Checking Out an In-Box Mac Performa 400!
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- Опубликовано: 16 сен 2021
- 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.freegeektwincities.org
Sources:
Performa 200 photo: www.alessandrorighi.com/my-com... 600 photo: madeapple.com/macintosh-perfo...
Dayton's store photo: vintagenewsdaily.com/inside-t...
Marshall Field's store photo: www.toledoblade.com/business/...
Apple IIe card photo: www.ebay.com/p/20028923609
Apple IIe card with box: i.pinimg.com/736x/e3/cf/61/e3...
Macintosh LC setup photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Macintosh LC dual floppy photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Performa 637CD box: / retro_90s_macintosh_pe...
Performa 200 photo: i.pinimg.com/originals/ca/90/...
Best Buy ad: geekologie.com/2011/09/21/bes...
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"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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you so much for this trip down memory lane. Back in the early 90s I was studying for my engineering degree, and while I had a passing familiarity with Mac I mostly had used PCs. After a couple of years of school I got really, really tired of walking to the computer labs to type reports. For more heavy-duty stuff we had SUN system labs I could go to, but for reports, spreadsheets, and the like sitting for hours ina lab to print, walk to my dorm, find an error, walk back, and repeat got old.
So one weekend I headed out to buy a cheap computer for my room. I believe it was a Sears, and I went for a PC (holding my nose as I hated them) but played with a Performa.... and it came home with me. It was this computer and monitor setup, and I loved it. Ran fine, played basic games, browsed BBS's, and I could do my work and then just stop by a computer lab while I was out to print stuff as needed. Used this computer for many years but ultimately went to PC as my work environments were all PC at the time and I've never been back to Apple (I mean, other than phone and ipad of course!)
Not the fastest or cheapest machine, but always felt well built and holistic... like the OS was designed to work well with the hardware. Something I couldn't say for my friends who seemed to constantly have to tinker with their Windows machines.
Thanks for this one!
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!
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
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.
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.
Always awesome to see things like this being saved, having it complete makes it so much cooler!
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 ruclips.net/video/DkNuO2KXv-8/видео.html
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.
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.
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!
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.
At Ease: Restricted for kids computer lab, usually featured MicroType and Math Blaster. Good times. Also Carmen Sandiego.
Really satisfying to listen to all your knowledge about these old apple computers, thanks for another one.
Awesome! Exactly the kind of video I was hoping for today! 👍
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.
My first home computer was a Macintosh performa 405 from 1992/93 maybe...
Thanks for the memories lol
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.
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.
My first Mac was an LC II - same as the Performa 400, as you point out. My second was the Performa 6200, which had the same case as that 635CD. So this video was a fun trip down memory lane. :D
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
thank you for another relaxing video,i wish we had a freegeek here with wonderful old stuff
Yet another fantastic trip down memory lane!
Love your channel, Colin. Cheers.
I remember when I was a kid in the mid 90s I would get up really early in the morning and I would watch the (SAME) macintosh Performa infomercial every morning at 5 AM and it had me hooked from that moment on even though it took me a long time to get a Mac. That lil ol'e infomercial turned me into a macintosh fanboy. And looking back on that infomercial from what I remember I do seem to remember it seem to be geared towards the family computer and getting it in the average household.
Look how much they have there. Oh how I'd love to be there!
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
When I was a kid my Mum's office had a network of LC and LC II's. I used to love working on them in the early 90s. I ended up working there as an adult too (early 2000s). I used to work as an all-purpose multimedia creator for tertiary education programs. I used to use that old Apple microphone to make music. I used a mod-tracker called 'Meditor' for system 7.1 I think. I also recorded one of my first songs with that microphone.
My first computer when I was a kid. Very cool video sir!
Aaaaand, we're instantaneously back at the shop!
I bet you were thinking, "Yeah, im'ma get this."
I remember using these machines in 5th grade in the early '90s and playing Oregon Trail. Fantastic walk down Memory Lane
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.
My best friend’s dad had one back in the early-mid 90s. I distinctly remember playing Prince of Persia 1 & 2, Quagmire, Lemmings, Leisuresuit Larry and Blood Bath. The other thing I remember is the whir of the fan and the soft ticking/groaning of the hard drive.
