The color classic is one of my top favorite Apple designs ever. Something about it just looks so sleek and classic. It’s like they took the Macintosh design and perfected it.
I went to a catholic school for the first bit of my education. The principal was obsessed with Macs. We had an entire lab full of 5300’s that I did all the networking on long after I graduated. Most importantly, the principal had a Mac + for years but one day, it was replaced with a color classic. She used that thing for years and years. Around 2005, she retired and she has it in her living room for show to this day.
This video was fantastic! Computer history is fascinating to me. Just recently acquired a Powermac G4 and have been tinkering with it a bit. I'd love to find an older Classic Mac someday too.
I have two of these machines, purchased at a time when I thought I might make the jump from Amiga to Apple. I found that this, and the G3 Power Mac were so inferior to the Amiga, that they languished in the corner of my basement. I did not realize that they have value, so now, I am going to sell them, and the LC III, and just keep the upgraded 7600 Power Mac and my Powerbook to play with. I have to admit, that with owning the last of the Mac line, that I do like owning a little bit of Apple history. I was getting a limo ride to the Toronto airport one day back when the Mac had been announced, and the limo driver told us as part of the usual conversation, that he was a software developer, and had just received a pre production Mac, and couldn't wait to get home to start working with it. It is amazing how quickly things evolved in those years. Bob
You are so lucky! I can’t get over the fact that some people find awesome computers in the side of the road. Around me, the only thing I find are old CRTs. Over and over
I love the modding/hacking seen for the Colour Classic, it's awesome that people would go so far to keep their beloved machines but the words "Ship of Theseus" kind of ring in my ears… :/
I find myself wondering, if you're just replacing the entire motherboard, does it even count as the same machine anymore? It's a bit of a "ship of theseus" problem I think.
My understanding of the video was the love of the computer's form factor, not necessarily it's power/specifications. I mean if they loved the computer as is, why change anything?
@@DrDavesDiversions one could argue it’s a bad argument. The Amiga crowd has literally continued to advance the entire platform after its official demise, everything from hardware, including the CPU, to the OS, and new accessories. That’s a hard act to follow, and it certainly isn’t one the Macintosh Color Classic is up for.
@@bujin5455 If you look at the Mac timeline and soooo many products, it's hard to compare ongoing popularity of models to the Amiga line. I mean this is ridiculous ('80's/'90s especially). Matt over at retrobits channel yesterday posted a video calling this timeline era a "haystack." :) I agree. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Macintosh_models
Great video as always! Love this video's bump in production quality. Please consider talking about the PC-8800/9800 series, (interesting influence on gaming) or the iMac G3 (we had these all over in elementary school lol, pretty sure my school still has a few in storage...)
Seeing this makes me miss the 'Monitor Mac' (identical to the Mac at 5:01 in the video) LC Power Mac my mom had back when I was a teenager. She was a teacher so could purchase LC Power Macs since those models were limited to the education market. It had a PCI slot and she got a PC Compatibility card for it, which was a Pentium 90 with 32MB RAM which ran pretty much independently of the computer and Windows 95 off a separate partition of the hard drive, but used everything else of the computer. It wasn't bad, though it wasn't great either. It was a Jack of All Trades, and pretty much ran second string to our normal PC at home, by my Mom was able to use it for school work, and I was able to use it for Myst before it became available for PC (muahaha). After she moved to a G3 with no compatibility card, it lived in my bedroom for a while....wish I still had it....
Australia had so many of these as all the unsold ones were dumped here and the education market lapped them up. Many schools still used them up to 2000! At least the apple talk networks and the machines were super easy to work on and fix.
