WARNING: Exploding "Maxell" PRAM batteries in vintage Mac's!

It was only recently that I had read a thread upon the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army forum pertaining to an increasing number discoveries of exploded, logic-board mounted PRAM batteries in Mac's made in the 80's and 90's, from the SE onwards. Whilst batteries leaking corrosive electrolite as they degrade and reach the end of their usable is not an uncommon occurance, in the instance of these affected vintage Mac's, their was evidence of violent explosive reactions in old batteries, often occuring during periods of inactivity where in some cases, computers were stored unused for years before the cells failed. In many cases these violent explosions, one of which was observed in action as being a random, spontaneous explosion which generated a significant ammount of heat,  resulted in a number of logic boards being completely destroyed as the corrosive acid in the lithium-based cells ate away everything in it's path! Not only is there a very real possibility of irrepairable destruction of now scarce vintage components, one has to consider that a potential fire and personal safety hazard exists where these Maxell cells are found.

Some time ago, it was observed by a fellow vintage Mac collector from 68kmla, that almost all of these explosions were occurring with a particular brand of battery used in countless Apple's and Mac's from the IIgs and SE (the first Mac's to make use of a logic-board mounted cell), right up until at least 1999 (I found one inside a Rev.1 B+W G3 tower that has a '99 date code corresponding with when the tower was made). The brand in question was Maxell, a Japanese company whom also made floppy discs, VHS tapes, and other such electronic consumable items during the 90's. The other popular OEM battery was Tadiran from Israel, which does not seem prone to violently exploding, although in the worst cases they have been known to occasionally degrade and disfigure when they become old and discharged, causing them to leak and cause similar damage, albeit far less devestating in appearance.  Other batteries I have since found as OEM items are a German manufactured cell which is blue in color and branded as something translating to "Sunlight" or similar, and also in a couple of machines from the 80's (specifically an SE and an SE Superdrive), a black Varta item also from Germany. From my experiences at least, these appear to also be relatively untroublesome, even after 20 years or more. There is one other brand, Tekcell, which seem more common as a replacement item than an OEM part, and thus far I haven't got any intel on these cells. I guess no news is good news?

Anyway,after I'd read this thread over the weekend I hastily set about digging into my collection to inspect machines or pulled boards for damage and remove all the batteries from them regardless of age or brand. I have gotten through 18 units so far... 2 SE's, 2 CC's, 3 IIgs's, a IIci, a IIsi, 4 LC's, 2 early and 1 late LCIII, a Performa 400 (LCII), and an LC475... plus a few pulled boards (Classic, 475, PM5200, PM7xxx), and there are many more to go. Outlined below are the results of my sweep to date. The news is good but not great, as you will see below.  I have included a number of phot's to illustrate various kinds of damage and also the various types of battery for ID purposes. 




First cab off the rank was my dad's SE FDHD that had been in the shed and switched on occasionally for the past 7 years. In this machine I thankfully found an intact Tadiran battery with '88 date code which I promptly removed. After this slight confidence boost, it was time to go through my own machines.


Before I had even started sifting through the stack, I found 3 Classic logic boards... the first had clearly had a battery explode already, which I could no longer find any viable trace of to discern a brand... only the aftermath below. At a glance however, I'd be inclined to write this off as a Maxell victim, as they were very common in Classics. I'd call this a parts board now at best... at worst, maybe junk.

The second one had not been demolished so impressively but nonetheless had a badly degraded Maxell that had leaked and started to corrode the caps, a couple of diodes, an I/C and a rectifier in the immediate vicinity. The finger contacts are also damaged as well as some corrosion on the bottom of the board, but i believe this may be due to it's proximity to the exploded battery, which was on the board beneath it in a stack.

The third one was on top of the stack, with a RAM stacker and 2 SIMMS connected to it, and with another spare stacker resting on top of it, These were all luckily unharmed. Incidentally, this third board had the blue-coloured German battery, which appeared fine and seemed to be original fitment. I have found a few of these in the machines I've investigated so far, however I am led to believe they are most common in Australian machines (many of which are built in the Singapore factory), and not terribly common in the US...

The next victim was this LC475 board I pulled from a machine years ago. This one however was not recently exploded... This corrosion was present when I got the machine nearly 10 years ago hence it's non-functional state. Thus far most of the LC475's Ive had from memory have had Maxell batteries.

