Checking Out an In-Box Mac Performa 400!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- Apple's Macintosh Performa line debuted in 1992 with three models aimed squarely at home users. At Free Geek Twin Cities I found a Performa 400 and its monitor, complete with their boxes -- so let's check them out!
Free Geek Twin Cities: www.freegeektw...
Sources:
Performa 200 photo: www.alessandror... 600 photo: madeapple.com/...
Dayton's store photo: vintagenewsdai...
Marshall Field's store photo: www.toledoblad...
Apple IIe card photo: www.ebay.com/p...
Apple IIe card with box: i.pinimg.com/7...
Macintosh LC setup photo: commons.wikime...
Macintosh LC dual floppy photo: commons.wikime...
Performa 637CD box: / retro_90s_macintosh_pe...
Performa 200 photo: i.pinimg.com/o...
Best Buy ad: geekologie.com...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please consider supporting my work on Patreon: / thisdoesnotcompute
Follow me on Twitter and Instagram! @thisdoesnotcomp
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Music by
Epidemic Sound (www.epidemicso...).
"Just a quick one here..." then I remember it's Colin's idea of a quick one! Happy to spend almost 20 minutes going through this amazing machine, thanks Colin!
Ope
2:30 Dayton Hudson (the parent company) is now known as Target. The department store branch was sold to May Department Stores (in ~2000) and has since been merged into Macy's.
I was a kid at the time, and I remember these being displayed in the downtown Minneapolis store. Every Christmas we would check out the 8th floor walk-through, eat lunch at the Oak Grill or Sky Room, and shop. These were located in a computer display on the Basement level which had blue lighting and futuristic music. I was mesmerized.
I bought the Performa 600CD back when this was being sold. I bought mine at Montgomery Wards. It's retail price was something like $2,500, including the monitor, but mine was the display model, so cheaper, and doubly so, because someone had password protected the system, and they couldn't undo it. :-) When I got home, I opened Claris Works, and saved a file with the same name over the file that had the password, and I got full access to the system. I could have done that at the store, but I negotiated the price based on how it was locked out, and how "difficult" it would be to fix that. Oh, my Performa came with the extended keyboard, and the nicer monitor too. Oh, paid price? $840. ;-) (without box, and disks and discs, but with manuals)
fucking baller move tbh
That pizza-box form factor was super compact for a home computer back in the 90s
Fixed cables on monitors wasn’t just an Apple thing. All my VGA monitors from the 90s until early 2000s came with a fixed VGA cable. Was especially great when I accidentally bent a few pins in one of the connectors 😑
Yeah, removable cables in the 90s were a feature on high end monitors as I remember, possibly coming down to the mid range in the very late 90s/early 00s.
@@lemagreengreen if you got lucky you got two inputs one vga and one bnc.
It's a feature. The issue is the DB-15 VGA connector poorly handles the bandwidth of the (then) modern screens, particularly with analog impairments like crosstalk and ringing. By having a captive cable, they reduce the crappy connectors by half. The better monitors eventually got much better BNC connectors on the monitor side.
Better get to that recap... My LC II looked pretty clean at first glance, but a few of the pads were already goners. Had to run a bodge wire or two, but the operation was a success in the end. It’s up and healthy again!
Might want to attend to the PSU caps while you’re at it. IIRC, a couple of those were starting to leak too.
Always awesome to see things like this being saved, having it complete makes it so much cooler!
7:04 You can still buy those batteries new, I bought some about a year ago on Amazon
You can also find them at places like Batteries+Bulbs if you need one right away. A few people have also modified their logic boards to take CR2032s.
Really satisfying to listen to all your knowledge about these old apple computers, thanks for another one.
By watching all the videos in this channel I ended up liking all that Apple old stuff, which is fun because you Colin make it fun, and it's even more fun the fact that I remember things of the 90's. Thank you.
Love the videos! I grew up in Brooklyn Park (suburb of Minneapolis) and remember Dayton's. Dayton's/Hudsons's also owned Target. in 2001 all the remaining Dayton's/Hudson's stores turned into targets. That's why you might see a mall with a Target anchor location.
