Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac
24 comments
·July 8, 2025zdw
The best thing about old computers is they're so damn simple, and there are a ton of projects out there to enhance them - for $50 you can get a BlueSCSI which gives you hard drive/optical/network emulation on many machines.
Also, new tools are way more capable and cheap - all you need to fix an old computer with a sub-50mhz bus clock is a multimeter/scope, soldering iron, and other bits, which can easily be purchased new for $200.
a_vanderbilt
I've been slowing working on a hobby project to 3D print a lookalike Sony PVM with a computer inside. There is a joy in knowing exactly how something works, and to be able to fix it intuitively.
PaulHoule
Old cars are even like that in performance. My son and I just bought a 1979 Ford Thunderbird which has a 5ℓ V8 engine but doesn't accelerate as well as a modern compact with a 1.5ℓ Inline 4.
It is simple though, it doesn't have a lot of complex parts to repair.
asciimov
My family had a '79 Thunderbird that was our main driver from 91-97. I haven't seen any of them on the road in over a decade. I have several memories of that car.
- The water pump going out, as we drove up a mountain, and rolling back down into the drive way of a converted apple barn. Where we found a nice cleaning lady who took my dad the 20 miles into town to get a new water pump, which he replaced in that driveway and got us back on the road.
- The rear diff throwing a bearing well after midnight in the middle of nowhere west Texas. The car limped a few miles down the road to a surprisingly still open gas station. My uncle, a mechanic, happened to have the necessary parts to fix it on him. So when he picked my dad up an hour later, they went ahead and spent the rest of the overnight hours replacing it in the parking lot of that middle of nowhere gas station.
- Spending several days at various salvage yards looking for rear tail lights. They are just the right height to be taken out by shopping carts. Unfortunately the 79 is the only year that didn't have a connecting strip that goes between the left and right hand sides. In the 90's they were very hard to find, I can't imagine they are any easier today. Seriously, buy an extra set even if you don't need them.
If you ever want a to move to a modern V8, Ford's panther platform from '02-'11 are just as big, roomy, and easy to work on as that Thunderbird. Plus you'll get modern conveniences like anti-lock breaks, air-bags, and good part availability.
userbinator
That sounds like it needs a tune-up. Lots of performance parts available too for cars from that era.
flomo
I'd guess it was always a malaise-era dog, the same engine from a decade later was much better.
WalterBright
I enjoy my 72 Dodge, because I know what every part in it does.
pbohun
It's interesting how more "amateur approachable" both old cars and old computers are. Old cars can be worked on by anyone with some basic tools and know-how, and old computers could be understood and programmed the same way. MacPaint was made by one employee.
I think this is partially why people want these types of objects. You can actually own them. You can understand them. You can mod them.
Modern cars, games, computers, etc. aren't owned anymore. They always have updates, and could be bricked at any moment if the manufacturer wishes, gets bought or goes out of business.
There's nothing preventing this from being the golden age of computers. The capabilities of the hardware are near magical. We just need to bring back the concept of ownership.
dlcarrier
What really disheartens me with modern cars is that electric cars are much simpler than than cars powered by combustion engines, which could be a huge boon to the fix-it-yourself crowd, but car manufacturers now lock customers out of their cars, so electric cars don't have the opportunity to become hobbyist friendly.
There are small electric-car companies that let customers do what they want, like Edison Motors, but they make industrial-sized work vehicles. It would be nice if a similar small company started selling consumer cars, but the automotive industry is heavily plagued by bikeshedding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality) to the point that large trucks and busses are allowed to do their thing, while subcompact vehicles have been effectively regulated out of existence.
Animats
> It's interesting how more "amateur approachable" both old cars and old computers are.
Right.[1]
I think of those guys at the Computer Museum who took years to repair an IBM 1401. They even had the assistance of some of the designers and retired IBM field engineers.
doodlebugging
I returned the MacSE30 that I bought at the Apple Store back in 1989 or 1990 when I went into grad school. Compared to the Epson that I bought at the same time it was a fantastic machine that would do almost everything that I needed to do out of the box whereas for the Epson I needed to buy other software. It helped that I already had Mac software though.
I returned it because I couldn't afford it. The cost with peripherals was almost 3X the price of the Epson so I took advantage of Apple's return policy and let it go.
I still have my original computer though, a 128k Mac that I upgraded to 512k within a couple months of getting it back in January 1985. I have the printer, an external floppy drive, and maybe something else. I used it to introduce my kids to computers, teaching them to type and use a mouse and to play the one or two games that I have for it. I have several software applications that are not Apple software including one with capabilities that I made good use of back in the day. It was mathematical software that I could feed the software points defining a line and it would compute the equation defining that line out to the nth order polynomial. It understood linear, logarithmic, and exponential scales so all you needed as input were the points in x,y space and the scale for each variable. It was very powerful and there was nothing like it in DOS land or in early Winland. I used it find the equations of lines in published nomographs and then used those equations to write and debug QuickBASIC software to calculate reservoir properties on an old Compaq 286 (later a 386 and 486, etc).