After that, was time to get into the complete computers... First in line were my trio of IIgs's. The first two were fine, with no signs of leakage. I believe one had a Tadiran and one a blue battery. AFter removing these, I opened the Limited Edition (which has the PRAM battery soldered to the board on legs underneat the PSU), and found a Tadiran soldered on pigtails (common on very early SE's with 800k drives and early gs's), which was obviously original and in a very sad state. the casing was deformed, it had clearly been leaking and there was corrosion beginning on one of the pigtails. After I snipped it off, I found the lower surface of the battery casing to be very poorly. I'll be pulling this board out over the coming days and washing it just to be safe and make sure no trace of goop remains...

The Color Classics both checked out fine, as did the IIci, the one of my pair of IIsi's that I checked, the LC's, the LCIII's, and the Performa 400... No real signs of serious degradation in the assortment of blue german batteries and Tadirans I encountered aside from very minor specks of corrosion beginning on the endcaps of a few of the 80's and early 90's coded ones. There was one Maxell in the lot that seemed good at a glance aside from similar endcap corrosion... but it was nonetheless binned.

Then I got to the the last of the "pizzabox" Mac's, The only operational LC475 in my collection... It was then thaat I was saddened and kind of awestruck when I found my first real irrecoverable Maxell victim. Sometime in the 4 years since the 475 was stored in a fully operational state on a shelf, this Maxell inside it had spontaneoulsy blown and blown good....

I guess I don't have a functioning LC475 any longer.  It looks like there must have been a decent amount of heat going on in there when it happened, and it looks to have been a pretty violent reaction indeed... the stuff reached all the way to the very rear of the case, and even seems to have eaten away at the actual locking tab as it snapped like a cracker-biscuit when i began to open the case. It has rusted one localised corner of the PSU case and destroyed everything in it's path on the logic board... even the fan copped some! 

I've now written this one off as junk and stripped it... luckily there was nothing in the PDS and the RAM and VRAM modules on the board seem to have miraculously escaped unharmed. The HDD was luckily shielded pretty well by it's own SCSI cable (which is ruined) and the FDD was far enough out of the way to escape without injury. I'm going to pull the PSU apart before I use it to make sure no stuff has not gotten in and began eating away the internals. This means I'm now on the prowl for a new LC475. I don't even have a spare case anymore, as I threw most of the cases from the ones I stripped out to make room for working stuff and kept only the best one, which is now junk. Ah well... lesson learned. 



Anyway, after that devestaing blow I investigated one of the prides of my collection expecting the worst. Luckily however, upon opening my nearly mint SE Superdrive I was  pleasantly surprised to find an unharmed logic board and analogue board (Incidentally with caps that look as good as brand new) and a Varta battery on pigtails with a date code on it that would indicate it is the original 25 year old item. 

It looks like new too, and from memory this machine actually still kept reasonable time after 25 years when it was last switched on, however to be safe I cut it off and left the pigtails on the board in case i ever decide to solder on a battery carrier.



Anyway... after the devestation I found in my 475 I'll be continuing my investigations post-hast, as I suspect at the very least my working Classics all have Maxell batteries onboard still, as well as the SE/30 and there is a good chance I may find some in the LC 5xx and early Powermacs, and the IIvx and other IIsi that I havent checked yet. 

These machines were all sold in Australia, and as such, many came from the Singapore factory... Incidentally, most of the machines of Singapore origin do NOT appear to have the Maxell battery onboard, and the ones that do have it have all seemingly been manufactured in the USA? 

In any case I shall continue my checks and post an update when I have news, or with luck don't have news!

OMT

Old Mac's and old data... Ethical nightmare? I'm not worried...

There has been a long running concern in the vintage computer fraternity that involves the handling of data found on discarded, recovered or secondhand computers and equipment. It is now generally accepted to be poor form to parouse data found intact on a on a volume whch has been obtained secondhand, and the accepted decorum generally seems to be that if intact data such as documents from previous users is discovered, it should be immediately deleted. There is a more hardline school of thought even that would have it considered that any hard drive or media be formatted flat and clean of any and all data indiscriminately before the volume is even used at all... this school of thought often takes into account in many case the probable presence of licensed software that theoretically we have no right to use if we havent paid for it. Believe it or not, there are many many people that get antsy about such things... usually serial bigots without any other discernable cause. But I digress.

