Tip for ANY retro computing KZreadr working on Mac’s: ALWAYS let us hear the startup chime! It’s a thing with us, just do it!

@OldAussieAds

6 ай бұрын

I didn't realise I needed that in these videos. But I can confirm it's true.

@voltare2amstereo

6 ай бұрын

Sometimes not getting what you expect of a good thing

@Storm_.

6 ай бұрын

He did though..

@retrotechguy

6 ай бұрын

True! I have to improve…at least one chime per video from now on!

The Unix system that Lex knows is of course a Silicon Graphics machine running SGI's Unix variant IRIX. The cool 3D file manager is fsn, by the way, and there's a "modern" open source clone of it called fsv that can also run on OS X.

@robsyoutube

6 ай бұрын

It wasn't just any SGI system either it was a crimson. One of the rarest ones. It was the box that was running the whole park.

@Jabjabs

6 ай бұрын

@@robsyoutube Back 2007 I was doing some IT stuff at a university for a few weeks, their sever setup was wild! It was essentially, just server system stacked on top of system on top of system. As you walked down the hall you would see the systems get older, like layers of an onion. At the very end was the original system, an SGI workstation. It had been running non stop for over 10 years at that point and there was concern for what would happen if it were to ever fail. It was possibly doing nothing, it was also possible running the entire business!

@robsyoutube

6 ай бұрын

@@Jabjabs I was told of a similar story with a pair of DEC microvax. They finally decided it wasn't doing anything and turned it off. The entire internal accounting system for all of this company's North America offices stopped working. Someone from Spokane Washington called very upset.

@logansorenssen

6 ай бұрын

The suggestion that the Macs might have been running A/UX comes from the idea that A) that model of Mac actually can, and B) it's easier to talk to a Unix system from a Unix system. A/UX would be a nice setup for a sysadmin workstation at the time, and wouldn't have been as eye-wateringly expensive as an IRIS Indigo or Indigo2. (IIRC the Indy came a bit later, and was still far from cheap. Also, given the choice between IRIX 5.3 on a base-model Indy, and A/UX on a Quadra 700, gimme the Quadra any day.)

I respect the meticulousness you and the other vintage tech channels always have when it comes to repairing/refurbing these old beasts. Tearing down the PSU and testing the old caps is an impressive level of detail. I wish I had the patience you do with stuff like this!

@outaspaceman

6 ай бұрын

I usually watch a couple of Colin’s vids b4 I set about tasks that need a lot of tongue-out-the-side-of-my-mouth concentration to put me “ in the zone..”

@webberfan1234

6 ай бұрын

I liked that one video

@JamieBainbridge

6 ай бұрын

Not all vintage tech channels are as good as Colin. I've seen people wrenching surface mount caps off with pliers, on rare systems like Compact Macs, and joking about it. Total cringe. Colin's level of care and attention is one of the best parts of this channel :)

@Toonrick12

6 ай бұрын

Well, most vintage tech channels. David's legacy is going to be paperclips instead of the Commander X16.

When caps fail due to age, its not just capacitance, esr and/or leaking electrolyte, but also sometimes increasing leakage current, which in some cases even causes a capacitor tester to show a higher capacitance than the cap actually has

Love the drum-n-bass music while you were putting tbe PSU back together

@angeliquexavier8835

5 ай бұрын

Awesome touch hey.

These old Mac's were built like tanks. I came across lots of them when our school systems were switching to Dells. Found most in dumpsters. Crazy considering how much the schools probably paid for them. Love the video.

Gotta love a music feature just for the sake of a reassembly. Love the dnb tho, definately has old school vibes.

Always learn so much watching you videos. They are concise! The music is always bangin’. Now I have restored & upgraded a handful of computers with the help from you and others in the retro tech community. Haven’t stepped up to fixing problems that require soldering yet but maybe one day. Thanks!

"This being the internet I'm wrong". Love it. Great video as usual.

You charred the AC Line cable when de-soldering the connector. I'd go back and check that so you don't run into arcing problems in the future.

Wow, editing, flow and entire video in general is fantastic. I love how much quality, camera things and editing in your videos improved. But as you probably know too well, such an episode takes much more time and effort to make as well... Hope this gives you some joy or satisfaction, as honestly you're one of my most liked YT channels regarding PC, retro, software and hardware in general.