While I am personally a windows user and don't care much for Apple and their products nowadays, I still find their older Macintosh computers really fascinating and love learning about them
I was always a fan of the performa 550, it was an awesome machine, the newer ones didn’t excite me nor does the newer versions of windows. The last system I liked was NT 5.0 server in the early to mid 2000’s
Wow, I didn't know most of this stuff! Great little machine, if you ask me. Last Mac I had before, years later, I ended up on a free piece-meal 386 with a bare slackware barely fitted in and running remote X windows to a K6 II 350MHz over 50 yards of 10BaseT ethernet :-D
Wow, my school had a lot of these units back in the late 90s, I honestly think they were just binned when the school was rebuilt and new IT systems (iMac) were installed. Wish I had asked for one to keep but they were so common and I didn’t give it a second thought.
Hi. Thanks. This brings back great memories of my LC 575 and Color Classic (US):-) and the memories opening those two for those mods (and having fun exchanging LC 575's board, my first Mac into the CC just for fun) and painstakingly soldering that Takky mod (and attempting that Macquarium) I wished I'd kept the CC, it's still the cutest computer every made along with a white PC Engine:-). CC's even cuter than the first iMac. That was a great chapter of my life with Macs. I hope Apple remakes the Color Classic without changing much the look and feel change (else it'll destroy that cutest computer every made by far) like what Nintendo did with NES and Famicom (which I have now). Same look and feel but with cool tech underneath even with a 10 inch OLED screen:-) and powerful enough for modern gaming which will be fast coz' of the resolution. I wonder what resolution using Retina tech with it's high PPI would be just right (native resolution) a few inches from its screen that's still comfortable to read? Any calculations say if they use an LG or Samsung with retina or higher PPI? I think like the NES or Famicom Mini, that CC revival would still sell very well, especially in Japan:-) God bless. Proverbs 31
My school had dozens of these which ended up eventually getting dumped and replaced with boring Windows 95 PCs. I managed to save one (which I still have) but have always wished I’d recovered more.
I find it interesting that classic Macs had their screen resolution limited to the size of the monitor, and instead of changing the pixel resolution, one had to buy a bigger Apple monitor, so instead of smaller pixels, the user got bigger screen estate.
I always wanted a Color Classic 1 or 2, but they are so expensive plus having to replace capacitors and extra stuff. I'm happy with my two Mac SE's. lol
What kind of a computer is that on the table at 5:36? That laptop with the integrated pen to the right of the screen and a directional pad to the left? I love its design!
I truly miss my cute Color Classic. I truly regret selling it. I tried those mods including rewiring. The transplant of the LC575 board was the easiest but it looks bad when viewed at the back.
Great video! The intro of the video got me thinking, was Apple ever a big player in the Japanese microcomputer market? I thought foreign companies had effectively been pushed out of the Japanese market after the short period where Commodore dominated the market with the VIC-1001.
Apple launches... Color Classic with 10MB memory max, AFTER the SE/30 which included a processor direct slot, and up to 128MB ram with some software tweaks. You can even upgrade the SE/30 untill it is even faster than a IIfx...
You missed out discussing the All in One, i had that mac and it pretty much blew the compact mac's out of the water, that being said some could say that it was not compact, also the bondi mac was still a compact mac.
I thought the same. Only last year a board was released for upgrading a lowly Amiga 500 from a 68000 at 7 MHz to a 68040 at up to 120 MHz - implemented in FPGA (Motorola only made them run as high as 40 MHz back in the day). Are there any upgrades available for M68K Macs?
PPC upgrades exist for the A1200, A3K, and A4K in the form of the PowerUP accelerator board line. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerUP_(accelerator)#Blizzard_PPC
Actually, I covered the Neo Geo Pocket Color about six months ago: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-sBNS6o7W2gM.html This style of video takes quite a while to put together, but I already have some ideas for future episodes.
Always loved the idea of having these AIOs Apple produced back then. Sure it's total garbage if those things brake at some point but its compact and useful enough to most users. My favorite will remain the G3 iMac though.