Look how much they have there. Oh how I'd love to be there!
Aaaaand, we're instantaneously back at the shop!
I bet you were thinking, "Yeah, im'ma get this."
In the 80s I would hang-out at the Brookdale Dayton’s electronics department on the second floor. I remember putzing around on a b/w Mac in early elementary school while my mom shopped. Likely an SE or SE/30.
My first Mac was the Performa 450 released a year or so later - it was sold via an office supplier in the UK targetting "DTP" for the home office and IIRC they did 0% interest payments. The 0% interest was why I ended up with a Mac, it certainly wasn't any sort of conscious choice as I was utterly ignorant of PC's in general, and just wanted to be able to design and print my own leaflets and brochures, so needed a "computer".
One thing that would NEVER have occurred to 99.9% of Mac owners to do back then, would have been to open the case. It was a black box mystery that only people with Masters and PhD's in computing and electronics could possibly understand. My point is the aura of mystique that surrounded these things for most people at the time - I owned one for years and this is the first time I've ever seen inside it! Looking back I see how carefully Apple nurtured that mystique - and how to this day so much of that Apple aura absolutely relies on people not poking around and figuring stuff out. Happy to report I've built at least half a dozen hackintoshes at this point and my romance with Apple hardware ended a very long time ago - still love the OS, well up to Mojave anyway. Cheers - great video!
I can hear 8-Bit Guy… Retrobrite!
And oh sweet let's totally destroy the OG fasteners and PSU LOL
He did a good repair on an LC II not long ago where he put the motherboard in a dish washer to clean up the leaky “cap juice”.
AWESOME VID. I hope you get someday the Apple II card!
I BUILT A BUSINESS with a Performa 400 running Clarisworks and a Style-Writer printer !
For around $2000 in the early 90s you could have all the tools needed to maintain and serve a large customer database.
Love your channel, Colin. Cheers.
I have an LCII. Been sitting in storage and last I tried it, it would not boot. But I still hold on to it. I need to tear into it and replace caps etc. Last time it worked it would randomly reboot and sometimes nonstop reboot and play the boot chime over and over with gray screen. I also have all the original documentation with the machine. ClarisWorks boxed software bundle, Print Shop, and an ImageWriter printer.
It’s definitely the caps. They are not kind to that poor motherboard.
I may not have the performa 400, BUT I do have the LCIII so I do at least have some experience with this model of machine. Someday I hope to upgrade it to have a SSD and a Floppy EMU or floppy to SD adapter.
i never own a apple computer growing up. my first computer was a trs-80 coco 2. but my school as a kid did have an apple ii & an apple iic. i did pick a apple ii up at goodwill yeas ago before ebay for $15. then i picked up a imac g3 up at goodwill for $25. then i found a imac at a fleamarket for $25.
Apple has always been the king of "slowing down" computers. I remember being in grade school and these computers being just one or two years old, and immediately having a lag and sluggish feeling to them. That's from just trying to run educational software. Can only imagine what productivity software felt like.
You mentioned Magnavox a couple of time, which was a subsidiary of Dutch electronics corporation Philips. This monitor was manufactured by Philips in Taiwan.
I have that apple II card, maybe 2 of them, but I havent found the cable yet.
Many late 80s-early 90s Mac models will not boot with a missing (or dead) PRAM battery. I saved people a lot of $$ as a Mac tech at CompUSA in the late 90s, by keeping a bin full of new 1/2 AA batteries on my bench.
I owned one of these.. a Performa 405 (LC II). From Sears
The first PC my family had (1992/93?) came with that same monitor, but with a VGA connector of course.That one was branded "DIGITAL" as in Digital Equipment Corp. I recall using it through my first year of college in 99/00, at which point it was getting super dim, and it was like looking at a fish bowl compared to newer screens that had come out by then. Yeah, it worked, but it was nothing special!