Oh no, that means I'm a dinosaur as well

@astralwerks4

6 ай бұрын

Yes

@xmlthegreat

6 ай бұрын

Hello fellow dinosaur!

My school had a Quad 700 and 950 next to each other. The 700 was so fast but the 950 really overshadowed it. The startup chime was louder and deeper, telling you who was boss. And it was. That 950 had so much power it drove a huge color monitor and still had room to use wasteful amounts of layering in Illustrator.

Well, the film came out 30 years ago and I was very excited. Glad this is the computer that used in the film itself.

The raspberry pi microcontroller for the BlueSCSI is probably magnitudes faster than the main CPU! :D Great video as always.

@Pasi123

6 ай бұрын

True, it has a 133MHz dual-core Cortex-M0+ (ARMv6-M). Though it only has 264KB RAM which is a lot less than what the Mac has

When I first started working as a graphic designer, the first mac that I used was a Quadra 700. It came with system 7.0.0. I just love it!

They never implied the Quadra was running Unix.... there is an SGI Crimson on the floor to the right of the desk.

Used one of these when I was advertising designer in the late 90s. System 7, QuarkXpress 3.3

The new Dan Mason album really is amazing. Business Casual putting out solid stuff as usual 👍 hearing that music feature was a pleasant surprise

I had one of these back in the day. It was my favorite retro Mac, I remember how snappy it felt to use and the case looked great too. A really cool machine.

6:10 that bops so hard. Thanks for the link in the description

I had a IIci as a teacher back then. The fact of the better caps used in the Quadra makes me want to get one so I can play my old 90s Mac games and all the maps I still have saved on CDs! Thanks! I'll make sure to get it checked when I get it in the future!

@MilesComparetto

6 ай бұрын

Escape Velocity!!!

I greatly enjoy your videos! Well produced and I always learn something new about retro tech. Especially love all your Mac related videos. Keep up the great work!

I used to have one of those, back in the day I used to dial into bulletin boards at 14400 bps. That was my 1990s version of "scary fast".

love your videos thanks Colin! I really hope to see a sequal to Putting Together My Own Retro Desktop PC soon!!!

The IIci was the real winner of the area and more common. Pretty much the same sized box form factor. The Quadra 950 was the one I lusted after as absolute unobtanium, after seeing one at an EA Sports Office invitational event up in some skyscraper in Atlanta. And then when I finally got a Quadra 950, the times they had moved on, it was in a pickup truck of an ocean of other better Macs, for example, a Powermac 9600... so the Quadra 950 ended up in the barn, and to this day I have never fired it up. The PowerMac 9600 became my time capsule Mac, that I loaded up with SCSI drives (3 or four of them), and loaded with my entire collection of software I had pirated from a software store... and then left Mac... forever... to jump to Windows and Linux. That was back in the 90's. I still have that time capsule Mac here on a shelf, and I've been meaning to fire it up... but I just don't have the room to set it up. I'd have to dig out a Monitor... keyboard, mouse... maybe a StyleWriter II or LaserWriter II... It's crazy that I abandoned some of the best hardware I had ever had to jump to Windows.. but the writing was on the wall. The internet needed something that could handle a TCP/IP stack, and a 300mghz Mac was fantastic, but a 1.2ghz Athalon Thunderbird was impossible to argue against. Plus I was getting Pentium 233MMX machines in spades and turning them into gaming machines on the network :)

I was fortunate growing up as my father had transitioned his career from draftsman/engineer to software engineer early on in the computer revolution. He had an Apple ][, and a Macintosh SE, then later a 512K. Eventually his workhorse machine became this Quadra 700, and it was truly a beast of the 68K series. Stole my first MP3 using it, and learned 4GL business RAD development on it. (Omnis FTW!) And, of course, various games (SC2000 represent, but also Mac Attack, and the Marathon series, and…) and notably most of Ambrosia SW's catalog. It was quick. No, quicker than that. SCSI 1x speed CD-ROM, Zip drive, we even had a Bernoulli drive. The "daisy-chain your mouse and another accessory from the keyboard itself" approach I recall first experiencing with this, continued through the PowerMac G3 and later revisions with USB. Mac OS 7/8/9, this thing was also a survivor.