Let's get the software side of things out of the way first up. So yes, it is in theory a transgression of the law to utilise software for which you dont own a license unless stated by the author of said title, however the specific laws which cover this are somewhat grey, cloudy, and open to interpretation, and still very contestable. They also do not recognise or take into account the concept of "Abandonwear"... Software that is no longer in any way supported or acknowledged by it's original author due to extreme obsolescence, or due to the original authoring entity no longer being in existence at all, which is becoming more and more common with it now approaching 40 years since the personal computer became concern. This I find interesting given that even a registered patent has a finite duration before it must be either renewed for another finite timeframe or relinquished.

As it stands, many licenses allow for software to be installed for use by a finite number of users on a finite number of machines at the time of purchase. As a general rule of thumb these licenses have not in the past... at least not in the 90's and early 2000's where I have the most concern for them... been subject to personal restrictions as to who may use it. The license for most simply stipulates that the software may be installed on x machines, and/or be used by y people... Where am I going with this? Well, allow me to present a scenario....

 Let's say for instance somebody discards their old mid-90's vintage Powermac complete with it's copy of ClarisWorks still installed, and ceases to use the product ever again as they had gone and purchased a MacBook to replace it. I find their old Mac at a local dump and take it home and boot it up, then find to my delight that it has ClarisWorks still installed (cos let's face it, Appleworks sucked) and use it... Even though Claris was taken over by Apple in the 90's and therefore theoretically the license issued by Claris still could be said to stand due to Apple being an existing entity in the present, theoretically there is no contravention of the law taking place if I continue to use the suite for private use, as it is still only installed on one machine (indeed the same machine at that), and being used by one person, as per the original license agreement. If on the other hand, I use it on the machine that was discarded, but meanwhile the original purchaser has retained their copy of the packaged software and installed it on an iMac they bought for the kids, THEY are in fact actively contravening the terms of the license and er go breaking the law, as it is their responsibility as licensee to ensure that only one copy of the software is installed and in use as stated by the terms of the Agreement for as long as they hold the license. I too, of course would be breaking the law in this circumstance, however the original licensee of the software is breaking the law on two counts by failing to uphold their responsibility of ensuring the software was deleted from the old machine prior to disposal... so who really has the high ground? This personal accountability is just as much relevant to personal digital effects, as I'll discuss not too far below.

So, that's practical, productive, theoretically still profitable software, with living or otherwise accountable authors/vendors covered. Now what of grossly obsolete, totally unsupported, and or completely orphaned software... things like MacWrite, MacDraw, MacPaint that went out with bubonic plague, the original monochrome Microsoft Flight Simulator, old, obsolete by up to 20 years or more, and now totally unsupported Macintosh System/MacOS installs, or the countless shareware, donationware, freeware or even paid-for, licensed software that was authored and/or released by entities that no longer exist? There once was a time when their license agreements were credible and binding, but in my opinion, the concept of being bound to a license created by an entity that no longer exists is absurd... Whilst I respect and take my hat off to the authors of years gone by, I'll happily contravene any law that says I'm bound to a license issued by a body that no longer exists. Same could be said for license agreements in place for software that has been completely dropped from distribution, is grossly obsolete and of very limited capabilities in present day application and/or is no longer supported by it's original vendor.... For instance Macintosh system software prior to OSX (or even including earlier variants of X if one wanted to go that far), or any pre-OSX software titles that are no longer updated or supported, which I'd go as far as to say that is most of them. The law becomes murky and grey in these parts anyway, and as far as I am concerned, the moment software becomes officially unsupported/obsolete, the original EULA should be rendered null and void, and the title should then be covered instead by some kind of state-legislated, generalised, Fair-Use policy. Again, I'll happily break the law by using a copy of MacOS 10.4  that I dont have a license to use, as Apple's "my way or the highway" policy of forced obscolescence has made it impossible for me to obtain a new legitimate copy for years. And same goes for all the software that is installed on the Mac Plus external HDD I dug out of an attic... I've got Buckley's of finding most of these pioneering programs, or even references to the existence of some, even if i wanted to purchase these monochrome games for the $10 each game title cost in 1989, as the they have been long forgotten about and the developers by now in many cases have shut up shop or passed away.