I had a few of these old Macs several years back in my collection, but gave away most of them. I wished I would have kept them instead.
still got my 475 box :O
2:45 1700$ was the introductory price of the LCII if the Wikipedia article is accurate, so that particular machine was not exactly a fine deal, right?
You saved some money if you consider that the Performance came with a keyboard and some bundled software. Adding those to an LC II probably would have cost another $200 or so.
Dang.... Four hundred fifty early-nineties dollars for a 14" .29 dot pitch monitor? I remember my Axion .28 dot pitch SVGA monitor costing a far cry less than that in November of 1992. No wonder my dad would never buy me any Macintosh stuff. I had to wait until I became an adult and start collecting them now to scratch that itch I developed so young LOL.
My first mac!
Had the Performa 600 with a LaserWriter LS and the Trinitron Apple monitor (the nicer monitor than this one) as my first computer.
Have you ever given a SCSI SSD a go?
Holy crap, the last time I saw one of these computers was in kindergarten.
had that mointor with my power mac 7200
Apples Slogan IT JUST WORKS is what it says of it's products but sometimes bugs can and do get into software when it shouldn't.
Didn't Daytons become Target at some point?
I still remember the disappointment when my school got these for the computer lab instead of IBM PS/2s
Nice.👍
if those batteries leak all over the place, it's game over, that mac is toast, it is difficult if not, impossible to fix if that happens, just best to recycle the board or use the battery damaged board as a parts board. there are the nicad ones that you find on 286, 386 or 486 and some early pentium motherboards which do leak slowly, and the lithium ones build up pressure and burst.
1/2 AA is a curse on vintage enthusiasts for sure
Hey Colin Howzitgoin, how's it going?
What those 68k Macs needs are a PiStorm :)
Very rare like new
Epic
It's like a lc
At least the caps didn't eat through the board.
4:20 UV giveth then taketh away.
The Performa Display was the low quality display. The Performa Plus Display was the higher quality. Not Trinitron quality, but it was .29 dot pitch.
Hey buddy I like your videos specially the gaming videos , but I want to buy a iMac desktop but I'm a beginner with this so I need some suggestions and also I don't want a new one, too expensive for me I prefer a used one , I need it for regular use and downloads programs and files that I don't have to be worry for windows Viruses BS...
TDK power supply wtf?
It was one of their side businesses at the time, since they made (and may actually still make, I don't know) one of the components that go into switch-mode power supplies (ferrite cores).
Save people money.... $450 for that 'low end' monitor. Apple never changes.
I really need to give Free Geek a look if I’m ever in the area…. Ugh, such a goldmine doesn’t seem to exist in Ohio.
Nope but there are plenty of people in Ohio that try to sell old computers like this but usually want 3x of what they're actually worth.
Soldered ram, crappy keyboard that you have to purchase separately, non replaceable cable, proprietary connection that nobody uses. ... Yep that was apple even back then.
Packard Bell was another company that did that crap (particularly the soldered RAM and the crappy keyboards). A lot of those machines had foam-and-foil keyboards, and they sucked even then.
That is a good example of why Macintosh (apple) was dying. Keyboard from Macintosh was $100.00, IBM keyboard for ps/2 $100.00. Clone keyboard $30.00. Also look at those prices. $1700.00. That got you a nice IBM clone with VGA monitor. Now I do admit that during that time. The mac Os was superior to dos. But price and speed talked.
No one use DOS in 1992, though. The 32-bit protected mode computing was already in full swing with Windows 3.1, and other extenders and memory managers.
Apple could offer only a weaksause 68k, which lacked paging and memory protection entirely.
@@IkarusKommt Depends on who you are talking about. The average person was using Dos and windows 3.x was just taking off. Even then plenty of people I know of from that time who used Dos and continued to use Dos. A good example was Autocad for dos. Sure they wanted a nice unix workstation for Autocad. But, they could not afford it. A very small group didn't switch until Windows 95 came out.
with inflatation thats $3,416.47
These Macs absolutely need the pram battery to power on. Most of them will not power on at all without a good pram battery.