Hit the sweet spot. I scored a 900 when I was at uni... admittedly it was already 1996, all the same, it holds a special place in my heart...

C’est une super machine! J’ai eu la chance d’en trouver une en France… il faudrait que je m’en occupe d’ailleurs… merci pour le partage 🙂👍

The JP appearance was cool and all, but for me, the reason I *had* to own one of these... is that it was one of the machines used in the creation of Myst. I'm a huge Myst fanboy, so that, and just the super cool form factor of these, meant that it had to be what filled that gap between the Mac Classic / SE / LC II era, and PowerMac 8500 / 9500 era in my collection.

Another great video, Colin. I don't have a Q700, but the design language is indeed strikingly similar to the IIci -- a Mac I recently acquired. After adding a Radius Thunder 24GT graphics card and a Turbo040 40MHz in the cache slot, it's now more powerful than the higher end Quadras, all running a bit more stably than my SE/30 ever did with the same T040 installed. Your PSU recapping experience parallels my own with the SONY PSU in the HD20 drive enclosure, which is a video I'm about to release. All caps in mine checked out fine too; but after 37 years, it's well past time to replace them. "Preventative maintenance" is always good, even if the machine otherwise seems to work fine. All said, I appreciated your video very much. Keep up the great work!

@lhpl

6 ай бұрын

I added a DayStar 68040 card to my IIci, making it about as fast as a Quadra. The 700 case really just is the cx/ci case with the vent slots facelifted in the other direction.

@JDW-

6 ай бұрын

​@@lhpl True, but the drive bays and other internals are quite similar as well. I always chuckle when I see prices of the Q700 because it is so outrageously priced for no good reason other than people want the computer they saw in the first Jurassic Park movie. The Quadra 650 is a much better 040 machine overall, and of course the Q840AV is the fastest 040 Mac Apple ever made. With that said, I am more than satisfied with the IIci now that it has about the fastest NuBus graphics card available (back in the day) and the 40MHz T040 really makes it fly. Add BlueSCSIv2 WIFI to that, and you have a very, very capable vintage Mac!

@lhpl

6 ай бұрын

@@JDW- As a Mac sysadmin in the 90es, I think I have had hands-on experience with just about every Mac model from Mac512K (though it had been upgraded to Mac Plus by the time I started the job, all MacII variants, SE, LC, Quadras (700,900,960,800,840AV) Performas, most PowerBooks, possibly a MacPortable also, Power Macintosh, iMacs of all flavors, and whathaveyou up to the Power Mac G4 Graphite...

Awesome video, as usual. I totally missed those RIFAs on the AC input board when I did my recap. I'll have to go back and do them at some point.

love the snow white design of the quadra 700 - my favourite of the quadra models wish there was a modern version of the case

The Quadra 700, 950 and 840av are my favorite Macs (I have more than 60 Macs, not counting all the iMacs up to the Pro model). I did a retrobright on one of my 2 Quadra 700s, and it sits like a work of art in my office. Of course, it has a PPC 601 on PDS port. To restore the 840av, I'll have more work, because in 1995 I painted it blue (I was jealous of the SGi stations). I'll have to find a place to display the Quadra 950, but given its gigantic size, it can't be put on one of my shelves.

I used to do some work for a tiny school for kids with learning disabilities that my mother was a teacher at, I maintained their collection of donated Macs in the late '90s. I'd sometimes take stuff home when newer machines were given to them, the best was a Quadra 700 along with a Radius tilt monitor. The video card wasn't in it, I had to track down one at a street sale that happened near downtown Dallas once a month, called the First Saturday Sale. This video really brought back the good memories!

So satisfying to see the cleaned hardware. Removal of the old dust and dirt makes the PCBs look like new.

I had several Quadra's back in the 90s early 00's so this brought back a LOT of memories for me. My 605 was the first computer I ever upgraded the RAM on myself!

That Dan Mason beat was really good!