AWESOME VID. I hope you get someday the Apple II card!
I remember our elementary school computer lab in the early-mid 90s having those Apple //e cards. I was always so disapointed when they made us boot into the Apple //e system instead of getting to use the cool Macintosh with the amazing GUI and graphics
Awesome find.
God bless you. Stay safe.
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!
My first computer! We got ours from the local Montgomery Wards. Slow… remember photoshop 2.5 taking like 10 minutes to load. That poor 16mhz processor with 16bit data paths. Double click and go make a sandwich. Couple years later we upgraded to a LC475 but kept the monitor and keyboard. Still have it today and it still turns on (battery removed of course)
Great video! I was definitely hoping that at least the monitor would be powered on.
The Magnavox/Philips monitors were also used by Olivetti for their PCS 1992 range in the early 1990s, my college had a room of pizza box macs with these monitors
Oh my, this was my first computer! What a throwback
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.
I have an old Performa 600 in storage. It's the one with the CD-rom drive. The monitors have a slightly blurred screen.
Some editor software was able to run on the performas. Aldus Pagemaker worked on it. Adobe Photoshop needed a Floating Point Processor to work some things.
Great video! Subscribed.
My first Mac was a Performa 6115CD, which was a PowerMac 6100 bundled with a 15” Goldstar made display, like the one you show on the later Performa. I bought it in 1994. It also had a Global Village modem.
I had a performa 475 i loved it, people loved it, easy to buy and sell
This is my dream machine 😍
That’s nuts!
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.
By the time I bought my first computer, the Performa 400 was on its way out, replaced by the Performa 405, 410, and Performa 430. If I remember correctly, the 405 was the most basic replacement. I never saw a 410. The 430 came with a better monitor, and I think it might have had more VRAM.
I ended up getting a Performa 450. I wish I could find another one. The only ones I ever find online are the ones with the manual inject drive, but I want to auto inject drive cover.
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”.
Super jealous about the 7100 "Carl Sagan" Mac. Pretty sure I have a Reply DOS compatible card that only works with that model...
I never had a Macintosh until 2007, but I always used to see Performa series in stores and had always wanted one. Would have been a nice home computer back in the day, but I more a Windows person at the time.
Nice video, like it... Thank you
My first mac!
At ease LOL, dad thought he had secured the computer with that software XD
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 😄
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.
♫ It's my Mac in a box! ♪
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.
Great tim4 capsule 2 Thumbs up
I have that apple II card, maybe 2 of them, but I havent found the cable yet.
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.
Oh snap, we just talked about how I need to recap my P400...crazy!
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!
You mentioned Magnavox a couple of time, which was a subsidiary of Dutch electronics corporation Philips. This monitor was manufactured by Philips in Taiwan.
My Magnavox Headstart 500CD 386 came with that same exact monitor back in the day... minus the apple branding, of course.
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.
8:00 from my experience early 90s capacitor usually don't cause a lot of damage. The ones from the early 2000's can be absolutely corrosive.
Apparently they changed recipe of the liquid inside the capacitor somewhere late 90's, to water. This could be an explanation but I'm not sure
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 owned one of these.. a Performa 405 (LC II). From Sears
I have one of those PowerPc 7100/80..i use it to play old Mac Os 8 games :)
Dayton Hudson bought Lechmere up here near Boston
On the Apple II GS, if you don't have the battery installed, the display will only be monochrome so its important.
A lot of IIgses have the battery soldered in, too, which is annoying (but also easy to replace with a 2xAA battery pack if you cut the leads on the old battery close and solder to them).
Ah my Macintosh !
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.
Nice.👍
Can we please have more 18 minute "real quick one" videos? :D
Dayton hudson was mervyn's on the west coast
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.
Wow there’s soo much old apple tech there!!!!!
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.
Epic
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.
never saw the mic clip!!!... but that door on the front of the monitor was the ash tray because everyone smoked of course
Adding to the confusion is the video cables they used for Apple IIc and Apple IIgs.