Awesome score on the IIfx, Colin. I was one of the fortunate ones who used one back in the day during my early career as an engineer at NASA, and I was similarly thrilled when I was able to obtain and restore one a few years ago for my collection.
@@organiccold when you could realistically become an engineer and be competitive on the market, before every single company abused the crap out of cheap workforce in other countries. It sure is not fun being young and trying to become someone and something in 2024.
Wow so my neighbour who had one for university (CS assignments) proooooobably didn’t need that level of power. Rich dad. I do blame them for starting my Apple fanaticism haha.
Nice video, I was the service manager for one of the top Apple dealerships in London in the late 80’ early 90’s. I even repaired Douglas Adams Mac II (my little claim to fame). The II, IIx and the fx were great workhorses. The fx was truly and awesome machine. One interesting point, many games at the time were unplayable on it as early games did not adjust for clock speed and processor power. I still have some of the early cards and parts stashed in a box in my garage, some new, unused. Nice work on the FD, they used to be a nightmare to clean and recondition. I don’t recall exactly but the fx was not cheap, I installed a lot of them for publishing companies and high end DTP. They were also used a lot in universities for high end graphic rendering and data modelling. Thanks again for the video, brings back memories. If I remember correctly the max MB was rated to 128MB, but it was extremely expensive at the time and highly unstable with the maximum RAM installed. In early documentation it was rated to 256MB, it was then revised down as the 256MB configuration never worked. The HD also struggled to keep up with the speed of the processor, if you were short on cash $$ there VRAM option (who remember that?). The IIfx was not always the easiest machine to configure and make stable.
Either they wore gloves or had very soft hands because even though the keyboard was dirty, the lettering is still in good shape. If they spent hours on it, the keys would be worn.
I used a logic analyzer that connected to one in tech school that had a capture card for recording data from a spectrum analyzer. But most like some kind of instrumentation. Also see these in simulation kits. Kind of runs the gamut but the capture card is usually there for joining data from offline instrumentation -- this is my first guess too because the BNC to RCA adapter most high end sopes and instruments had video out on BNC in the 90s
When I was a grad student at the University of Wisconsin (Center for X-ray Lithography), my research group put out a bid for an infrared spectrometer and we ended up with one controlled by a IIfx. Being a Mac user, I was happy about that but oh the price tag! I think the Mac alone was $7000. My boss also bought an A/ROSE (Apple Realtime Operating System) NuBus card for it and I was looking into controlling an older spectrometer with that, but never got around to it.
A/ROSE is wiiiiiiiild. It's basically runs in a whole embedded 68k system that actually had pre-emptive multitasking, when the machine it ran on didn't.
19:57 must be wild to join Apple as a system developer and work alongside someone who’s a veteran of veterans, principal of principals. “IIfx, Quadra? That’s me.”
Same, one somehow ended up in the arts high school I attended during the late ‘90s and despite being the one lone Mac nerd of the entire school and into vintage hardware before that was even a thing I totally didn’t appreciate the fx (or Quadra 950 for that matter). To my 14yo eyes in ‘97 it was an ancient looking aircraft carrier of a desktop with duct tape over the 2nd floppy drive and no CDROM that’d been relegated to a corner of our photo lab. I at least was curious enough to check the thing out a dozen or so times, probably the only person to touch it over my entire 4yrs of high school, and do remember it had 128MB of memory installed too.. bitch was fully maxed out and I didn’t even know or appreciate that despite being the weirdo who proudly rocked an outdated PowerBook Duo 280c at the time. Ugh! I still think about that machine and have regrets haha. Hope it’s in good hands and doing well
My father let me configure our IIfx back in January '91. I was in high school, but also helped do graphic design and photo scanning for our business. I spent a lot of time in Letraset ColorStudio. We had a SuperMac video card and 19" CRT monitor. I remember the monitor was almost $5,000 and it was a Trinitron tube, so it is flate vertically. Our IIfx is sitting upstairs at work in our storage room. It was taken out of production working perfectly. We have all of our old computers back to a Tandy Model I. I guess I should open a museum. :) I really need to get them all out and check the batteries. Ours were all pretty much sterile when stored and they were stored in sealed plastic bags. We still have a couple of Tandy 1000s that get used every couple of weeks. I never thought about the capacitors going bad.
Amazing! Yes, open a museum. 😀 I was 17 in 1987, working for my uncle, when he replaced the Commodore 64 we were using with a Mac Plus. The GUI and mouse blew my teenage mind! And he bought the 20MB HD, that was the same footprint as the Mac Plus and sat underneath it, for $1,000 (!). Loved Macs ever since.
As soon as I saw the GPIB board, it brought back memories. I supported a bunch of Mac boxes for the Georgia Tech School of Chemical Engineering in the early 1990s, first as a student assistant, then as a full-time employee. We had a couple of the IIfx boxes, but mostly had IIx, IIci, SE/30, and a few IIsi boxes. They had a bunch of IIci with HPIB/GPIB boards in them along with Labview to run their unit operations lab along with some scattered about in other research labs (mostly 4MB RAM with 80MB SCSI drives). When I left in '97, they'd mostly gone to PowerMacs or PC compatibles and various flavors of UNIX workstations. We never bothered to do as much repair work on the floppies as you did here - they were much easier to just replace back in the day. We'd clean/lube them a bit, but rarely a full disassemble/clean/reassemble.
The FD and FDHD were always a modular swap, as you said it was much easier just to replace them. That said, from time to time it was always worth havening a go from time to time. It was usually the lubricant (grease) that became old and sticky.
There are a few reasons why electrolytic capacitors are preferred over tantalum or ceramic caps in certain applications. Two common ones are 1) that electrolytic caps have better linearity with voltage and are therefore preferential in, for instance, audio circuits, and 2) electrolytic capacitors have a greater equivalent series resistance (ESR) which can be very important for power regulation, hence why they are common in power supplies. Replacing electrolytic capacitors for tantalum or ceramic capacitors with the same rated capacitance may thus not always be a good idea.
This is correct, high ESR (electrolytic caps) are usually required in linear regulator circuits for loop stability. I've used a handful of LDOs in the past which specifically warned against using MLCC/tants. Also, putting tantalums into a switching regulator may not always be straightforward - tantalums are VERY sensitive to both reverse voltage and overvoltage, even short transients. You must design the original circuit around them. If the switcher is poorly designed or aged, you may unknowingly be subjecting your replacement tants to stresses that will sometimes lead to very sudden and explosive failures.
@@marshallgsdo new capacitors have better liquids that are not as leaky as those from back in the day? Meaning that if you leave a new board with those for 35 years they would not need to be replaced in 2060?