Some safety cautions: - be very careful when measuring with the metalic vernier; the tip of the jaws would short terminals for sure and in the case of big mains caps you can receive quite a shock/spark - when (de)soldering in crowded boards be very careful not to melt the isolation of cables; again specially dangerous are the mains cables which will short catastrophically That monitor was amazing; its top quality was courtesy of the internal Sony Trinitron small tube, thus the sharp vivid color image, even after 30+ years.

@medes5597

4 ай бұрын

You can see that he is careful in both situations.

The boot chime makes even those ancient Macs feel more modern than a brand-new PC that still starts with a harsh BEEP.

Hurray for the Quadra 700. I absolutely adore mine. It was the machine that made me Mac curious back in the day as an Amiga owner, specifically around the A/UX side of things, Unix always seemed like the grown up serious computer system and paired with the Apple GUI it seemed like a winning formula, lol. As a result it was the first classic Mac I added to my collection along with a few modern upgrades.

@glossymouse7712

6 ай бұрын

Unfortunate that they were so incompetent to implement A/UX properly. From all the demonstrations I've seen, it looks and feels like a high school project.

@paul_boddie

6 ай бұрын

@@glossymouse7712 A/UX 3.0 seems to have had some positive reviews, but the plans for developing it further seem to have been shelved in favour of products like the Macintosh Application Environment, available for Sun and HP workstations, giving existing Unix users the opportunity to run Mac software instead, which seems like a less ambitious strategy to me. Obviously, the transition to PowerPC and the migration to something based on OpenSTEP, bringing the traditional Mac technologies more into line with the facilities already developed by NeXT, proved to be a more sustainable and successful approach.

Watching your videos is like petting a cat that likes to be petted, and it purrs. Alos, loved the drum & bass track while you put the power supply back together. Chefs kiss!

The overlap of vintage computing enthusiasts and retro music is a great one! That new @danmason6444 stuff is fantastic! I picked up a Quadra 700 at an estate sale a few months back and let's just say that the battery leakage was a depressing horror show... Not sure if I can revive it, but maybe someday!

@EvilTurkeySlices

6 ай бұрын

The best thing to do now is to clean out any and all corrosion so it doesn’t get worse. It will save you a lot of headache later, especially if you can’t get to fixing it for years.

I'm jealous of that desoldering iron, makes it so clean and quick!

My Q700 has the PPC 601card in the PDS and the 386sx25 NubusCard in the free NUBUS slot. Great machine...

My Quadra 700 is probably my favourite in the vintage Mac collection for all the reasons you say here. It just seems to take everything in its stride.

I liked your Mac II teardown I had used many of those and the IIfx models but by the time of the Quadras there was a wide range of graphical workstations on the market that were much more powerful. Like in the background of the movie clips you showed SGI and SUN were leaps and bounds ahead of what you could get from Apple and I find little reference to them today. Barco Graphics software on VMS servers with SGI frontends were decades ahead of any offerings from the home computer boys but little can be found on them. The real innovators are forgotten.

you slightly melted the brown cable when using the desoldering pump at 3:19

In the early 90s I would read those Mac magazines and dream of getting a quadra! My Dad would never buy another computer though after our 1990 IIsi purchase. I made great use out of that IIsi though, I recorded my first album on it, a mod tracker album called 'Weinermart'...

…and as always, thanks for making great videos!

I love my Quadra 700! This was my dream machine when I was in junior high. I had an LC instead, which I loved, but I always wondered if I'd own a super-cool machine like a Quadra 700. Several generations and numerous top of the line maxed out Macs later, I bought one off eBay and it's a joy! The late '80s to mid-'90s were such a great time to be in computing.

@DerekDavis213

6 ай бұрын

It's funny that you would call the mid-90's a great time for Mac computing. Isn't that about the time when Apple was close to bankruptcy? Bill Gates at Microsoft gave Apple a badly-needed $150 million lifeline back them. When Windows 95 released, that was the beginning of the end for Mac.

@TheRealTrididos

3 ай бұрын

@@DerekDavis213 That's not what I said.

@DerekDavis213

3 ай бұрын

@@TheRealTrididos On the topic of the glory days of Mac computing, here we are 40 years after Mac was launched. Last year, Mac had a 9 percent market share, while Windows rules the world. Also, Android smartphones are totally dominant worldwide. Apple hasn't fared that well, over the years. It's kind of sad really. My first computer ever was an Apple IIgs, and I still have affection for Apple products.

