Skip to Content

Celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Mac Plus with a crazy helmet

by Steven Sande Jan 14th 2011 at 2:30PM

1986

It was the year that The Hacker Manifesto was written, Halley's Comet was in the skies, the Chernobyl reactor disaster occurred and the Voyager aircraft did the first round-the-world flight without refueling. The year started on an auspicious note on January 14 with the introduction of the Mac Plus.

At the time, this was a heck of a computer. 1 MB of RAM (kids, that IS correct -- one megabyte), which could be expanded to 4 MB, a single 800 KB floppy disk drive and an SCSI port. The SCSI port allowed the Mac Plus to be attached (and not without a lot of pain) to external peripherals such as SCSI hard disk drives and scanners. It was a speedy machine, with a Motorola 68000 CPU crunching along at 8 MHz. The base machine sold for US$2,599.

Fast-forward to 2011. For a mere pittance, you can pick up a Mac Plus on eBay or at a garage sale. And, if you're Terrence Scoville, you'll use your ingenuity to turn that Mac Plus into an amazing helmet for DJ Kid Chameleon. The helmet features a gutted Mac Plus, strategically located sponges and an iPad to turn Kid's head into a work of art. There's video after the break, and if you happen to be anywhere near Glendale, CA this evening, be sure to see this helmet in action at LA Art Mix.

[via Macstories]



View Tags

Related Stories

Categories

Odds and ends

1986 It was the year that The Hacker Manifesto was written, Halley's Comet was in the skies, the Chernobyl reactor disaster occurred and...
 

Add a Comment

Sign in »
*0 / 3000 Character Maximum Comment Moderation Enabled. Your comment will appear after it is cleared by an editor.

9 Comments

Filter by:
fartman

Pretty cool.

I believe it's actually a Macintosh 512k and NOT a Macintosh Plus as it states in the articles.

DJ Helmet photo
http://dvice.com/uploads/macintoshdjhelmet5.jpg

Macintosh Plus
http://www.pugo.org/media/collection/computer/apple_macintosh_plus.jpg

Macintosh 512k
http://www.audiogold.co.uk/catalogue/images/BIG_Apple%20512K.jpg

Notice the placement of the logo in the lower left hand corner.

. . . just saying. Still pretty cool "Mac Headroom" helmet.

January 18 2011 at 9:19 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
House of Mirth

First reaction: Neat...

Second reaction: Please people don't kill working Mac Pluses!! :-O

January 15 2011 at 1:13 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to House of Mirth's comment
Terrence Scoville

Don't worry, I made sure to find a broken one and it was water damaged beyond repair.

January 15 2011 at 8:15 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Adamsck

We still have our old plus sitting in the closet. I think we got it in 87. 40mb hd 4mb ram 1200 baud external modem. I think we got system 7 on it. Amazing machine' but my brother revolted to wintel :(

January 15 2011 at 11:23 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mulls

The Mac Plus & the 'Fat Mac' were two totally different things bro. I have the original, a 512k (Fat Mac), and a Plus.

January 15 2011 at 7:27 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Flyboybob

The Mac Plus, aka Fat Mac, only came with 512K of Ram. The RAM was soldered to the mother board and could not be expanded without opening up the case and soldering in more memory. It did not have a SCSI port.

I have one in my closet and it still works. I had a third party computer technician solder an additional 512K of RAM so that it now has 1 Meg of memory. I also have an external 800k floppy drive which replaced the internal 400k drive that died after the computer was out of warrantee. The external one was cheaper to buy than to replace the internal drive.

I also have an Apple HD-20 external 20 megabyte hard drive that connects to the Mac through the serial port. I have both the original keyboard that did not have the 10 key pad and the optional separate 10 key pad. I later bought the larger keyboard which combined both the QUERTY keyboard and the ten key pad in one unit. Interestingly, my new iMac came without a ten key pad just like the fat Mac did.

The whole thing fits nicely into my beige Mac carrying bag with the rainbow Apple logo on the front. i used to carry the Mac to work and produced some very good training manuals.

The computer is running System 4.0 and I have MacWrite, MacPaint, MacDraw and Lotus Symphony installed on the hard drive along with several other applications that I can't recall. I also have an Apple Image Writer dot matrix printer. I don't think anyone makes ribbons for it any longer.

On rainy days I sometimes take it out of the closet, boot it up and play with it just for fun.

January 14 2011 at 10:50 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Joshua

My dad got us a Mac Plus in '86 and the trajectory of my life was set. I'd been obsessed with the Mac since seeing Performer (or something just like it) running on an original model at the NAMM show in New Orleans, '84. I was 11. :)

January 14 2011 at 3:41 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mack

Now there's something you won't be able to do with the MacBook Air in twenty years time!

January 14 2011 at 2:56 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to mack's comment
Emil

excuse me? Give me four Macbook Air 11" laptops (13" if you have a large head), some styrofoam and a length of duct tape, and I will fashion thee a helmet fit for a director of some three-letter gov't agency.

January 14 2011 at 3:13 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Buy an ad here

Tweets

© 2012 AOL Inc. All Rights Reserved.