This thing is utter junk. It was utter junk when it was new.
Not the case. There’s no battery in my LC II and it boots fine. Same with a Quadra and pair of Power Macs.
Hardly junk, either. It wasn’t a beast, but it was close (give or take some) to equivalent to the PC I had at that time, except 1/5th the size, and a full GUI OS.
@@nickwallette6201 Most 68k Macs will not turn on with a PRAM battery. There are some exceptions though and even on machines that need it, I think it has more to do with the pram being corrupt. I've seen many II models and even Quadra models do this.
Yes, this thing was total junk new. It's the lowest end 030 you can get and uses only a 16 bit external data bus. The video is slow as hell too. This thing is a 92 computer! If it was an 89 model, it would be different.
I had one of these as a shared machine in 94/95 doing end user tech support. It was slow as all hell.
4mb ram😲
Beautiful machines more reliable than new crap
This was okay, but I prefer your more produced content. Also, the sound in this video was overly loud.
Remind me now iPhone 12 or 13, that does not include a charger, same sh**t as keyboard here.
Edit : 15.40, what is iMac ?? on the right ?
Dayton’s. Buy with confidence from a company that doesn’t understand basic grammar and punctuation!
They should have put a z instead of an s. Go pure North American! Jesus.
Just plug it in. Seriously.
Okay so why would you say in box if it’s literally a used computer in the box. Borderline clickbait dude
I guess the age old question must be asked here.. does it run Doom?
That Magnavox monitor must've been sold exclusively on the retail market. I never saw any Macs in schools using it. And it definitely doesn't match the look of the machine.
I think you’re right, I don’t remember seeing them in school either. There were also several Performa-exclusive monitor models, so I think Apple just slapped their name on whatever they could get the best deal on.
I used to have an LC II with a similar "Performa Plus Display" from a local school (not necessarily a school model, though - they weren't officially sold in Russia for that) and the display looked similar to this minus the labels and the geometry knobs, it was definitely not the "flush" LC monitor
I remember playing Sim City 2000 on one of these in high school(probably like a 475 tho looking at the specs). Had tons of them at the art department.
Absolutely love this form factor BTW. Like kind of a thin desktop case with a matching monitor. If I ever get a permanent retro PC set up, it’s going to be something like that.
Man I REALLY wish we had something like FreeGeek here in Raleigh, NC. I sometimes think about trying to start something like that, but I have a full time healthcare job and wouldn't know the first thing about doing something like that.
You get Clint from LGR locally instead. :)
@@JB-mk4ry haha, this is true!! The goodwills here are not anywhere near as good as his!
@@Sykora171 I'm down in western SC, along the GA border and the Goodwills here can be hit, and miss big time as well(same for other thrift stores), and we have nothing like Free Geek, but I am thankful our local recycle drop off lets me dig though the e-waste bin if it's no too busy, and I've come up with a few good things here, and there like IBM keyboards, Apple Macbook pros, Amazon Kindles, old Dell P4 systems for 98SE/XP builds, and a still very useable HP machine with a hyperthreaded Intel core i7 2600s I upgraded the ram to 16GB, 120GB SSD(came with 1.5TB HDD I use for storage), and a low power MSI AMD R7 250 2GB OC GPU I had in the parts bin, and with Manjaro Mate Linux it works great. If you have any local e-waste drop off locations see if they will let you look around, you never know what you might find.
I had the Performa 400 with the matching Trinitron monitor. And 40 MB HD. Upgraded it with a 170 MB HD, 8 MD memory and a acceleration card. 1699 Dutch guilders, all included (also the monitor). 1699 is 900 USD.
The monitor you have there isn't the lowest end one, actually. The Apple Performa Plus monitor had a .29 dot pitch, 67hz. The Performa monitor, even lower than this one, was .39 dot pitch, 60hz. We had a saying at retail when selling these things... 60hz, hurts!
