Back in early 1995 my living room / computer lab looked a bit like this:
In the above photo you can see my IBM Model 330-P75 on the left, which had a Pentium 75 in it. It was my BBS / MUCK dialup box… That’s probably FurryMUCK on the screen.
In the middle (sitting on top of the monitor) is an HP Vectra VL series 3 5/90. This had a hotrod Pentium 90 in it and was the server for my Major BBS setup – “Silicon Psychosis”.
And on the right side of the desk is my Apple Power Macintosh 8100/100AV, which was the machine I was using for all of my web stuff and graphic work.
That Mac is the first computer I ever purchased for myself with the intention of using it for actual work, and accordingly it’s the first machine I owned that I actually made money with… I can attribute that old Mac with getting me really going in internet technology, graphic design, and all of the other things I still do to this day.
And since the mid 2000’s I’ve been looking for another 8100 to complete my collection of all the old Macs I’ve owned.
But they are rarer than hen’s teeth because they were like $4500 in 1995 – or about $9000 in 2023 money – for the 100Mhz model, they were only around for six months before the PowerPC 604-based machines came on the scene, and they were insanely fragile… So there weren’t many of them to begin with and most of them have self-destructed or simply fallen apart over the years.
These are also Apple’s first PowerPC machine, so they are a collection of weirdness internally… The 100 and 110Mhz machines used a Peltier Junction cooling system that was generally more trouble than it was worth, they used “NuBus” for expansion cards, and the video card is interfaced on the processor bus using a PDS (processor direct slot). PDS was problematic because if someone removed the card and didn’t install a terminator board bad things happened – and being as every other computer on the planet that had cards didn’t have such a setup, there were a lot of blown machines.
But for all the hassles of this new RISC platform you got some bonuses: MacOS was lightyears ahead of Windows, the PPC 601 ran circles around Pentium-based machines, it was all SCSI inside which left old ATA in the dust, the new PPC machines came with 2-meg video which offered 1152 x 870 resolutions and thousands of colors at the same time, and the machine would address 264megs of ram in a time where most people were running 32megs or so.
Anyway, roll the clock forward almost 30 years and I finally found an 8100 that met my specifications: fully functional and as close to ‘new’ as possible…
So this is my new 8100/80, which while not exactly the same as my circa ’94 8100/100AV, it’s close enough to the original that I spent the afternoon back in 1995.
Overall the 8100/80 is pretty much exactly the same as the 8100/100 performance wise, mostly because the 80 is a clock-doubled CPU on a 40Mhz bus while the 100 is a clock-tripled CPU on a 33Mhz bus – so it essentially runs all of my old OS8 software just like the original.
Those who know these machines will probably be agog at the fact all of the faceplates are intact, and while the plastics are a little yellow they’re still in amazingly good shape… The face plates and the front of the machine are held on with plastic tabs, and the plastics on these machines after 30 years has essentially turned into powder. So if you look at the bezels the wrong way they break off…
I also have the original Apple Multiple Scan 17″ monitor and the keyboard and mouse the system came with – also in pristine condition… Save for the control door on the monitor – the little plastic tab that holds the door closed snapped off – but I think I can use the baking soda and superglue trick to fix it.
Like I said, the plastics are really brittle now.
I picked this all up from Tammy over at Apple Rescue of Denver for a song… It’s got 112megs of RAM in it (72-pin 80ns simms) and a 640meg SCSI HD – and now has its original PDS video card in it.
Everything runs great and I’ve been loading old software on it all day.
I think, like the rest of my functional Apple time-capsules, I’ll max it out as much as possible and get it running on an SSD. This means I’ll need to order a BlueSCSI, more ram, more video ram, an AAUI to ethernet adapter, and other sundry items – all of which are available online for relatively cheap.
Should keep me entertained for good long while. 🙂
Listening to "As the Days Go By" by Marvel83'