Sweet Jungle Tunes at 6:25

I have two of these as they’re my favourite vintage Mac. Iconic design and excellent performance. I’ve upgraded one with a Daystar PowerPC 601 CPU card and it is supercharged

That reminds me, I have to fire up my Quadra 840AV one day. Over the years I think I've owned and serviced most models, including the Lisa. One of the favourites was the 2fx with 6 video cards running 6 seperate monitors, a feat that very few machines can do today.

Wow kicking It old school 😊😊😮😮

At 13:55 - I'm pretty sure that's a different computer being used for that scene, Nedry has a Quadra on his desk, but there's a big chonker SGI (Crimson? I think?) sitting to the side on the floor, just beside the door into the room, that uses that version of UNIX and the 3D file browser shown in Jurassic Park.

I bought one a couple of years ago and put modern hardware into it. Epic 90s looks combined with modern performance 😎 Though when I look at this, I fear that might’ve been a bit sacrilegious… But I did sell the parts and am sure they found a good (retro) home. Only the PSU was a casualty of the project. I fired the machine up to see if everything was working OK and after a while it started to smell funky. Turned out one of the caps was leaking badly and then it went into the garbage.

10:55 - the case design is so similar in fact that Apple offered an upgrade path from IIRC a Centris model to this Quadra 700 - a new case sticker and motherboard being the only things to swap out!

I absolutely LOVE my Hakko desoldering gun! I put off buying one for a long time because t ended up with some cash for helping someone with a project, so I decided to splurge. It’s easily worth the $260 even if you are just a hobbyist like me. It does a fantastic job with removing solder from vias that are almost impossible to clean well with desoldering wick. Get one. You won’t be disappointed!

Man, seeing a Q700 fills me with nostalgia every time. I'm so bummed out I gave mine away back in the day.

Love your channel. Awesome work.

Really great thumbnail on this one! Good job!

I procured 4 of its big brother the quadra 950, we were a large printing company and I recall the q950 with a 650 mb CMS drive and graphics coprocessor maxed out on RAM/VRAM was just over $17,000... Oh what fun it was back then!

Nice vid. Q700 was a pretty decent machine. If i remember correctly, scsi and memory bus was a bit slow but processor was fast.

I’d be psyched to own the Jurassic Park computer. Nice work on the restoration! Liked the liquid drum and bass too

Was the quantum drive one of those models with the sticky rubber that causes the heads to stick and the drive not to function as intended ?

This was my first machine at my very first pro Mac programming job. It was one of Apple’s most awesome machines.

Whoa Dan Music Feature sounds awesome

I was given one of these in college after it was retired and hacked on it a great deal. With a fairly simple mod, you can convince a Q700 that it is actually a Q950 workgroup server (changes the gestalt ID). That was fairly useless then, and entirely useless today, but it was interesting that they shared the same logic board. Either way, running the Q700 with a 33MHz 68040 was a nice upgrade at the time.

Highly recommended to drain the capacitors with a wooden stick and a resistor and a ground wire. Also use a plastic/composite caliper. Or maybe measure the leades from the other side of some plastic if all you have is a metal one.

Those Apple Extended Keyboards were fabulous! It was so nice when computer manufacturers included keyboards with mechanical switches. Now we get cheap garbage keyboards and have to source good keyboards elsewhere. At least now there’s a wide variety of excellent quality switches readily available. But there’s still no replacement for the Apple Extended Keyboard. I could fly typing on one. Yours looks like it’s in great condition.

The drum and bass part was ducking sick

Great video. Love my 700.

The 040 in the Quadra was a beast. The fastest 486 machines with VLB couldn't really compare and in that era from 1990-1993 the Mac was a powerhouse for desktop publishing, education and CAD applications. The PC was still more versatile in industrial or organizational use cases and the Mac could have really taken off if Apple realized that $4,000 was a lot to ask even of the "prosumer" home users and small businesses. Sure it was the bread and butter of universities, marketing firms, design industries, publishing and printing but your normal home buyer wasn't dropping that kind of cash and financing wasn't a thing until the late 90s. That kept Apple in the sub 10% range because by 1992 you could get a PC with "multimedia" features in the 2-2.5K range and software was very, very abundant. Apple could have dominated the internet revolution but they couldn't see the forest from the trees.

