7 ms·

Macintosh 128K Teardown

88 points by kjhughes 13y ago

joshmlewis 13y ago
It's surreal when you take a step back for a second, like marathon runners at one of those drinking stands, and you take in how far we've come in the last 50, 30, and 15 years even. Then you have to think what's next because computers are getting skinnier and faster from the original design and we all know that eventually something else will take over. I wonder who will do it, what it will be like, and how it will change the world even more. We aren't just going to stop once our laptops are paper thin and lightning fast (ha ha), so what will it be? The future is a vast frontier even today with how far we've come.
- vezzy-fnord 13y ago
  I probably just lack imagination, but I don't see the general model of a digital computer with a Harvard architecture going away for a very long time. Rather, our focuses will be on getting higher power and complexity on increasingly smaller sizes, while ubiquitously integrating them in virtually everything imaginable (in short: ubiquitous computing is the future). Although we likely will see huge world-changing advancements that will be taken for granted in the future, much like the integrated circuit is now, the concept of a computer as we know it today probably won't disappear.
protomyth 13y ago
Its amazing to me how the later Apple platinum color and aluminum make the original Mac look sickly green. I wonder if that was the intent of the platinum change.
- kens 13y ago
  Plastic cases often yellow over time due to flame retardants in the plastic, which is the cause of the sickly color. The Mac case was a originally a much more pleasant beige than it appears in the teardown photos. For more info on case yellowing, see http://hackaday.com/2009/03/02/restoring-yellowed-computer-plastics/ http://hackaday.com/2009/03/02/restoring-yellowed-computer-p... Apple used to be much more open about their products. The service guide goes into great detail about how to disassemble the Mac - it makes the teardown almost redundant: http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/legacy/macintosh_128k.512k.pdf http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/legacy/macintosh_128k.512k.pd... A hardware note: the iFixit teardown points out the "74LS393 Video Counter" chips - these are just plain TTL binary counter chips, not special video chips, so I don't know why it's pointed out as notable. The 6522 Versatile Interface Adapter (bottom center) seems much more notable.
  - drivers99 13y ago
    Thanks. That actually answered my main question: how did they manage to remove the big scary red wire. It shows how to use a discharge tool connected to ground to discharge the anode wire. Even before doing such a thing, I'd do some more research on servicing CRTs before attempting such a thing.
  - gaius 13y ago
    See http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/home http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/home
  - pasbesoin 13y ago
    IIRC, the original compact Mac cases were also sensitive to some cleaners. I remember mandates of "whatever you do, don't clean it with 409."
coldcode 13y ago
Amazing to think that was an 8mhz 68000. I can't even compute how many times faster a new Mac Pro is today (even if you ignore the GPU). Or even how many times more powerful my iPhone 5 is than this.
- mikeash 13y ago
  That 68000 could manage about 1 MIPS. No floating-point unit, so the FLOPS will be painfully low. The low-end Mac Pro has four cores at 3.9GHz each. I believe they'll do in the neighborhood of 3 instructions per clock cycle at peak performance, so that means the total is 3.9 x 4 x 3 x 1000 = 46,800 MIPS. Roughly. So in the neighborhood of 50,000 times faster when looking at the CPUs. The GPUs make it outright ludicrous. The low-end Mac Pro does 2 teraFLOPS on the GPUs. Even if we're charitable to the 68000 and consider its 1 MIPS roughly equivalent to 1 MFLOPS, the Mac Pro is still two million times faster there. And of course the Mac Pro is substantially cheaper when adjusted for inflation. Although it doesn't come with a display, nor any input devices.
  - coldcode 13y ago
    Gag that's crazy. Yet it was still usable according to the needs of the day.
    - cschmidt 13y ago
      The 128k Mac was very usable (and a thing of magic and joy to me as a teenager). The only bad part was swapping floppy disks back and forth. That could give you disk swapper's elbow. http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Disk_Swappers_Elbow.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Disk_Swappers_Elb...
  - gaius 13y ago
    And yet my Amiga and my ST display a menu as soon as I click, can keep up with my typing, and scroll documents without lag. My MacBookPro can do none of these things.
    - 13y ago
joosters 13y ago
The repairability score of 7/10 seems unfair. Opening up this computer could kill you! Surely that deserves a 0/10 ?
- julespitt 13y ago
  The bane of my childhood was hysterical, clueless adults warning about how I could die from opening anything with a CRT in it... yet here I am!
  - joosters 13y ago
    Yes, that must mean it was all lies and misinformation. Thanks for setting us straight on that.
  - epo 13y ago
    Fascinating. Please share your insights about drink driving, we'd love to know.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 13y ago
    It's too bad nobody has CRT's anymore. We used to build these in high school: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibW_x8lWWFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibW_x8lWWFM. Yes, it's entirely as awesome as it looks.
  - bri3d 13y ago
    For all the sarcastic responses to this post, I can't find a single record of a death by CRT. I found lots of references to people accidentally touching the HV side of CRTs and receiving a painful shock but none of the shock causing any lasting issues. Death by CRT is definitely possible in theory and the lack of real-world examples could be an issue of shoddy reporting (i.e. cardiac arrest due to electric shock minus a CRT as the specific reason) but I'd think think that across the millions and millions of CRTs sold there'd be at least one concrete report of a death. Does anyone know of any?
caycep 13y ago
All that 80's isms must represent years of historical research!!!
ableal 13y ago
One of the ifixit commenters tossed in the story of the floppy drive: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Hide_Under_This_Desk.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Hide_Under_This_D... "But American business practices, they are very strange. Very strange." said the Japanese engineer, when he figured out they were hiding from the boss ...

