It's not often I find something that's post worthy, but this week I acquired something that I never thought I'd actually GET.
$200 for the stack you see.
A co-worker of mine helps out with IT things and what not at a local church/parochial school. He texted me images of a Macintosh 512K, keyboard, mouse, external floppy drive, books/software along with a couple PowerBooks (145 and 180) and an Imagewriter printer. I've gotten into Macs over the last few years and there was just something about checking out the original that got me interested. The 512 worked but the PowerBooks not so much-both powered on but one only had the mouse cursor but wouldn't boot from the hard drive.
He looked them up on ebay on value, which started to make my heart sink. While the school was clearing out space and was getting rid of them, he didn't feel right just taking the stuff and I understood. We came up with a price of $200 for the 512, Powerbooks, the manuals and software and printer.
The 512 works with the external floppy. The internal will take disks but can't read them, so I'm thinking it's dirty. The screen is nice a crisp with no whining or anything. The keyboard only had one key not working, the "V" key, but a few squirts of contact cleaner down the shaft followed by repeated pressing freed that up. Some disks seem to have rot but I could get MacWrite/MacPaint to work (which comes with box, manuals and the audio tape). One of the copied discs (had MacWord) has "Golf", a card solitaire style game. THAT has been neat to play with and I am heavily thinking of getting a flash drive for it in the future.
The PowerBooks need help. The 180 looks salvageable as it boots and has a moveable mouse arrow but the hard drive just clicks. I'm going to open the HD and see if I can coax it back to life for at least a little while for kicks. If anything I can get a SCSI to SD card for it later. The 145 needs work. The screen bezel is apart due to old plastic cracking and I'm not sure if the display is connecting properly to the board or not. It does power up and chime but nothing shows on the display. The HD is shot too as it just spins and shuts down.
The Imagewriter, still with a ribbon in it, works! I did a test print (turn on power while holding Form Feed-the ol' middle school memories are coming back when I would fix these things during class) and I got results! It's such a trooper.
Now to find software for this stuff....
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