Yes, it might be that they designed the motherboard for both since they hadn't worked out what the best choice for each capacitor was, and so they left it open for them to change it down the line if it was necessary to change one for the other.
@@tatianaes3354 The theory that I buy as to why there's this mini-capacitor plague around 1990, specifically on surface mount electrolytic capacitors, is because of the wave soldering they would've used at the time, this heated up the surface mount electrolytic capacitors to a degree that their internal gaskets aged prematurely. None of the through-hole radial or axial capacitors of that time are particularly prone to leaking, just the surface mount ones.
@@tatianaes3354 I'm sure newer caps are a bit better. At the least, they wouldn't spew their guts everywhere. But, electrolytic caps in general won't last forever. The more heat you expose them to, the faster they drop in effectiveness. Keeping electronics in a hot storage area is the worst for this reason, among others.
We used the same mac in the robotics lab in the technical university of Athens (Greece) in 1994. It was used for all sorts of things, including research into the control of an industrial robotic arm, which probably had a camera for feedback.
That's the advantage of something that was high end for the time, be watches, computers, cameras or cars, someone did pay good money for it and didn't want to see it going to waste later, hence the maintenance and being in good shape after all those years.
@@thedopplereffect00 Two things can be true haha The IIfx got replaced more often than not, when something more powerful came along. The PPC transition wasn’t as painful as the OSX transition, so it’s more likely to see a G3 or early G4 tower put to work until the 2010s. For instance maybe a DAW. But the 68030 era was also the 386 era, and that kind of thing was far more common in MS-DOS applications that didn’t transition to Windows.
I live in the UK and these machines are rarer than Hens teeth but I managed to acquire a perfect example 20 years ago and paid the princely sum of £40. I also by an amazing stroke of luck found 128Mb RAM (x8 16Mb modules) that originally cost £495 per chip. I also found a brand new 80Mb Hard Drive. I have two superdrives installed and a 24~Bit Graphics card. I love these machines and will never sell mine!
Fantastic! I remember these, but I was a teenager at the time, and only had the funds for a Zenith Data System running DOS 6.22, and an Intel 8088 CPU (8-bit data bus instead of 16-bit), and a CGA / EGA hybrid video card. Something like this would have been far out of reach of anyone I knew. I had taught myself BASIC programming, and had just learned the Apple IIe variant of 6502 BASIC the year before that. I was also still running my Commodore 64. So it's amazing to see this video. Congratulations on the effective restoration process. Absolutely amazing! I did pick up an Apple Quadra series about 10 years ago from a thrift store, and it works. So I'm pleased with that. It has been in a box for a time, so I need to see what condition it is in now, after having sat in isolation for 5 years. Your video gave some great tips on restoration and component replacement... hopefully Apple had moved beyond the Electrolytic capacitors for their Quadra builds. Thanks for the great video!
Just wanted to pop in while I watch this great video: I can never click on your videos fast enough when I see them. As someone who does board work for a living; it's oddly theraputic to watch you restore these old beauties.
Thanks for the memory flashback! I worked in "Computer Services" at a college in the late 80s/early 90s and worked on these at the time. I also had a personal II that was upgraded with a Daystar card that ended up being slightly faster in most things than the IIfx.
Great work! The first Mac I ever used, back in 1988, was a Mac II and I have very fond memories of it. Been Mac at home now since 1992 and would never go back to anything else.
great video! I appreciate the calm and straightforward tone of your work. The lo-fi beats and POV camera is oddly satisfying. Really dug your powerbook duo and mac tablet videos too.
Thanks for the gift of this vid, Colin. In all my college work in the late 80s and early 90's I only encountered one real world IIfx outside of the college bookstore sales demo models and MacWorld articles. In 1991-92 at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Apple donated a IIfx to our graduate program in Multimedia Design and Technical Writing. We used it for video capture and pushing the then-new Quicktime technology to new limits with Macromedia Director. Most of us didn't get to play with it too much, as the profs were hogging it!
What a beaut. I caught me a Mac II back in the day, the upgrades and expansion were something else. They were really nice workstation chassis with more expansion options than you could ever afford.
Oh yeah, there's a reason the Mac II especially was a nice workstation chassis -- from what I recall, they were in some kind of deal with Apollo computers (a UNIX workstation vendor who was bought by HP), the plan had been to use the Mac II as a UNIX workstation; besides AUX I think Apollo had intended to run DomainOS on it. But that fell through. Jobs was rather hostile to user expandability, but a UNIX workstation one expected expandability; therefore these had a lot of expandability.
Classic Nubus. I had some ancient Digidesign recording DSP cards and interfaces for these macs before switching the PCI based TDM cards and interfaces on the 9600, eventually moving to a G4. Such great times.
Thank you for the video! Brought me back to the days of working for an Apple dealer and repairing Apple products at the time. Brought back many memories.
It was lovely to see this one come together. It looks great. My dad had one of these in his home office for work. It was the first Mac I ever used. I fell in love with System 7 then. I *still* want one of these, even though I know it's not even the most powerful or desirable retro Mac I could get.
This video brings back a lot of memories. In 1991 straight out of college I was working as a designer in a small ad agency. My boss asked me to price out a new Mac system. Of course I got a price on a IIfx, but he totally balked at the $10K+ price tag! We ended up buying a IIci instead. A few years later in my next job I was lucky enough to work in a university where we had the budget for a Quadra 700. It was such a great work horse of a machine. In '98 I bought the same model computer second hand and used it as a business tool right up until 2005. Good times. p.s. In 1991 20Mb of RAM was huge!
Ahhhhhhhh The IIFx!! This was my very first Macintosh, and I loved it. Code named : Blackbird, after the SR-71 because thus machine was so fast in it's day!! I bought mine in 1992, and I actually still have it in mint condition.... Such cool memories of using it back then! ❤️
tysm for the video! I love the II series form factor. They just look so good on a desk, like there's just something about it that just says class. I managed to get my hands on a IIx a few years ago but the motherboard had been eaten alive by battery damage. It's good to know there are now replacement motherboards, so I'm definitely going to have to look into that.
I remember being around 10-11 years old here in TH-cam, and I found a 3D animation demo for the IIfx. I was *fascinated* by it, how 80s it was, and how a little crystal was floating. I went on a wikipedia rabbit hole and then got into retro tech. And here I am some 14-17 years later. This is one of my dream machines, maxxed out so I can run AutoCAD or Photoshop, or try run some Pascal (or C) compiler and try develop some fun thing.