I don't remember the name of the software but it was very a good mathematical application. I still don't think there is similar software for Windows unless Wolfram Alpha can do the same thing. I haven't needed to try in a long time.
Thanks for this reminder.
jdougan
MathCAD? TK!Solver?
JSR_FDED
This resonates so hard with me! Except in my case it’s the Apple ][.
I’ve decided it’s completely unnecessary to justify this retro computing passion, there’s nothing wrong with venerating the ingenuity, ethos and craftsmanship of the time.
The excitement we felt at the breakthroughs that were coming fast and furious back then, the community and camaraderie of fellow nerds, the realization that those massively constrained systems with 10,000 to 100,000 times less power than we have today still managed to offer massive value to us as users and programmers - that’s pretty amazing.
Another reason to love that era was that there was still genuine idealism in the industry and everything was far less corporate than today.
keyle
I wonder if my kids will feel the same about their iPad 8 or whatever version this is... My guess is not.
Technology feels so "all worked out" today, with the right to repair out the window, everything is fused, and just dies one day and that'll be it.
I do fantasise about being reunited with my 386 DX 33, 4MB of ram and 40MB of hdd! It was the cream of the crop. Oh, that reset button has seen some action.
threeio
The se/30 is a beautiful machine, but it’s got some of the worst battery and cap issues, so clean it up quick :)
ggm
Time plays tricks. I also love vintage computing equipment but somehow the keyboards and mice are less kind to my hands than my memory of them.
Perhaps my acquired hate of low profile non-buckling-spring keyboards is misplaced?
kaonwarb
I have very fond memories of overclocking our 50 MHz Pentium to 75 MHz (after adding in a fan). Magic.
jdkee
There is certainly a nostalgia that I feel about tech from when I was 8 until 15 years old. This corresponded with Radio Shack 100-in-1 electronics kits, the Mattel Big Trak programmable vehicle, Mattel handheld electronic games, the Vectrex gaming system, the ZX-81 and the Commodore Amiga 500 computer. And I will throw in old Edmund Scientific catalogs for good measure. I was pre-Nintendo and Sega and certainly pre-Playstation and Xbox by a generation
I imagine the current crop of college students that I teach today will feel the same about Minecraft, Angry Birds and the original iPad when they reach their 40s or later.
WalterBright
This is the electronics kit I had as a boy:
https://generalatomic.com/teil1/index.html
If you work through the base kit and the sequels, it offers a complete undergraduate course in electronics, minus the math.
jojobas
An old car can still drive on current roads. There's may be no aircon, only AM radio and no airbags, but there's still horsepower and size to do what cars do.
Then, cars rust and naturally become rare and expensive to restore to a running state, and almost all of the appeal is that you can show off in them, displaying how much money you can afford to spend on a hobby.
Old computers are pretty cheap and are limited to old software, and there's nearly no showing off other than on HN.
Whatever rocks your boat I guess.
geerlingguy
Surprisingly, a lot of the Internet is still accessible to these old dinosaurs, through the efforts of retro enthusiasts. A search engine like FrogFind reformats results for the earliest browsers like Netscape Navigator, and kind of "text modes" the pages. There's even virtual plugfests like GlobalTalk that links together retro enthusiasts' printers over the Internet.
nivethan
Wow! Frogfind looks great, I've been thinking of writing my own proxy but it makes me happy to see someone has beat me to it.
jojobas
So basically "as long as another machine does the work", which would be like towing an old car on a trailer.
Suggestions for old Mac Apps to look out for:
- WriteNow! a very nice word processor that was originally developed for Next computers, before word took over it was the favorite.
- ClarisWorks/AppleWorks - One of the better pre office integrated apps - the database was REALLY easy to use, and interfaced well with the vector graphics module, spreadsheet, and word processor...
- FoxBase+/Mac - Before Microsoft bought Fox Software they got "Mac religion" and it shows in the incredible FoxBase+/Mac its amazin how much capability fits in a floppy.
- SuperPaint - great bitmap paint program though not as accurate as later graphics apps. (fractional/grid positioning was an issue)
- Ready,Set,Go! A great alternative DTP program to PageMaker/Quark. Never used others but I hear I think it was FrameMaker that had some sort of template/database feature to manage/generate catalogs. There were some interesting things back in the day.
- Stepping out - virtual larger desktop
- PowerPrint - Hook into epson compatible parallel printers with serial->parallel adapter.
- Comic Strip Factory - way before there was ComicLife there was Comic Strip Factory - a nice clipart based comic strip compositor.
- HyperCard - Never got into it but it had quite a community.
- Of course programming languages like Pascal, Logo, and BASIC in various flavors.
Of course you have the early greats like the Adobe programs and Microsoft Word/Excel/Office.