12 years ago I acquired this old Macintosh from Otis, the Art School I was attending to at the time. I used to work part time at the computer lab there and this little machine was sitting in a closet collecting dust until I asked to take it home. Since then I have never been able to use it for lack of an Operating System. It turns out, the OS, the applications and it’s documents all get saved to 400k floppies, something virtually impossible to find nowadays. And I was never really sure what model exactly this computer was since it just says Macintosh on it. I eventually gave up on the quest of finding floppies and the Mac was stored away in a closet. Going from apartment to apartment and finally to our current home’s garage. Last week I decided, after many years of retirement, it was time to open it up and see if I can pull a Serang by replacing the innards with that of an iMac SE and a flat display from an IBM ThinkPad.
To my surprise I found all these signatures inside the box and realized this was no ordinary vintage Mac, this was model M0001, the very first Macintosh model ever built. So now I have a dilemma, do I continue the original plan of hacking it? or do i restore it back to it’s 128k glory?
NOTE ADDED: When I say the very first Mac model I am saying the first generation of the Mac not the very first individual unit.
Got LOTS of pictures!
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I think this is a tough call. It kind of depends on if you want to sell it or not.
One big reason to restore it, is to sell it. If you restore it, but don’t sell it… the cool factor will probably eventually wear off and it will just sit in a display case, or in the closet, because there isn’t much you can really do with it.
On the other hand if you stick new guts in it, it may not be worth as much later, but you have a working, useful computer in a cool old case.
I wonder what the market is on hacked M0001′s. Maybe the old case with a new computer in side is worth something too?
no restore!
Nothing to do but RESTORE it!
What a wonderful piece of history!!!
This evening I’ll open mine lying in the basement!!!
A question: what does you use to obtain that slideshow?
Thanks
The sigs were definitely on later compact Macs too – my own Mac Plus had them inside.
My platinum Mac Plus (which I still have) has the engraved signatures as well.
My first mac was an SE 2/20 and when I opened it up to put in some ram it also had the sigs
Wow I like your slideshow. How did you make it like that. Can I have the code to do that?? lol
Don’t restore it! it’s a clasic!
I’ll buy it. I have System 4.2 amd it runs FAST on ramdisc.
Jerry
If you hack it, I’ll hunt you down and eat your brains.
Oh and I may have the disks you need to get it up and running.