Amazing project as always! The intermittent switches on the keyboard probably had to do with the bath, since Alps switches are not well sealed against dust and (especially) liquids, and the water could be shorting the switches' metal contacts inside. As the water evaporates they'll likely work properly again, although you might want to take the long hard path of opening them all to ensure they are clean and dry inside (and to ensure the springs and metal contacts don't rust). Blowing the dust from the bottom housings (which includes the metal contacts assembly) and then cleaning the stems, springs and top housings with an ultrasonic cleaner is usually a good idea on filthy keyboards (to remove any gunk that might make the switches operation too scratchy). As an extra step, you can put a tiny bit of Nyogel lube on the sides of the cleaned stems before you close the switches up, for a smoother operation. These AEKs are some of the best mechanical keyboards ever made, so preserving them is totally worth it!
I used a IIci doing Photoshop and Illustrator graphics with a Canon CLC 500 copier/scanner/printer at work for the university I attended. I remember lusting mightily after the fx. Happy to see one brought back to life.
Radius made large grayscale monitors for the Mac. Also, tantalum capacitors as shown are also electrolytic, the other type is aluminum electrolytic. Tantalums may not leak but can short.
A tantalum capacitor generally has a significantly higher frequency response compared to an electrolytic capacitor, That's probably why Apple used the two electrolytic caps. Great video Colin!
The IIfx is the first classic Mac I wanted to start collecting back in 2017. I first found an SE. Then, I found a Mac II. It wasn't what I wanted, but hey, it was related. To my surprise, it had the IIfx upgrade. Then, I got another IIfx shortly thereafter as well as a regular Mac II. I absolutely love these machines. I haven't had good luck getting it on my network yet, but I'm not sure if it's my own ignorance to System 7 or a defective card. I'll figure it out here sooner or later and make some better videos of it than my previous ones.
So glad I found this guy again. I haven’t watched him in years. And at 431k subs. It’s great to see him doing so well. I couldn’t be happier for him. He’s the one who taught how to install backlit screens in my gameboys
Fun fact: When I was making my apprenticeship at a graphics/print manufacturer in the year 2000, we still had to use some of these IIfx. We hated them, they were sooo slow. I was happy to get a Quadra at one point. ;-) Later we got some G3 Macs, and in 2004 even G4.
What a great Mac that was. I worked with the Mac IIfx and mainly with DTP, with an external removable hard disk for the fonts. Most used software was: FormsExpert from Purup Electronics, Denmark. Unfortunately my colleague was ahead of me... he was allowed to have the IIfx. Great video. Memories to old good times.
Great video. I do enjoy watching your material as the pace is just right and you explain things really well, making for an informative watch. I was late to the Apple party in the 90s, finding my feet with the original iMac, but I find learning about these older machines really interesting. Keep up the good work. 😎
I had an Mac IICi on my teacher's desk for a few years, with 2 monitors, a printer (on a side table) and connected to 6 apple IIs as a server. It rocked before my school switched to Dells and it subsequent network. My Mac had a buttload of Cards too! That National Instruments card looks like the one I hooked up those Apple II in.
I remember getting my hands on one of the first Mac IIs when working at DuPont. Just having color was amazing and the quality of the Trinitron monitor was really good. Fondly remember running FlowFazer on it and seeing the glorious colors and shapes it would create. This thing was so far ahead of any PC running Windows. It was like having an iPhone 5 years before anyone else.
Ah! The machine we all wanted back in the day but could only dream of! My first Mac was a IIcx (second-hand) and I absolutely loved it. Classic Apple design, still looks good today..
Awesome video! I am new to your channel and i really got into computers around 12/13 in 1992/1993 so this was right before I got into it all so learning about IIfx was beyond fascinating. thank you and i'm subscribed!
I used to sell and use all these machines back in the day. My first Mac was the Mac II that I built myself from old thrown away parts from a tech support center. I cobbled the MOBO, RAM, HDD, and power supply. The most expensive part was the brand new case that I had to special order for $250 from my own small Apple reseller. I was very proud about the build and my brother had an old discarded Mac color monitor that he had laying around from Boeing Computer Services. It was so gear back in the day--a $5K rig for pennies!
Oh the memories. My early 1990s HS photo graphics computer lab jumped straight from Mac II (68020) to the Quadra 900 (68040) as the primary workstation though, so we saved the 68030 fun for the LCII and LCIII learning stations. Only did higher-end employers post-HS have the older IIfx and IIci hanging around.
thanks Colin!!! love your restore videos! Would love to see you build and/or restore your or others windows 95/98/XP PC especially love to see you upgrade and custom mod them
Loved my IIfx - ran my BBS CyberDen on it with FirstClass - 4 modems, internet supporting 8 users, CD-ROM drives, all the storage - never even broke a sweat.
I worked for 4D.inc in 1990 (called ACI at the time) and I used to go to trade shows demonstrating the database's graphical abilities using a IIfx with that Neotech card connected to a CCTV camera. I'd take attendees photos, trigger the capture from a video source and add it to the database. Seems run of the mill now but was a "show-stopper" back in 1990 when databases were nearly all text based.
I love that you left the asset tags on the systems. I do that with all of mine because it shows the providence of the system and often in conversations I've heard "...and XYZ institution was doing ABC research/development on those systems..." and I have one from there/then and it might have been involved in it. A couple of times there was only 1 or 2 systems in the project so it was easy to identify. I love the stories and history of the old systems almost as much as using them :)
Man, I haven't seen one of those National boards since I worked at a service bureau where we had a IIci that ran a pair of imagesetters through GPIB. Lots of folks held on to their IIfx boxes because they had 5 or 6 nubus cards, and nobody who'd shelled out $20,000 for a IIfx in 1990 or '91 was going to cough up for a comparable Quadra 950 that soon. Thanks for this trip down memory lane!
We had 4 of these at my office, after we retired our original Mac CX to server duty. We added radius video cards and monitors for graphics duty and ethernet cards. They were workhouses and served use well until the G3 models came out. The business owners thought it was crazy to spend so much on a computer, but when the money started rolling in they stopped complaining, until of course when we needed new Macs and they complained "why can't you just use the old computer". BTW nice to see After Dark toasters again.
The best our schools had was the IIci and it was guarded like a shrine so the IIfx was like a mythical beast for my generation. I was just saying I'd still be very excited to explore one, I've still got a Mac Classic sitting in the corner waiting to power up for the first time in over 20 years. I can only imagine the BIOS battery looks like an old lost piece of tomato.
The IIfx was such a special machine, that it was also heavily used in music production and editing, being one of the first machines that were fast enough to record more than two tracks of audio, early versions of ProTools ran on this machine and at least one album was recorded/edited/mixed and mastered on a IIfx 1992's Switched On Bach 2000 by Wendy Carlos, the IIfx was also used as the patch librarian/editor for later Synclavier II's such as the one Gary Rydstrom used to create the dinosaur sounds in Jurassic Park.
