A few of us have recently posted pictures of vintage Macintosh computers over in the Favorite Toys thread. That has me thinking that there may be enough interest for a dedicated Retro Apple Tech thread. So this will be the place for all things Apple: computers, peripherals, swag and what have you.

I’ve amassed quite a collection of Apple ephemera over the decades, so I will kick this off with a few quick posts.

I’ll lead with a repost of the images I first posted over in the Toys thread.

Presenting the Macintosh Portable, aka the Lugable. Weighing in at 16 lbs, this model shipped from September 1989 to October 1991. The list price was a whopping $6500 for the 1.44 MB floppy drive only edition, and $7300 with the optional 40 MB hard drive. Add in the backlit display option and you could get close to the $10k mark, for what was really a pretty underpowered and only somewhat “portable” Mac.

One neat feature for all you southpaws is that you can pop out the trackball unit, shift the keyboard over, and place the trackball on the left.

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Back in the late 90s I decided I would give one of my vintage Macs some 60s era art vibes. The first shot shows the work in progress. The unpainted areas ultimately got painted with the day-glow blue paint seen in the picture.

Unfortunately, the acrylics I used were not the best option. The blue had all but flaked off within a month. Over the ensuing years, so did the orange. The following shot is how this poor Mac Classic sits today.

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When Apple was shipping Power Macintosh computers based on the PowerPC RISC architecture, they used to poke fun at how well they out performed Intel’s Pentium class processors. The ‘Toasted’ poster below is just one example. I also have one with a Pentium 4 pictured on the back of a snail.

Fast forward to 2005, and Steve Jobs announced that the Mac platform was going to transition to Intel x86 processors.

I initially felt a little betrayed by the change. When Mac OS X Tiger, the first x86 ready version of the operating system was released, I mocked up this poster as a form of protest.

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Here's a Mac Plus booted from Steve Capps’ early Mac game, "Through the Looking Glass". It was the only video game Apple had published up to that time. Note the Finder version 1.1g, circa 1984.

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On this day in 1984...

Here's a random assortment of swag. Much of this came from vendor booths at various MacWorld Expos. The small OS X logo items at the top are actually temporary tattoos.

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The venerable ImageWriter II, 1985-1996. Built like a tank, this dot matrix printer was compatible with the Apple II, Apple IIGS, Apple III, Lisa, and Macintosh computers. Many were still in service well into the 2000s.

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Before the Macintosh, Apple had released the Lisa, which was among the first computers to use a mouse and feature a graphical user interface. Unlike the Mac, the Lisa was targeted primarily at business users. In support of that goal, Apple released the Lisa Office System, later rebranded as Lisa 7/7 (after the number of applications included). This was years before the release of Microsoft Office.

Among the rarest items in my assortment, I have NOS editions of both the Lisa Office System and Lisa 7/7.

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With the Macintosh announcement the following year, the expensive Lisa was not deemed a sales success, although most acclaim the technical achievements.

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The Video Spigot was an early NuBus expansion card used for digitizing video, so early that it shipped with the pre-release .8 beta version of QuickTime. The "high resolution" compression setting produced QuickTime files at just 320x240. I still have it installed in my Quadra 650.

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Apple released the Flower Power edition toward the end of the CRT based iMac run. I guess I was ahead of my time.

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I first met my wife when I set up a grape iMac for her. She opted for the lifetime support plan.

At the end of his keynote speech at the 2000 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs let loose with one of his famous "wait, there's one more thing". It turned out that there was an Apple Pro Optical Mouse (which had just been announced) fixed to the bottom of all of the audience members’ seats.

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That’s the sacrilegious part.

Nice overhaul!

Here's an early dev guide from before the official Mac OS X release, circa 2000.

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That's not so easy anymore with Apple Silicon. You need to get the Windows ARM 64 build, which is still far from feature complete.

The M2 Mini with adequate RAM is quite capable. I've deployed over 50 of the M2 Max MacBook Pros (provisioned another one earlier today), and it is easily the most capable portable Apple has ever delivered. My only complaint might be the added weight, but that is easily offset by the performance and additional ports compared to the previous Intel models. The M2 MacBook Air is also a very good value.

I was digging around in a closet earlier and came across some random stuff that made me think of this thread. So here's to the necro-bump!

If you recognize the contents of this box, you were probably a Mac-tech in the 90s, or a very serious MacGeek!

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I also found this guy.

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And this, my last dial up modem.

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I also had the Global Village 33.6 and 14.4 models prior to this one. My first modem was probably the Apple Personal Modem. I still have it somewhere around here. It was 1200/300 bps (yes, that's baud). This is not my picture, but I include it for reference.

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This may well have been the first iPod sold in Virginia. I pulled it well before the official launch. I gave it to my then fiancé (now and still my bride) for Christmas that year. To be honest, the iPod was initially a slow burn. Sales did not pick up until several months after launch.

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