The cutest little all-in-ones.
There's something that feels homey about the old beige boxes with black-and-white displays that we call Compact Macintoshes. Sometimes I feel like it's nostalgia, I have a lot of good memories playing Oregon Trail as a kid on a Mac Plus that my school had. Other times I think it's just because they're quite polite systems, simple and quiet boxes that don't take up a ton of space. Sure they don't do a ton, they're a little bit slow by modern standards and they don't exactly have the most advanced anything for their time, but there's a ton of fun to be had in their simplicity.
I own two working compact macs, a 128K and a SE. I've had the 128K for around twelve years as-of 2024, it was free from a religious school that was clearing out their closet clutter to whoever would take it. It lives in my bedroom alongside a few little boxes of floppy disks, all the boards in it were serviced around 2015, and I bring it out every now and then to do little bits of writing. The SE is much newer to me, only having had it for around a year. It was just recently serviced as-of initially writing this page (September 2nd, '24) and I've got a BlueSCSI loaded up with all sorts of goodies on it.
I've also got a SE/30 (that still needs logic board repair from bad capacitors + an analog board recap) and a Takky-modded Color Classic 2 (that needs a little help on the analog board due to prior damage making certain parts a slight bit flaky). Hopefully I have those two with issues running happy in the near future.
I have no intention to change anything on the 128K from its stock configuration. I know that in a sense I'm making the machine pretty useless by not upgrading it, it would really benefit from 512K if not 1MB of RAM, but there's some sentimental value with the machine as it is. I have it, I have its keyboard + mouse, I have a 400K Macintosh External Disk Drive, and I like it like that.
The SE was upgraded to 4MB of RAM as it should, something that I think helps a ton from the 2MB it had when I originally got it. I'm running a DB25 BlueSCSI (1.1, I'll upgrade to 2 with wifi soon enough) for hard disk suppot, the old junky MiniScribe now lives in the pile of dead SCSI drives instead of being a brick inside the case. Whoever had the thing before me was nice enough to pre-clip the battery out which I really do appreciate!
The SE/30 is going to get maxed out RAM and a ROMinator. I'm being quite lazy with the whole "fixing it" thing, all the old capacitors were taken off but I still need to re-lay the line of bus transceivers back down in the bottom-right of the board and put all new capacitors on the motherboard. It will also get a BlueSCSI 'cause I just like BlueSCSIs.
The Color Classic 2 is my machine that I really mess about with. I got it as a pre-modded system with a 6500/275 motherboard in place of the stock hardware. I do love the power that said board gives me, a 275MHz 603ev is quite the hell of a jump up from 33MHz 68030, but I did want to try playing around with said 33MHz 68030. A while of hunting about on Yahoo Auctions JP got me an original board, fitting that back into the chopped tray meant to fit that 6500 board was an exercise in fun, and then maybe a week later I went right back to said 6500 board. I've now picked up four different options for it: The original 33MHz logic board, a Performa 640 board with a 33MHz 68LC040, that 6500/275 board, and a 6500/300 board. The 6500/300 board lives in the case 95% of the time, the other boards are mostly just for showing people who tour my home collection how the whole Takky mod goes.
Last Update: 09024-1537
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