88 points by kjhughes 13y ago

It's surreal when you take a step back for a second, like marathon runners at one of those drinking stands, and you take in how far we've come in the last 50, 30, and 15 years even. Then you have to think what's next because computers are getting skinnier and faster from the original design and we all know that eventually something else will take over. I wonder who will do it, what it will be like, and how it will change the world even more. We aren't just going to stop once our laptops are paper thin and lightning fast (ha ha), so what will it be? The future is a vast frontier even today with how far we've come.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago
I probably just lack imagination, but I don't see the general model of a digital computer with a Harvard architecture going away for a very long time. Rather, our focuses will be on getting higher power and complexity on increasingly smaller sizes, while ubiquitously integrating them in virtually everything imaginable (in short: ubiquitous computing is the future). Although we likely will see huge world-changing advancements that will be taken for granted in the future, much like the integrated circuit is now, the concept of a computer as we know it today probably won't disappear.

protomyth 13y ago

Its amazing to me how the later Apple platinum color and aluminum make the original Mac look sickly green. I wonder if that was the intent of the platinum change.

kens 13y ago
Plastic cases often yellow over time due to flame retardants in the plastic, which is the cause of the sickly color. The Mac case was a originally a much more pleasant beige than it appears in the teardown photos. For more info on case yellowing, see http://hackaday.com/2009/03/02/restoring-yellowed-computer-plastics/ http://hackaday.com/2009/03/02/restoring-yellowed-computer-p... Apple used to be much more open about their products. The service guide goes into great detail about how to disassemble the Mac - it makes the teardown almost redundant: http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/legacy/macintosh_128k.512k.pdf http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/legacy/macintosh_128k.512k.pd... A hardware note: the iFixit teardown points out the "74LS393 Video Counter" chips - these are just plain TTL binary counter chips, not special video chips, so I don't know why it's pointed out as notable. The 6522 Versatile Interface Adapter (bottom center) seems much more notable.
- drivers99 13y ago
  Thanks. That actually answered my main question: how did they manage to remove the big scary red wire. It shows how to use a discharge tool connected to ground to discharge the anode wire. Even before doing such a thing, I'd do some more research on servicing CRTs before attempting such a thing.
- gaius 13y ago
  See http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/home http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/home
- pasbesoin 13y ago
  IIRC, the original compact Mac cases were also sensitive to some cleaners. I remember mandates of "whatever you do, don't clean it with 409."

coldcode 13y ago

Amazing to think that was an 8mhz 68000. I can't even compute how many times faster a new Mac Pro is today (even if you ignore the GPU). Or even how many times more powerful my iPhone 5 is than this.

mikeash 13y ago
That 68000 could manage about 1 MIPS. No floating-point unit, so the FLOPS will be painfully low. The low-end Mac Pro has four cores at 3.9GHz each. I believe they'll do in the neighborhood of 3 instructions per clock cycle at peak performance, so that means the total is 3.9 x 4 x 3 x 1000 = 46,800 MIPS. Roughly. So in the neighborhood of 50,000 times faster when looking at the CPUs. The GPUs make it outright ludicrous. The low-end Mac Pro does 2 teraFLOPS on the GPUs. Even if we're charitable to the 68000 and consider its 1 MIPS roughly equivalent to 1 MFLOPS, the Mac Pro is still two million times faster there. And of course the Mac Pro is substantially cheaper when adjusted for inflation. Although it doesn't come with a display, nor any input devices.
- coldcode 13y ago
  Gag that's crazy. Yet it was still usable according to the needs of the day.
  - cschmidt 13y ago
    The 128k Mac was very usable (and a thing of magic and joy to me as a teenager). The only bad part was swapping floppy disks back and forth. That could give you disk swapper's elbow. http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Disk_Swappers_Elbow.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Disk_Swappers_Elb...
- gaius 13y ago
  And yet my Amiga and my ST display a menu as soon as I click, can keep up with my typing, and scroll documents without lag. My MacBookPro can do none of these things.
  - 13y ago

joosters 13y ago

The repairability score of 7/10 seems unfair. Opening up this computer could kill you! Surely that deserves a 0/10 ?

julespitt 13y ago
The bane of my childhood was hysterical, clueless adults warning about how I could die from opening anything with a CRT in it... yet here I am!
- joosters 13y ago
  Yes, that must mean it was all lies and misinformation. Thanks for setting us straight on that.
- epo 13y ago
  Fascinating. Please share your insights about drink driving, we'd love to know.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 13y ago
  It's too bad nobody has CRT's anymore. We used to build these in high school: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibW_x8lWWFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibW_x8lWWFM. Yes, it's entirely as awesome as it looks.
- bri3d 13y ago
  For all the sarcastic responses to this post, I can't find a single record of a death by CRT. I found lots of references to people accidentally touching the HV side of CRTs and receiving a painful shock but none of the shock causing any lasting issues. Death by CRT is definitely possible in theory and the lack of real-world examples could be an issue of shoddy reporting (i.e. cardiac arrest due to electric shock minus a CRT as the specific reason) but I'd think think that across the millions and millions of CRTs sold there'd be at least one concrete report of a death. Does anyone know of any?

caycep 13y ago

All that 80's isms must represent years of historical research!!!

ableal 13y ago

One of the ifixit commenters tossed in the story of the floppy drive: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Hide_Under_This_Desk.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Hide_Under_This_D... "But American business practices, they are very strange. Very strange." said the Japanese engineer, when he figured out they were hiding from the boss ...