Forget the TAM. I want this thing.David Clausen decided to celebrate the Mac's longevity by making something special. So, he gutted the case of a 512K Mac (the case is in great shape, by the way), then inserted the workings of a Mac mini and a grayscale monitor. Add to that a LS-120 floppy disk drive and a custom-built USB microcontroller (to use the original mouse and keyboard), and you've got one badass compact Mac. For more detail, check out the Flickr Set.
All because he wanted to "...experiment with creating a custom USB device." That's one heck of a device. Hey Dave, if you decide to sell these, let me know.
[Via Adam Tow]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-21-2008 @ 9:57PM
Eli said...
He should take the external hard drive and put it in a Mac Plus hard drive enclosure.
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1-21-2008 @ 10:08PM
Viper007Bond said...
Haha, what an awesome mod.
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1-21-2008 @ 10:13PM
Cycomachead said...
sweeeeeet!!!!
Would be cool to mod more accessories to work with newer things like a CD/DVD drive (in an old floppy enclosure)
oh and an external monitor would be nice to have, just to make it more useful.
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1-21-2008 @ 10:30PM
link.dupont said...
I would love to be able to type on that keyboard again. The tactile feedback that keyboard gives is like none other I've found these days. Springy for the win!
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1-22-2008 @ 11:49AM
Stephen Lang said...
You can type on those keyboards now, if you use a ADB-USB adapter like the Griffin iMate (about $30, plug and play compatible with Leopard and older).
I'm typing this on an Apple Extended Keyboard that I bought on EBay for $20. The combined price of the 2 is still much cheaper than the price of a Matias Tactile Pro or something like that.
1-22-2008 @ 1:36AM
Simon Arch said...
"the case is in great shape, by the way"
That's all well and good, but I hope the system itself was non-op. I hate seeing these old systems gutted and "improved" when the original hardware worked well. I'll grant you there's not much need for a Fat Mac these days, but ruining a perfectly good computer for a mod like this...it seems wasteful.
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1-22-2008 @ 6:52AM
FoundInTheFlood said...
"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."
Steve Jobs
1-22-2008 @ 10:02AM
artifex said...
It's recycling. You can't even donate gear this old to charities, because it would cost them too much to run, and many of them are smart enough to know that. If you start trying to do any real work on them, you discover the power to performance ratio sucks. So it really is cheaper and better for the environment to buy a new computer that uses less power to do far more, and then responsibly recycle the old stuff.
1-22-2008 @ 1:58PM
Simon Arch said...
"So it really is cheaper and better for the environment to buy a new computer that uses less power to do far more, and then responsibly recycle the old stuff."
Nonsense. Better to make what we have last longer and not needlessly fill up the landfills with yesterday's cast offs.
1-22-2008 @ 6:15PM
Sketch said...
Get over yourself. A 24-year-old computer is not usable for anything--anything--that a computer could be needed for today. The only reason a Mac 512k would be run today is for nostalgia purposes. Now it's been made into something more useful, and the donor Mac mini and the new LCD are considerably better on power than the original CRT and innards, I'm sure.
I'll be using my nearly 4 year old PowerMac G5 until it's unusable, but that's different. My G5 can still accomplish things.
1-22-2008 @ 10:03AM
Bizzkit said...
My first Mac was a 512K. Definitely a closed system. Had to cut a hole in the battery compartment to dangle a SCSI cable out the back to add a 20 mb hard drive.
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1-22-2008 @ 12:49PM
john said...
Heck i thought 24 years ago computers were mega ton mainframes. way to go Mac http://andpcs.com/Computers-and-Networking/Apple-Macintosh-Computers
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