Very interesting! I had a 1993 Performa 400 that I bought at Sears. I upgraded the memory to 10mb (the maximum that the motherboard supported). I installed RAM Doubler which increased the effective memory to 20mb without using the slow virtual memory. It was quiet, compact, and it booted in 1/10th the time that my 386DX PC did into Windows 3.1. I would still have used it now hadn't that the HD failed. Thanks Colin!
Ram Doubler was just virtual memory. It was a scam!
@@bltvd No, it wasn't. It used compression in memory, and did not touch the hard drive at all. I used it for over 5 years extensively.
@@Stryder_The_Nite_Owl 😂😂😂 It is a known scam! Where do you think this magical extra memory came from!? Compression 😂 Oh that is rich!
@@bltvd Really? Please, expand on this for me... I used a Mac IIsi with 5MB of RAM in 1993, with RAMDoubler, and I was able to use more applications than I could with only 5MB of RAM. Additionally, it did not write to the disk using virtual memory. It was in-ram compression. It was not a scam. Did you actually ever try RamDoubler software by Connectix? There were other 'ram doubling' programs made for Windows, that really didn't work. The Macintosh RamDoubler did work.
@@bltvd th-cam.com/video/DkNuO2KXv-8/w-d-xo.html
The Apple II card wasn't as fast at drawing the screen as an actual Apple II which kinda sucks but it's still great that they offered this for classrooms so they could use their existing software library.
About 20 years ago a co-worker wanted to get a "gaming computer" for his son and came back with this one.
He wanted me to check it out first to see if it were any good. I said to him "This is a Mac. You can't game on it." :-)
Ope
I wonder where that kid is now.
The Performa 600 wasn't exactly just a rebadge of the IIvx. The IIvi and IIvx were identical machines, but the IIvi had a 16MHz CPU and no cache, and the IIvx had a 32MHz CPU (still on a 16MHz bus) and 32K of L2 cache. The Performa 600 sat inbetween the two, it had the 32MHz CPU of the IIvx, but the lack of cache of the IIvi.
The SAFT battery in there may have been a replacement. Typically you see the red Maxell's or the purple batteries in Apple products, but yes check the date and change it. But in the case of my LC475, it does require a battery to boot properly -- I don't recall if that's universal among the pizza box Macs. You can get it to boot if you power it on and quickly flick the power switch off and on. Something to do with the RAM check.
The Maxells were what Apple used at first, and a *lot* of them exploded or leaked. The Tadiran (purple and black) batteries are better but do still have a tendency to leak. I've used SAFT replacements in the Macs I have that use this type of battery, and so far they've all done well, though if it's more than 10 years old it needs to go.
At Ease: Restricted for kids computer lab, usually featured MicroType and Math Blaster. Good times. Also Carmen Sandiego.
I used to repair these daily. LCs, Performas, PowerPC*, 480/580, iMacs.....hate these computers lol. OS 7.5+ was easy enough to support --> Boot to CD, rebless the System folder. Clear out extensions as necessary but otherwise performance would *tank* after just a little bit of use....... I still got to play Warcraft so maybe I shouldnt' complain so much lol
The 7100/80 at the end - we had that exact model at one point when I was a kid (among many other macs that my family had but couldn’t afford and bought anyway…). It was the first Mac I could play some “cool” games on, like doom. Loved that machine.
What a cool find-in the original box and everything! And great job with the video as always! I wish we had a place like Free Geek Twin Cities here in Denver!
My first mac! Loved that thing. Kid Pix, Crystal Quest, Spacestation Pheta. We had an external SCSI CD drive, too. I spent hours looking at the video clips in the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia.
In the Detroit area in the early 90's, schools would order these and apple would throw in a free stylewriter. Because the stylewriter was not on the official invoice, the school staff would take the printers home and pawn them. There were thousands of stylewriters in the pawn shops of Detroit.
16:43 That one brings back memoies. This was my first computer, as it was handed down by my father when he got an IBM Aptiva in 1997.
I did play hours of Prince of Persia on my LC II as a kid. But a bit flakey for anything else. I'm having flashbacks of trying to run Internet Explorer on 4MB of RAM. Internet computer it was not, even for the day. First computer I ever owned. I think I had the smarts to save a couple of bucks and nab a Quadra off eBay, the difference was astounding.