I remember as a kid, my primary school owned one of these computers, exactly one - because they needed one high end Apple computer to govern over all the Macintoshes on the Apple network at the school and this was it. One of the teachers at the school was obsessed with Apple computers and was a big tech geek, I remember him going crazy over the first apple inkjet printer which he linked up to this thing and printed out a really amazing image. He kept the machine in his office, I didn't know if the school owned it or he owned it. But the school used it for designing flyers and posters for all their events and was likely used as the network admin.
Damn this brings back memories! I was an apple tech during the original mac roll out and the Mac II line was a quantum leap forward from the self-contained mac's.
I'm still kicking myself for not removing the batteries from my IIfx when I moved house and had to put it in storage. The batteries bombed it so badly that even the 128Mb of RAM suffered corrosion from battery spray. There seems to be something about the IIfx, or those specific batteries, that makes it prone to this issue. A company I worked for had around 20 older IIcx Macs in storage for a decade before they were disposed of, and I didn't see any leaking batteries when I was stripping them for recycling. I know they hadn't ever replaced the batteries as they all had a 1989 date, and they were a different battery brand to the ones I've seen in the early 90s Macs like the IIfx.
My dad worked for a print shop in the early 90s. He once brought home 6 Mac IIfx that were being discarded. I was 12 and was able to find one that powered on and then combined the different parts into one full loaded machine. I also am from Minneapolis.
Awesome video Colin, the IIfx was peak OG Apple. I had one in the early 2000s during my collection phase, with triple video cards with as many monitors including one 20” colour CRT, 64Mb of RAM, Ethernet card, dual floppies, HD and external CD-ROM it would have cost somewhere in the region of AUD$30K in the early 90s, which to put in perspective would have almost bought you a house where I lived! I had it dual booting MacOS and AU/X 3.1, though the latter proved extremely frustrating for both myself and my Linux buddy to do anything meaningful with. Sadly the system didn’t survive an interstate move and extended storage - those damn PRAM batteries made a mess of the logic board. I got my money back selling off all the other bits including the special IIfx only SIMMs, ROM and SCSI terminator which were already rare, high value items in the mid 2000s, but still carry the guilt of killing one of these rare beasts under my care. So great to see another still running in 2025. Happy New Year!
30 years ago when I worked at a University Institute (Europe) we had one of these boxes for a senior member of staff. Compared to the other PCs the mere mortals had, the Mac was really expensive. I cannot judge the speed as compared to a 486 PC. It is nice to see that these machines still run. B.
The Mac II cases were always a great design, but soooo huge. I was offered one for free back around 2000 and I regret that I declined. I used to run Mac emulation on my Amiga 3000, which was a bit faster than real Macs with the same CPU. The II FX was easily faster than the original Mac II which came with a 16mhz 68020 CPU. Great work on restoration on the Mac. Having a modern storage system helps to make it fly.
In electronics manufacturing, it's not uncommon to make a 'rolling change' where one lot of a given assembly is begun with one part, once stock is used up (and if none can be had reasonably soon), the alternate will be sent to the floor to keep the line going. Your board is obviously a 'cutover' from one to the other.
I've got an old IIfx sitting in my basement. I grabbed it from work before it was tossed out. It ran the last time I checked it a few years ago. I'm glad I replaced the batteries at that time.
Nice. I, too, owned a “Wicked Fast” Mac IIfx. I got it while working at the UCLA computer store (inside book store). IIRC, I got it for around 70% off MRSP as a special deal for student employees at the computer store. I believe I got it with an 8*24 accelerated graphics card. Great machine that served me well for a few years.
I recently bought a Macintosh II that turned out to be a IIfx with 32 mb ram. My board is just like yours with the same caps. First time a powered it up I was amazed the speed. I also had some cool cards, like a 386 pc card and a pretty nice video card that can display millions of colors. for the $100 a paid for it I was pretty happy.
I had a IIfx purcased second hand after the Quadras came out. That was the snappiest Mac experience I ever had. I loved that machine, using it for years. Macs got increasingly sluggish even after the PowerPC hit the scene.
From what I understand, capacitance on tantalum caps tends to drift a lot more with heat than electrolytics. Maybe Apple found that they drifted too far out of spec as the machine warmed up, so they used electrolytics in those specific circuits.
Awesome score on the IIfx, Colin. I was one of the fortunate ones who used one back in the day during my early career as an engineer at NASA, and I was similarly thrilled when I was able to obtain and restore one a few years ago for my collection.
The good old times 😊
@@organiccold when you could realistically become an engineer and be competitive on the market, before every single company abused the crap out of cheap workforce in other countries. It sure is not fun being young and trying to become someone and something in 2024.
Wow so my neighbour who had one for university (CS assignments) proooooobably didn’t need that level of power. Rich dad. I do blame them for starting my Apple fanaticism haha.
Nice video, I was the service manager for one of the top Apple dealerships in London in the late 80’ early 90’s. I even repaired Douglas Adams Mac II (my little claim to fame). The II, IIx and the fx were great workhorses. The fx was truly and awesome machine. One interesting point, many games at the time were unplayable on it as early games did not adjust for clock speed and processor power. I still have some of the early cards and parts stashed in a box in my garage, some new, unused. Nice work on the FD, they used to be a nightmare to clean and recondition. I don’t recall exactly but the fx was not cheap, I installed a lot of them for publishing companies and high end DTP. They were also used a lot in universities for high end graphic rendering and data modelling. Thanks again for the video, brings back memories. If I remember correctly the max MB was rated to 128MB, but it was extremely expensive at the time and highly unstable with the maximum RAM installed. In early documentation it was rated to 256MB, it was then revised down as the 256MB configuration never worked. The HD also struggled to keep up with the speed of the processor, if you were short on cash $$ there VRAM option (who remember that?). The IIfx was not always the easiest machine to configure and make stable.
Part of me wonders if this was connected to some kind of electron microscope, hence the capture card and other cards for controlling it.
Yeah that was my thought. Either a microscope or some sort of medical imaging machine.
Just glad that was a coffee spill on the keyboard, and not blood 😅
Either they wore gloves or had very soft hands because even though the keyboard was dirty, the lettering is still in good shape. If they spent hours on it, the keys would be worn.
I used a logic analyzer that connected to one in tech school that had a capture card for recording data from a spectrum analyzer. But most like some kind of instrumentation. Also see these in simulation kits. Kind of runs the gamut but the capture card is usually there for joining data from offline instrumentation -- this is my first guess too because the BNC to RCA adapter most high end sopes and instruments had video out on BNC in the 90s
Once spilled coke on a worthless PC keyboard and told others it was water. Except a curious half of the keys stopped responding, so …
These restoration videos are sooo good. The content, the editing, and the narration are all superb. Thank you for making them!
