Filed under: Hardware, Mods, Mac mini
Behold the 24th Anniversary Mac
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]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Eli said 9:57PM on 1-21-2008
He should take the external hard drive and put it in a Mac Plus hard drive enclosure.
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Viper007Bond said 10:08PM on 1-21-2008
Haha, what an awesome mod.
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Cycomachead said 10:13PM on 1-21-2008
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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link.dupont said 10:30PM on 1-21-2008
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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Stephen Lang said 11:49AM on 1-22-2008
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.
john said 12:49PM on 1-22-2008
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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Simon Arch said 1:36AM on 1-22-2008
"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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FoundInTheFlood said 6:52AM on 1-22-2008
"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
artifex said 10:02AM on 1-22-2008
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.
Simon Arch said 1:58PM on 1-22-2008
"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.
Sketch said 6:15PM on 1-22-2008
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.
Bizzkit said 10:03AM on 1-22-2008
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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