Can we please have more 18 minute "real quick one" videos? :D
My Centris 610 actually came to me in box as well, with it's original pricing sheet.
Poor guy paid $6300 for a computer and then never even opened the box, he was in the hospital when it showed up and by the time he was out the PowerPC machines had already replaced it.
Better to be safe than sorry but know that those Saft/Tadiran batteries don't have the same explosive flaw that the Maxell ones do, so don't worry too much.
I have taken them out of my LC II, Quadra 700, Power Mac 8500 and 9500, and a 1/3rd AA that I think came from a PS/2 Model 30. All of them were fine, but as above - better safe than sorry!
I built a 3D model of the cell and had Shapeways print it. I’m waiting on the PCB fab for a tiny board that will step up 3.0V from a CR2032 to 3.6V like the original 1/2AA. The coin sticks out vertically through the slot in the top of the battery holder.
I remember in school we had Apple II, mostly playing Oregon trail. After school we had a LC II with a monitor that stood over, but not on top of the LC II. In this era there were tons of different models, really confusing. Apple must have learned their lesson because now you only have the pro and mini for desktops.
I played on an IIe in school back in the 90's and would like to get one again but everyone that has one for sale want way too much money for them.
@@benkeysor7576 I think I actually had a IIe. Home I had a Commodore 64. I’ve heard the MOS chips in both go bad over time.
These Performa monitors were horrible. When I bought my LC475 (it was sold under that name in addition to Performa 475 in Europe, not just to education), I shelled out a bit more money to get the 14" Trinitron that was released with the LC back then to replace the expensive 13".
Very much a nostalgia trip. After the death of our Apple IIGS my family bought a member of the Performa 460 line, I don’t remember which model (460,466,467). The only difference between the models was the bundled software I believe, the hardware was a slightly updated LCIII. It’s known as the LC III+ but I don’t think it was ever available for sale in the US as such.
I do remember is that it all came in one large box that took up an entire seat in the family car, as I remember driving home from the store next to the large box. By that point not only was the monitor included but so was a modem as it was the hay day of online services like AOL and Compuserve.
Super jealous about the 7100 "Carl Sagan" Mac. Pretty sure I have a Reply DOS compatible card that only works with that model...
I keep the boxes of my electronics and all the packaging. Not for me but for someone like you and me 30 years from now that will get excited about a complete inbox Fuji X-T2 camera with all the manuals. I’ve also started labeling my computers inside when I perform an upgrade.
Ha I had exactly the same monitor with my Hyundai Super AT 286 PC I got from my dad which he got from his work 😄
The problem with the monitor is not just the cable. They run at 67hz, which is pretty non-standard in a PC monitor. Most VGA monitors of that era absolutely will not sync with an Apple computer. The built in graphics card usually also cannot put out a standard refresh rate either. The multisync monitors came later. In 1990, which is when this was made, you pretty much HAD to use an Apple monitor.
You could get multisync monitors in the early 1990s (NEC first introduced them under that name in 1985), but they were typically more expensive than a monitor that could only do basic VGA. The price differential was enough that a lot of PCs didn't start getting them until around 1995.
@@lee4hmz Yes, they were around, but few and far between. They were pretty good at locking you into their tech. It is a BEAR trying to get a non Apple hard disk to work in one of these machines even.
I may be speaking out of turn, but if you want to undo the yellowing of the case I've seen a bunch of restore videos using hydrogen peroxide and UV lamps.
I hate the styrofoam sound rubbing against cardboard
Oh gawd no. All the horrible memories of having to use this infernal machine at school in a time period where Pentium 3 where a thing.
I bought a Mac Mini in 2011 and I had to buy a keyboard and mouse separately.
This was my first Mac! And yea I remember my family bought it at a department store, I think Sears or JCPenny. I also remember that one benefit of AtEase was that it took less memory than Finder, so I could run games a little bit faster :)