When I was a grad student at the University of Wisconsin (Center for X-ray Lithography), my research group put out a bid for an infrared spectrometer and we ended up with one controlled by a IIfx. Being a Mac user, I was happy about that but oh the price tag! I think the Mac alone was $7000.
My boss also bought an A/ROSE (Apple Realtime Operating System) NuBus card for it and I was looking into controlling an older spectrometer with that, but never got around to it.
A/ROSE is wiiiiiiiild. It's basically runs in a whole embedded 68k system that actually had pre-emptive multitasking, when the machine it ran on didn't.
Used one in 1990-92 in desktop publishing. 21” monitor. Aldus PageMaker and MacDraw for technical drawings and diagrams. LaserWriter IIg. Loving this!
LIVING THE DREAM! Bet you knew what that badge was about, “Windows 95 = Macintosh 89”
Do you still have your files from back in the day?
Can new Illustrator/Photoshop can open Aldus files?
@@tatianaes3354 Oh, PageMaker... yes.
19:57 must be wild to join Apple as a system developer and work alongside someone who’s a veteran of veterans, principal of principals.
“IIfx, Quadra? That’s me.”
I used a IIfx a bunch of times when I was a kid and had no appreciation for how insane it was.
ignorance is not always bliss
Same, one somehow ended up in the arts high school I attended during the late ‘90s and despite being the one lone Mac nerd of the entire school and into vintage hardware before that was even a thing I totally didn’t appreciate the fx (or Quadra 950 for that matter). To my 14yo eyes in ‘97 it was an ancient looking aircraft carrier of a desktop with duct tape over the 2nd floppy drive and no CDROM that’d been relegated to a corner of our photo lab. I at least was curious enough to check the thing out a dozen or so times, probably the only person to touch it over my entire 4yrs of high school, and do remember it had 128MB of memory installed too.. bitch was fully maxed out and I didn’t even know or appreciate that despite being the weirdo who proudly rocked an outdated PowerBook Duo 280c at the time. Ugh! I still think about that machine and have regrets haha. Hope it’s in good hands and doing well
My father let me configure our IIfx back in January '91. I was in high school, but also helped do graphic design and photo scanning for our business. I spent a lot of time in Letraset ColorStudio. We had a SuperMac video card and 19" CRT monitor. I remember the monitor was almost $5,000 and it was a Trinitron tube, so it is flate vertically.
Our IIfx is sitting upstairs at work in our storage room. It was taken out of production working perfectly. We have all of our old computers back to a Tandy Model I. I guess I should open a museum. :) I really need to get them all out and check the batteries. Ours were all pretty much sterile when stored and they were stored in sealed plastic bags. We still have a couple of Tandy 1000s that get used every couple of weeks. I never thought about the capacitors going bad.
Amazing! Yes, open a museum. 😀 I was 17 in 1987, working for my uncle, when he replaced the Commodore 64 we were using with a Mac Plus. The GUI and mouse blew my teenage mind! And he bought the 20MB HD, that was the same footprint as the Mac Plus and sat underneath it, for $1,000 (!). Loved Macs ever since.
As soon as I saw the GPIB board, it brought back memories. I supported a bunch of Mac boxes for the Georgia Tech School of Chemical Engineering in the early 1990s, first as a student assistant, then as a full-time employee. We had a couple of the IIfx boxes, but mostly had IIx, IIci, SE/30, and a few IIsi boxes. They had a bunch of IIci with HPIB/GPIB boards in them along with Labview to run their unit operations lab along with some scattered about in other research labs (mostly 4MB RAM with 80MB SCSI drives). When I left in '97, they'd mostly gone to PowerMacs or PC compatibles and various flavors of UNIX workstations. We never bothered to do as much repair work on the floppies as you did here - they were much easier to just replace back in the day. We'd clean/lube them a bit, but rarely a full disassemble/clean/reassemble.
The FD and FDHD were always a modular swap, as you said it was much easier just to replace them. That said, from time to time it was always worth havening a go from time to time. It was usually the lubricant (grease) that became old and sticky.
Amazing video Colin! Really nice edit and flow all the way through, that floppy segment was pure comfort food to watch.
There are a few reasons why electrolytic capacitors are preferred over tantalum or ceramic caps in certain applications. Two common ones are 1) that electrolytic caps have better linearity with voltage and are therefore preferential in, for instance, audio circuits, and 2) electrolytic capacitors have a greater equivalent series resistance (ESR) which can be very important for power regulation, hence why they are common in power supplies. Replacing electrolytic capacitors for tantalum or ceramic capacitors with the same rated capacitance may thus not always be a good idea.
This is correct, high ESR (electrolytic caps) are usually required in linear regulator circuits for loop stability. I've used a handful of LDOs in the past which specifically warned against using MLCC/tants.
Also, putting tantalums into a switching regulator may not always be straightforward - tantalums are VERY sensitive to both reverse voltage and overvoltage, even short transients. You must design the original circuit around them. If the switcher is poorly designed or aged, you may unknowingly be subjecting your replacement tants to stresses that will sometimes lead to very sudden and explosive failures.
@@marshallgsdo new capacitors have better liquids that are not as leaky as those from back in the day?
Meaning that if you leave a new board with those for 35 years they would not need to be replaced in 2060?
Yes, it might be that they designed the motherboard for both since they hadn't worked out what the best choice for each capacitor was, and so they left it open for them to change it down the line if it was necessary to change one for the other.
@@tatianaes3354 The theory that I buy as to why there's this mini-capacitor plague around 1990, specifically on surface mount electrolytic capacitors, is because of the wave soldering they would've used at the time, this heated up the surface mount electrolytic capacitors to a degree that their internal gaskets aged prematurely. None of the through-hole radial or axial capacitors of that time are particularly prone to leaking, just the surface mount ones.
@@tatianaes3354 I'm sure newer caps are a bit better. At the least, they wouldn't spew their guts everywhere. But, electrolytic caps in general won't last forever. The more heat you expose them to, the faster they drop in effectiveness. Keeping electronics in a hot storage area is the worst for this reason, among others.
We used the same mac in the robotics lab in the technical university of Athens (Greece) in 1994. It was used for all sorts of things, including research into the control of an industrial robotic arm, which probably had a camera for feedback.
Always astonishes me the detail to which you go to get these up and running again. So soothing!
That's the advantage of something that was high end for the time, be watches, computers, cameras or cars, someone did pay good money for it and didn't want to see it going to waste later, hence the maintenance and being in good shape after all those years.
