Macintosh Classic II Repair — Part 3 (Final)
September 8, 2023
Part 3: You are here
Written on a MacBook Pro while watching
The only CDROM drive with a Turbo button!
After writing the post for Part 2, I was pretty much out of ideas to do before putting it back together. The only things I could think of would be recapping the analog board (that I should do eventually but it currently seems in perfect condition) and cleaning the contacts on the RAM SIMMs—I had planned to do that when I first got it but forgot until then.
After scrubbing the contacts with isopropyl alcohol, I began sullenly reassembling the whole machine. I was very anxious, if I hadn't destroyed it outright with my shitty recapping job or my disassembly of the analog components, I was doubtful it would do anything other than show that checkerboard. Despite my lack of hope, plugging it in and flipping the switch was the most stressful things I've done in recent memory, far ahead of like, last semester's finals or anything.
But after plugging it in… it played a startup chime and showed a Welcome to Macintosh.
screen! Then I almost had a heart attack from it actually doing something.
Close up of the CRT showing a blank dithered background with a window showing “Welcome to Macintosh.”
The computer actually booted up. It shows a “Preferences” menu and the desktop has Kid Pix, “Bilingual Writing Center™”, and “Student Work”.
I do find it amusing that while the checkerboard screen nominally indicates a RAM error, I had gotten it so stuck into my head that it had to be because of the leaking capacitors and didn't have anything to do with the RAM itself. Although maybe it ultimately wasn't scrubbing the RAM contacts, since I was essentially shotgun debugging while I had the machine fully disassembled. Maybe my isopropyl alcohol soak cleaned up leftover capacitor electrolyte that had been shorting out parts, who knows?
The Poking
So, finally, onto the long-awaited poking around! It's running Mac OS System 7.1, which is supposedly about the optimal version for this machine when balancing performance, software compatibility, and features. Given the IT graffiti on the side, this was definitely a school machine, and had the expected mid-90s school software: ClarisWorks, an office suite (actually a completely office suite, not just a word processor); Kid Pix; MacPaint; Bilingual Writing Center™
; HyperCard; and WordSearch Deluxe
replete with educational word searches. Not much else, although a surprising amount for a machine that was seemingly used at an elementary school.
While the filesystem did have folders like Student Work
, they were all empty (likely created by some standard drive image, or just some IT intern doing bulk setup) so I think this was actually a teacher-used machine. There were a handful of weekly staff announcement bulletins written with ClarisWorks, further corroborating that theory; and perhaps explaining why there was a full office suite instead of the good-enough-for-elementary-schoolers TeachText.
Another Conundrum
After exploring around, I popped in an empty floppy disk and it said it was unreadable and prompted to reformat it for Mac, which I did. Bringing that to my USB floppy drives, it turns out they just outright refused to mount the Mac formatted floppies. I could still dd the raw bytes, but that doesn't help much for trying to get files added to the disk.
So that left me with a pickle. The computer had seemingly no useful software to read PC format disks or any other external communication, and I had no obvious way to get such software onto it—not having a way to access an IDE hard drive or write into Mac format floppies. I noticed that there was XMODEM and Kermit extensions installed so I was hopeful that I could transfer a file over serial, and it turns out that ClarisWorks has a Communication
suite for working with serial and modems! Unfortunately the Mac only has a weird-ass 8-pin DIN for serial rather than the standard DE-9 or DB-25, so I'd have to wait however long to order the right connector and then make my own adaptor. It would be lovely to be able to start copying stuff to the machine now, so I shelved that idea and instead decided to beg people on the Fediverse for help, my usual go-to (spoilers for how I solved it):
https://tilde.zone/@nytpu/111031307758379070
With a bit of help I determined it'd be best to install the PC Exchange control panel that came with a later System 7 version. Trivial to find a copy, but I still had to actually get it on… Since I could still write Mac format disk images just fine over USB with the only trouble being making/modifying them, I was hoping to find it as a disk image I could just write. Unfortunately no luck, only finding it as the traditional Stuffit archive that I'd still have to get onto a disk. Finally, after a lot of searching around—hampered by the fact that it's rather difficult to google about classic Macintoshes without finding SEO crap or stuff about classic
Macs from 2013—found an old forum saying you could use the Mini vMac emulator to make a disk image containing it, which seemed promising. After a lot of finagling to get it set up, turns out from there it trivial to make an image, write the files into it, and write that to the drive.
Since the image still contained a Stuffit archive I also needed that software. Luckily the Stuffit Extractor itself was easier, coming as a premade Mac disk image—not very practical to expect you to unstufit
before you have it installed.
There. Can now copy stuff from a modern computer.
The Ensoftening
I spent the rest of the day researching cool software that I want to load; and backing up the original files on the system before reorganizing it. Backing up everything took a really ungodly long time, and ended up being five filled-to-the-brim floppies because they had clip art libraries and huge crap on there. Haven't even backed up most of the System Folder or the programs I'm planning on leaving installed yet.
I knew I wanted a Pascal development environment, and I'd love a Lisp and assembly one too. Also a text editor other than TeachText and ClarisWrite.
It turned out to be a big pain to find what version of software to use, as from the early 90s to the late 90s they rather vastly differed but still used the same names. I eventually settled on THINK Pascal 4.0 and Mac Common Lisp 2.0 (MCL). I also found a port of Vim, so of course I had to pick that up.
THINK Pascal 4.0 with documentation
Turns out THINK Pascal and MCL were actually originally distributed on 800 KiB low-density disks which are impossible to write using 1.44 MiB high-density drives for various reasons, so I opened them up in Mini vMac and copied them to fresh 1.44 MiB disk images.
After spending a surprisingly short time copying the stuff off the floppies and an ungodly long time waiting for the files to extract (expecially the 100 individual Lisp files for MCL), I finally had something interesting!
It was also 9:30 PM (I had other stuff to do throughout the day which slowed everything down further) so I ended up not actually do much with the system once everything's installed lol.
Conclusion… For Now
Today I hope to find some games, such as they are on Mac, and get to playing around with the darn thing. I also might take it apart again, because despite having a fresh 3.6 V PRAM battery in there the clock resets every time I shut it down. And of course I should recap the analog board sooner rather than later… For now I'm content with actually using the machine.
I'm labelling this part as Final since I probably won't write a follow-up unless something major pops up. If you're interested I may—or may not—post some minor goings-on with it on my Fediverse account if I decide something's interesting enough.
The final setup as of now, the Mac is on the desktop, there's a USB→ADB Wombat plugged into it, with a USB hub and a modern Logitech mouse and keyboard plugged into the Wombat. A box of thirty floppy disks is next to the machine.
The same as above, but a closeup of just the Mac itself with various programs like THINK Pascal on the desktop.