They should make a thinline Machintosh Classic today just for the heck of it. Just functioning as a desktop tablet being handy for notes, plans and miscellaneous. I'm not an Apple guy, but I'd buy that as long as it wasn't severely overpriced. Irony is most Apple products are, sadly. 5:36 Also dang, that's a cool setup.
on a MAC! it's not like you have a slider on your graphical properties, or gotta touch XRANDR on a black command line interface, noo... you need to change the hardware itself!
It would be cool if apple still made a macintosh classic/compact mac with a similar silhouette to the original. (It would obviously be thinner though.)
I've never seen a Color Classic in person, but being in Canada, I have played around a bunch with its successor, the Color Classic II. I didn't realize it wasn't more widely released. The LC575 mod is a bit unfortunate, as the 68LC040 lacked an FPU, and many LC575s shipped with a buggy CPU that prevented the use of a software FPU emulator. I was unlucky enough to have just such an LC575. However, I think the 68LC040 could be swapped out directly for a full 68040 with an FPU. Anyhow, the G3 mods would be a much bigger upgrade. I know that even back in the day, there were processor upgrade cards (even apparently one from Apple) that would put a PowerPC 601 in the LC 575, and I *really* wish that I had that as a kid, as a rather lot of games (Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Quake, Diablo, etc) required a PowerPC and wouldn't run on my LC575. If I still had the thing, I'd probably have done that sort of an upgrade to be able to fulfill my childhood dream, but sadly my parents threw the thing away quite a few years ago, not long after I moved out.
The PowerPC upgrade card for the 68040-class machines was generally considered a dog, largely due to the motherboard's limited bus speed. That said, the first-gen Power Macs (6100/7100/8100) weren't really speed demons either, but that was more due to the fact that most of the Mac OS at that time wasn't PPC-native code. By the time that PPC 603-based machines rolled around, the performance gains were substantial, and that's why I think a lot of Color Classic modders went straight for those motherboards.
It looks like the LC575 and PowerMac 6100 had the same bus speed (33MHz), although it looks like it might be half the width. In any event, most games not running on my LC575 wasn't due to performance, but because after a certain point, games simply didn't support the '040. I got Sim City, Sim Tower, WarCraft II, and Doom... But nothing newer. As I said, Starcraft, C&C, Quake, and Diablo were the ones that I was really missing back then. It was a big lament for years, until I later cobbled together a 486DX2 machine out of parts that I could beg off people. The 486 was super outdated by that time, but it got me one step closer (C&C ran... maybe at 2 FPS, but I damn well endured), and gave me a platform for upgrades to eventually get me something that could play real games, bit by bit. I had a friend who happened to have a 6100 and what I think was a 6400 and a 6500, and we had some great times with multiplayer gaming when I would visit.
The actual research portion was easy -- I already knew all of it. Finding historical photos/video/Web sites was a bit more tricky, and I'm very thankful to those who let me use their work.
I had a modified CC - had a 275mhz PPC processor in it - I did all of the work. It was amazing but it was still barely adequate to even access the internet in our modern age (2001-2002). I threw it out in a padded in case in a dumpster in 2011 - big mistake given how much they are worth now, even hacked as much as mine was :(
What about Commodore Amiga computers? They died in 1994 and there are still several hardware and software developers in 2021... new OS, Accelerators, etc.
The iMac (and other all-in one models that came before it) isn't really considered a "compact Mac." Generally, machines that fit that term have smaller 9" or 10" displays. Wikipedia has the definitive list: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Macintosh
Well, we will have to agree to disagree. And as one of my professor's likes to remind me on a regular basis, Wikipedia is not a valid source. (Sorry couldn't help it, as a grad student I hear this non-stop.)
However this could be an issue only if you can really find a paper that could tell you what is a "compact mac". Otherwise, you are dealing with non-acdemic problems, Wikipeidia is generally good enough.
I am I wrong in seeing the Color Classic II as more of nice case with built in screen? I feel like if you swap the motherboard you are just installing are just swapping the computer and keeping the peripherals.