It's more the software wouldn't run on anything newer so they had to keep it working as long as possible
@@thedopplereffect00 Two things can be true haha
The IIfx got replaced more often than not, when something more powerful came along. The PPC transition wasn’t as painful as the OSX transition, so it’s more likely to see a G3 or early G4 tower put to work until the 2010s. For instance maybe a DAW.
But the 68030 era was also the 386 era, and that kind of thing was far more common in MS-DOS applications that didn’t transition to Windows.
Battery removal shows the previous owner did want to preserve it.
I live in the UK and these machines are rarer than Hens teeth but I managed to acquire a perfect example 20 years ago and paid the princely sum of £40. I also by an amazing stroke of luck found 128Mb RAM (x8 16Mb modules) that originally cost £495 per chip. I also found a brand new 80Mb Hard Drive. I have two superdrives installed and a 24~Bit Graphics card. I love these machines and will never sell mine!
do you have pictures of the Set up?
Te la compro por 500.000€
@@Turmoil111 Good offer.
Fantastic! I remember these, but I was a teenager at the time, and only had the funds for a Zenith Data System running DOS 6.22, and an Intel 8088 CPU (8-bit data bus instead of 16-bit), and a CGA / EGA hybrid video card. Something like this would have been far out of reach of anyone I knew. I had taught myself BASIC programming, and had just learned the Apple IIe variant of 6502 BASIC the year before that. I was also still running my Commodore 64.
So it's amazing to see this video. Congratulations on the effective restoration process. Absolutely amazing! I did pick up an Apple Quadra series about 10 years ago from a thrift store, and it works. So I'm pleased with that. It has been in a box for a time, so I need to see what condition it is in now, after having sat in isolation for 5 years. Your video gave some great tips on restoration and component replacement... hopefully Apple had moved beyond the Electrolytic capacitors for their Quadra builds.
Thanks for the great video!
Just wanted to pop in while I watch this great video:
I can never click on your videos fast enough when I see them. As someone who does board work for a living; it's oddly theraputic to watch you restore these old beauties.
Thanks for the memory flashback! I worked in "Computer Services" at a college in the late 80s/early 90s and worked on these at the time. I also had a personal II that was upgraded with a Daystar card that ended up being slightly faster in most things than the IIfx.
Love your astute attention to detail and commitment to restoring instead of throwing away! Keep it up!
Great restore work. Thanks for the memories. I worked at Apple back then and worked on this and many other models. Great times.
Great work! The first Mac I ever used, back in 1988, was a Mac II and I have very fond memories of it. Been Mac at home now since 1992 and would never go back to anything else.
That keyboard cleaning was soooooo satisfying. Love that one chapter name, too.
came here to say this, love it.
Still have mine. Lovely Alps switches.
Just wash it under running water
great video! I appreciate the calm and straightforward tone of your work. The lo-fi beats and POV camera is oddly satisfying. Really dug your powerbook duo and mac tablet videos too.
I know you've been doing this for a while, but you've really got this video format dialed in. This was fun, relaxing, and relevant to my interests.
I really loved the song @6:50! In case anyone was wondering it's "Trouble Sleeping" by Baegel
Thanks for the gift of this vid, Colin. In all my college work in the late 80s and early 90's I only encountered one real world IIfx outside of the college bookstore sales demo models and MacWorld articles. In 1991-92 at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Apple donated a IIfx to our graduate program in Multimedia Design and Technical Writing. We used it for video capture and pushing the then-new Quicktime technology to new limits with Macromedia Director. Most of us didn't get to play with it too much, as the profs were hogging it!
What a beaut. I caught me a Mac II back in the day, the upgrades and expansion were something else.
They were really nice workstation chassis with more expansion options than you could ever afford.
Oh yeah, there's a reason the Mac II especially was a nice workstation chassis -- from what I recall, they were in some kind of deal with Apollo computers (a UNIX workstation vendor who was bought by HP), the plan had been to use the Mac II as a UNIX workstation; besides AUX I think Apollo had intended to run DomainOS on it. But that fell through. Jobs was rather hostile to user expandability, but a UNIX workstation one expected expandability; therefore these had a lot of expandability.
Classic Nubus. I had some ancient Digidesign recording DSP cards and interfaces for these macs before switching the PCI based TDM cards and interfaces on the 9600, eventually moving to a G4. Such great times.
Thank you for the video! Brought me back to the days of working for an Apple dealer and repairing Apple products at the time. Brought back many memories.
It was lovely to see this one come together. It looks great.
My dad had one of these in his home office for work. It was the first Mac I ever used. I fell in love with System 7 then.
I *still* want one of these, even though I know it's not even the most powerful or desirable retro Mac I could get.
This video brings back a lot of memories. In 1991 straight out of college I was working as a designer in a small ad agency. My boss asked me to price out a new Mac system. Of course I got a price on a IIfx, but he totally balked at the $10K+ price tag! We ended up buying a IIci instead. A few years later in my next job I was lucky enough to work in a university where we had the budget for a Quadra 700. It was such a great work horse of a machine. In '98 I bought the same model computer second hand and used it as a business tool right up until 2005. Good times.
p.s. In 1991 20Mb of RAM was huge!
Ahhhhhhhh The IIFx!! This was my very first Macintosh, and I loved it. Code named : Blackbird, after the SR-71 because thus machine was so fast in it's day!! I bought mine in 1992, and I actually still have it in mint condition.... Such cool memories of using it back then! ❤️
❤❤❤❤❤❤
The IIfx was the unobtainium halo car of Macs. A rare sight but what a beast. Really enjoy your restorations - soothing and informative
tysm for the video! I love the II series form factor. They just look so good on a desk, like there's just something about it that just says class. I managed to get my hands on a IIx a few years ago but the motherboard had been eaten alive by battery damage. It's good to know there are now replacement motherboards, so I'm definitely going to have to look into that.
I remember being around 10-11 years old here in TH-cam, and I found a 3D animation demo for the IIfx. I was *fascinated* by it, how 80s it was, and how a little crystal was floating.
I went on a wikipedia rabbit hole and then got into retro tech. And here I am some 14-17 years later. This is one of my dream machines, maxxed out so I can run AutoCAD or Photoshop, or try run some Pascal (or C) compiler and try develop some fun thing.
I did computer lab as my elective in high school and my district had all the latest Macs so these videos really hit the nostalgia buttons.
Very satisfying video, Colin. Another certified banger.
Nice work cleaning up that alps keyboard! Still may all-time favorite keyboard across all computers. the Mac is nice, but that keeb is magnificent.
Beautiful machine - great work. Greetings from Germany and happy new year!!
