on the desktop and what I can do here is either run it directly from that disc image or I can copy it over to my apps folder on my virtual hard drive here and then load it that way and as you’ll see here it will load up and we can play the game just like we were on the original hardware and in fact this is how I got this to work on the original hardware in the first place I grabbed it off of that website and dragged it right in there and you can go ahead and start playing your duffel pup cafe again and play just as poorly as you did before so pull stuff and just a fun way to get started here with playing around with the Mac if you don’t have working hardware so that’s going to do it for another retro review here on the channel and just like last year the hardware did not survive but hopefully we’ll get it working again I do want to find somebody
local to me that knows how to fix this stuff to maybe come in and try to get all these old 30 year old computers we’re once more because we got a dead Apple two Gs there that Mac se 30 stopped working as well I’ve got another dead 2e in the closet and my wife is beginning to wonder why we have all these rusted old relics kicking around that aren’t working I also reminded her that she doesn’t want me to be fixing these things because I’d likely electrocute myself or burn the house down so again we’re gonna find somebody professional to come in and help me and that might be a fun series to do so if you live in Connecticut let me know and you can come down here and help me out be kind of fun to do something like that so we’ll hopefully be able to explore that in the near future I do have one last working Apple 2e that I might try to connect up to that image writer too and make some holiday banners with the kids so maybe I’ll throw that on the extras Channel or something like that but so far we’re just not doing too well with this retro stuff I do eventually want to get to one of my Newtons I’ve got about four of those and one of those is bound to work for at least a little while so we do have some more retro things in the in the hopper for future videos but let me know what you thought of this one and have some fun with those Mac emulators and good luck because sometimes it can be really difficult to get those things working so we’ll put this thing away for now and I’d love to hear from all of you down below in the comment thread happy holidays to everyone and we’ll see you in the new year until next time this is lines I’ve been thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lawn TV supporters including gold-level supporters Kris Allegretto the four guys with quarters podcast Tom Albrecht and Kalyan Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