Fixed the Ci years ago, that battery destroyed a lot of boards. Never got to the cap problems before switching to Power Macs. Donated them all to the schools for kids to play on.

Another great video! Keep it up!

I actually got a hold of a working Quadra 700 at a yard sale for $15 2 months ago, however I didn't rebuild the power supply like you did. Probably should though.

You can also use those floppys on an apple IIGS if the drive goes bad its just a drive in an enclosure.

I always enjoy your videos, so thanks for another post.

Where can I find the detailed explanation of floppy maintenence? I think I've ruined my Quadra 700 floppy drive by screwing something up. The little reader headmount is suddenly not staying down. It's extended vertically and I have no idea what I've done wrong :P I can push it down no problem but it just springss back up :/

I'm rather jealous the PSU in yours worked. The one in my Q650 was already dead, thanks to a burning/dead resistor. I had to modify an ATX v1.5 PSU's guts to fit inside, building a transistor "flip" circuit to preserve the soft power functionality.

Your "case-by-case" criterion for parts replacement seems to me completely sensible. By the way, it works in daily-life judgments, too. Maybe we could use a bit of that these fractious, turbulent days. Thanks for your straightforward, low-key, well-made videos.

Would it not be beneficial to clean the dust off, especially before soldering in new components?

68040 with FPU! The first machine I used was the LC575, which had to rely on software FPU. Its integer math was sure fast though.

@liam3284

6 ай бұрын

*fast for a 33MHz system.

Could you drop a link for your 'De-Soldering Iron'? Thanks for the Quadra 700 PSU Capacitor List Link.., ordering Caps now!

Still wishing I'd never gotten rid of the Quadra 700 I had. I can't even remember where it went so I must have. Hoping it'll turn up in my parents' house some day but I've searched several times.

I would have liked to see if that hard drive was actually dead! Retro KZreadrs tend to go straight for the solid state alternatives and won't even touch the ol' spinning rust anymore.

I was looking the quadra 700 prices before and they're somewhat rare but not impossible to find a reasonable price

Maybe it’s because I’m “old” now, but those old CRT monitors are looking so good still.

Was the Mac OS reinstalled on the solid state drive you installed? I was curious about that.

JP never implies the Macs run UNIX. The machine she’s sitting at is one of the SGIs which runs IRIX (a variant of UNIX). The 3D fly-over view of a UNIX file system is also a real experimental IRIX file browser from the time.

Those Tadiran batteries are known to last as long as 40 years in that kind of application.

I used to have one of these, wish I still had it...

VERY GOOD YOU REPLACED THESE CAPS THEY EXPLODE SMOKE

I have a IIci that has almost the exact same form factor. My Astec PSU has died completely and now I usually just use a modified ATX PSU to power the computer.

Loved the vid. I have two 1996 desktop models I've found in the trash. The brittle plastic really makes case disassembly a nightmare.

@epic_paul27

6 ай бұрын

What trash bin was it found in?

@michaelscottcutler3627

6 ай бұрын

@@epic_paul27 I find everything in the trash. More than I have room to keep.

The funny thing about the Blue SCSI is that the Pi Pico is actually more powerful than the Mac you put it in.

Might be a silly question, but at ~7:49 when the PSU turns on, it appears something moves inside it. What is that, and is it supposed to happen?

@gunsunnuva8346

6 ай бұрын

It's just a fan. Electricity gets hot.

I used to hate on Macs as a kid, and even made some anti-Mac GIFs in the 90s, but oddly enough now I collect the old compact Macs lol. I've always wanted a Quadra 700 also, I think cause of Jurassic Park.

@GoogleDoesEvil

4 ай бұрын

Because they did suck back then. My family avoided Apple for a very long time because of their awful experiences with a Mac in the 90s.

I'm glad I kept my Quadra 700... I got rid of my Mac IIci since its built-in sound didnt work. Alas.