Amazing project as always! The intermittent switches on the keyboard probably had to do with the bath, since Alps switches are not well sealed against dust and (especially) liquids, and the water could be shorting the switches' metal contacts inside. As the water evaporates they'll likely work properly again, although you might want to take the long hard path of opening them all to ensure they are clean and dry inside (and to ensure the springs and metal contacts don't rust). Blowing the dust from the bottom housings (which includes the metal contacts assembly) and then cleaning the stems, springs and top housings with an ultrasonic cleaner is usually a good idea on filthy keyboards (to remove any gunk that might make the switches operation too scratchy). As an extra step, you can put a tiny bit of Nyogel lube on the sides of the cleaned stems before you close the switches up, for a smoother operation.
These AEKs are some of the best mechanical keyboards ever made, so preserving them is totally worth it!
I used a IIci doing Photoshop and Illustrator graphics with a Canon CLC 500 copier/scanner/printer at work for the university I attended. I remember lusting mightily after the fx. Happy to see one brought back to life.
Radius made large grayscale monitors for the Mac. Also, tantalum capacitors as shown are also electrolytic, the other type is aluminum electrolytic. Tantalums may not leak but can short.
A tantalum capacitor generally has a significantly higher frequency response compared to an electrolytic capacitor, That's probably why Apple used the two electrolytic caps. Great video Colin!
The IIfx is the first classic Mac I wanted to start collecting back in 2017. I first found an SE. Then, I found a Mac II. It wasn't what I wanted, but hey, it was related. To my surprise, it had the IIfx upgrade. Then, I got another IIfx shortly thereafter as well as a regular Mac II. I absolutely love these machines. I haven't had good luck getting it on my network yet, but I'm not sure if it's my own ignorance to System 7 or a defective card. I'll figure it out here sooner or later and make some better videos of it than my previous ones.
What a wonder My friend, You are SO lucky to have one working, Thanks a Lot for sharing, i appreciate it👌
So glad I found this guy again. I haven’t watched him in years. And at 431k subs. It’s great to see him doing so well. I couldn’t be happier for him. He’s the one who taught how to install backlit screens in my gameboys
Thank you, and welcome back!
That floppy breakdown and repair was actually quite relaxing to watch. Maybe not so much when you're doing the work, but I've never tried.
Most powerful MAC in 1990!
Good collect !
Great video. I used one these as my daily driver when I worked in the prepress / service bureau
Fun fact: When I was making my apprenticeship at a graphics/print manufacturer in the year 2000, we still had to use some of these IIfx. We hated them, they were sooo slow. I was happy to get a Quadra at one point. ;-) Later we got some G3 Macs, and in 2004 even G4.
What a great Mac that was.
I worked with the Mac IIfx and mainly with DTP, with an external removable hard disk for the fonts.
Most used software was: FormsExpert from Purup Electronics, Denmark.
Unfortunately my colleague was ahead of me... he was allowed to have the IIfx.
Great video. Memories to old good times.
Woah that's a sweet set of cards. Reminds me I should still build a retro PC for logging and programming my T&M equipment
This was a delightful video. Good job man. I hope you had a great Christmas.
Awesome one, thank you, Colin!
Hello ❤❤❤❤❤❤
Great video. I do enjoy watching your material as the pace is just right and you explain things really well, making for an informative watch. I was late to the Apple party in the 90s, finding my feet with the original iMac, but I find learning about these older machines really interesting.
Keep up the good work. 😎
The IIfx was a rocket for its time
I had an Mac IICi on my teacher's desk for a few years, with 2 monitors, a printer (on a side table) and connected to 6 apple IIs as a server. It rocked before my school switched to Dells and it subsequent network. My Mac had a buttload of Cards too!
That National Instruments card looks like the one I hooked up those Apple II in.
I remember getting my hands on one of the first Mac IIs when working at DuPont. Just having color was amazing and the quality of the Trinitron monitor was really good. Fondly remember running FlowFazer on it and seeing the glorious colors and shapes it would create. This thing was so far ahead of any PC running Windows. It was like having an iPhone 5 years before anyone else.
Used these for MANY years, doing Graphic Arts Pre-press operations straight out of college. They were the best for a couple years.
You really hit the jackpot with that find! Congrats!
Ah! The machine we all wanted back in the day but could only dream of! My first Mac was a IIcx (second-hand) and I absolutely loved it. Classic Apple design, still looks good today..
Awesome video! I am new to your channel and i really got into computers around 12/13 in 1992/1993 so this was right before I got into it all so learning about IIfx was beyond fascinating. thank you and i'm subscribed!
I used to sell and use all these machines back in the day. My first Mac was the Mac II that I built myself from old thrown away parts from a tech support center. I cobbled the MOBO, RAM, HDD, and power supply. The most expensive part was the brand new case that I had to special order for $250 from my own small Apple reseller. I was very proud about the build and my brother had an old discarded Mac color monitor that he had laying around from Boeing Computer Services. It was so gear back in the day--a $5K rig for pennies!
i used to service these things so that's why i enjoy watching these vids.... nostalgia. their industrial design back then was fantastic.
Oh the memories. My early 1990s HS photo graphics computer lab jumped straight from Mac II (68020) to the Quadra 900 (68040) as the primary workstation though, so we saved the 68030 fun for the LCII and LCIII learning stations. Only did higher-end employers post-HS have the older IIfx and IIci hanging around.
Awesome video. Very informative. Likes much the keyboard part.
thanks Colin!!! love your restore videos! Would love to see you build and/or restore your or others windows 95/98/XP PC especially love to see you upgrade and custom mod them
Loved my IIfx - ran my BBS CyberDen on it with FirstClass - 4 modems, internet supporting 8 users, CD-ROM drives, all the storage - never even broke a sweat.
I worked for 4D.inc in 1990 (called ACI at the time) and I used to go to trade shows demonstrating the database's graphical abilities using a IIfx with that Neotech card connected to a CCTV camera. I'd take attendees photos, trigger the capture from a video source and add it to the database. Seems run of the mill now but was a "show-stopper" back in 1990 when databases were nearly all text based.
Right? This is before AV Macs were a thing in Quadras. Any kind of TV image was remarkable.
Such a great find. Great work!
I love that you left the asset tags on the systems. I do that with all of mine because it shows the providence of the system and often in conversations I've heard "...and XYZ institution was doing ABC research/development on those systems..." and I have one from there/then and it might have been involved in it. A couple of times there was only 1 or 2 systems in the project so it was easy to identify. I love the stories and history of the old systems almost as much as using them :)
Man, I haven't seen one of those National boards since I worked at a service bureau where we had a IIci that ran a pair of imagesetters through GPIB. Lots of folks held on to their IIfx boxes because they had 5 or 6 nubus cards, and nobody who'd shelled out $20,000 for a IIfx in 1990 or '91 was going to cough up for a comparable Quadra 950 that soon. Thanks for this trip down memory lane!
Great video thanks for sharing. Really enjoyed every part of it
This video is so satisfying ... kudos man
We had 4 of these at my office, after we retired our original Mac CX to server duty. We added radius video cards and monitors for graphics duty and ethernet cards. They were workhouses and served use well until the G3 models came out. The business owners thought it was crazy to spend so much on a computer, but when the money started rolling in they stopped complaining, until of course when we needed new Macs and they complained "why can't you just use the old computer". BTW nice to see After Dark toasters again.
This is a great video, I am a Mac fan for the first day and this video nails it! Thank you 🙏
The best our schools had was the IIci and it was guarded like a shrine so the IIfx was like a mythical beast for my generation. I was just saying I'd still be very excited to explore one, I've still got a Mac Classic sitting in the corner waiting to power up for the first time in over 20 years. I can only imagine the BIOS battery looks like an old lost piece of tomato.
The IIfx was such a special machine, that it was also heavily used in music production and editing, being one of the first machines that were fast enough to record more than two tracks of audio, early versions of ProTools ran on this machine and at least one album was recorded/edited/mixed and mastered on a IIfx 1992's Switched On Bach 2000 by Wendy Carlos, the IIfx was also used as the patch librarian/editor for later Synclavier II's such as the one Gary Rydstrom used to create the dinosaur sounds in Jurassic Park.
I love your channel. Hope you had a good christmas ☺️
Now, this is a hell of a cool episode. 😮
What a beast.❤
I had a Mac IIci as my desktop publishing workstation, but lusted after the IIfx.
I remember as a kid, my primary school owned one of these computers, exactly one - because they needed one high end Apple computer to govern over all the Macintoshes on the Apple network at the school and this was it.
One of the teachers at the school was obsessed with Apple computers and was a big tech geek, I remember him going crazy over the first apple inkjet printer which he linked up to this thing and printed out a really amazing image. He kept the machine in his office, I didn't know if the school owned it or he owned it.
But the school used it for designing flyers and posters for all their events and was likely used as the network admin.
Damn this brings back memories! I was an apple tech during the original mac roll out and the Mac II line was a quantum leap forward from the self-contained mac's.
Loved watching this. Thank you.
I'm still kicking myself for not removing the batteries from my IIfx when I moved house and had to put it in storage. The batteries bombed it so badly that even the 128Mb of RAM suffered corrosion from battery spray.
There seems to be something about the IIfx, or those specific batteries, that makes it prone to this issue. A company I worked for had around 20 older IIcx Macs in storage for a decade before they were disposed of, and I didn't see any leaking batteries when I was stripping them for recycling. I know they hadn't ever replaced the batteries as they all had a 1989 date, and they were a different battery brand to the ones I've seen in the early 90s Macs like the IIfx.
this restauration doesn't seem to have been done in 1990
I too have a IIfx that has fallen victim to the battery bomb, but at least there are replica motherboards that can save them!
@@2dfx Replica motherboards? Do you have any more information about that?
Ooof that keyboard cleanup bit. Reminds me of my extensive cleanups. Felt the pain.
My dad worked for a print shop in the early 90s. He once brought home 6 Mac IIfx that were being discarded. I was 12 and was able to find one that powered on and then combined the different parts into one full loaded machine. I also am from Minneapolis.
Ive always wanted a IIfx... Looks great!
I entered high-school at the end of summer in 1990, and I remember the Apple IIfx! This thing was fast then.
yeah, compared to a desktop "pc" at 16-20Mhz this was killing them.. And the price killed you 😂
Awesome video Colin, the IIfx was peak OG Apple. I had one in the early 2000s during my collection phase, with triple video cards with as many monitors including one 20” colour CRT, 64Mb of RAM, Ethernet card, dual floppies, HD and external CD-ROM it would have cost somewhere in the region of AUD$30K in the early 90s, which to put in perspective would have almost bought you a house where I lived! I had it dual booting MacOS and AU/X 3.1, though the latter proved extremely frustrating for both myself and my Linux buddy to do anything meaningful with. Sadly the system didn’t survive an interstate move and extended storage - those damn PRAM batteries made a mess of the logic board. I got my money back selling off all the other bits including the special IIfx only SIMMs, ROM and SCSI terminator which were already rare, high value items in the mid 2000s, but still carry the guilt of killing one of these rare beasts under my care. So great to see another still running in 2025. Happy New Year!
30 years ago when I worked at a University Institute (Europe) we had one of these boxes for a senior member of staff. Compared to the other PCs the mere mortals had, the Mac was really expensive. I cannot judge the speed as compared to a 486 PC. It is nice to see that these machines still run. B.
The Mac II cases were always a great design, but soooo huge. I was offered one for free back around 2000 and I regret that I declined.
I used to run Mac emulation on my Amiga 3000, which was a bit faster than real Macs with the same CPU.
The II FX was easily faster than the original Mac II which came with a 16mhz 68020 CPU.
Great work on restoration on the Mac. Having a modern storage system helps to make it fly.
In electronics manufacturing, it's not uncommon to make a 'rolling change' where one lot of a given assembly is begun with one part, once stock is used up (and if none can be had reasonably soon), the alternate will be sent to the floor to keep the line going. Your board is obviously a 'cutover' from one to the other.
Man you making this video made my day!
I've got an old IIfx sitting in my basement. I grabbed it from work before it was tossed out. It ran the last time I checked it a few years ago. I'm glad I replaced the batteries at that time.
Nice. I, too, owned a “Wicked Fast” Mac IIfx. I got it while working at the UCLA computer store (inside book store). IIRC, I got it for around 70% off MRSP as a special deal for student employees at the computer store. I believe I got it with an 8*24 accelerated graphics card. Great machine that served me well for a few years.
I recently bought a Macintosh II that turned out to be a IIfx with 32 mb ram. My board is just like yours with the same caps. First time a powered it up I was amazed the speed. I also had some cool cards, like a 386 pc card and a pretty nice video card that can display millions of colors. for the $100 a paid for it I was pretty happy.
I had a IIfx purcased second hand after the Quadras came out. That was the snappiest Mac experience I ever had. I loved that machine, using it for years. Macs got increasingly sluggish even after the PowerPC hit the scene.
From what I understand, capacitance on tantalum caps tends to drift a lot more with heat than electrolytics. Maybe Apple found that they drifted too far out of spec as the machine warmed up, so they used electrolytics in those specific circuits.