Now for the personal data/old documents side of the argument. The long and short of how I see things is to the effect that when one creates any data, whether it be electronic or otherwise, ultimate responsibility for maintaining it's security or confidentiality comes down to the creater. It isn't hard to format or erase a volume that has been made redundant... or even simply hit the thing with a sledgehammer or drop it off a bridge into a river. If one makes the decision to freely dispose of intact media with data still intact as well, then they are effectively releasing said data into the public domain.

Whilst I am not for a second suggesting that people should go out of their way to use carelessly released digital data for purposes of evil, or even go out of their way to parouse said data, I would like to make a point that people ought to be taking far more ownership for what they put into the digi-sphere and have a far greater awareness than what many do of how little protection they have in the event that their data falls into the wrong hands due to something as simple as careless disposal of a computer or storage device. And leaving a drive password protected or encrypted is not enough.

It's a slightly different ethical and possibly legal scenario if somebody actually goes as far as to try and recover data that has been for all intents and purposes destroyed. Doing that just makes you a contemptable individual or a government intelligence official.  Even so, legally from what I can gather with my limited knowledge of IP and privacy laws, and with seperate laws pertaining to copyright and usage aside, if data has been discarded into the public in anyway it is still not really covered by any hard law except in a few exceptional circumstances... even if it did have to be run through some kind of whizzbang data recovery process to get to it. This is something it's taken people a long time to grasp. Whilst analogue data has finite copies and can be destroyed entirely at will with varying degrees of simplicity or difficulty, digital data, particularly in the age of the internet and with the culture of questionable ethics that surrounds it, leaves traces and prints that are far more difficult to completely destroy than your average Joe is fully aware of.

So in a nutshell, I have no real ethical or legal concerns about picking up an old Mac somewhere, switching it on and having a ferret around through it's directory system. Sure, I don't go out of my way to find and view... nor indeed do I even have the tiniest degree of interest in... people's personal data and documents, however if I happen to stumble across them and see something that doesnt concern or interest me in the process of scoping out the 10 years worth of cool shareware, freeware, or abandonware for which I don't own the license,  I'm certainly not going to be in the slightest bit worried about being considered morally corrupt. I just move right along with my business, and eventually the old documents get shafted into the trash to make way for cool stuff I actually want. At the end of the day if a drive has System 6 on it, I'm certainly not going to format it just to meet some kind of imaginary ethical obligation, only to have to pull out my crusty old System 6 floppies and install it again... or the now equally crusty 10 year old backups...

OMT

Why we should not abandon the print media in favour of a digital world...

I can't help but somehow find myself subjected to the whole analogue vs digital data discussion as of late... in fact I have come across it quite a few times in the past week. Whilst I am all for advancements in technology and thinking that benefit and progress the human experience, I have to concede to a certain degree of alarm at how willingly people are following the trend of adopting half-baked, rushed advances in technology, with there seeming to be a push towards the complete digitalisation of all assets that the population are blindly swallowing without much concern for the consequences and availability of recourse should these new and unproven technologies turn pear-shaped... In particular those concerning the storage and retrieval of important or historical data.

Call me old-hat and dogmatic in my thinking, but I am of the opinion that whilst hard media is tried, tested and proven to hold up reasonably well for hundreds or even thousands of years, digital media, whilst somewhat convenient and fairly streamlined when functioning as it should, is still very much in it's infancy and as such , potentially subject to harm from shere apathy alone, as well as many facets that are thus far unknown. 

I was actually partaking in this discussion (view the thread here) a few days ago on what remains of the old MacAddict forums at Macstack.net, and have been involved in it or come across it a number of times since ... my position being that firstly, whilst ideally there would be many regular backups of digital data maintained to prevent any permanent irretrievable loss, in reality this cannot be relied upon to occur on a personal level for on, as digital media has become such a convenient and seemingly permanent convenience that the average individual has developed a very poorly guided sense of trust in the ability of said data to withstand the rigours that it may face in a harsh digital world. Furthermore there appears to be an equally misguided trust that somebody else will keep their data safe, and ensure that it is progressed with changes in the technology used to store and access it such that it remains viable into the future.

Particularly since the advent of cloud-type data-access arrangements such as Apple's iCloud, online media repositories (such as photobucket) and the seemingly permanent and accountable social networking media of the past few years, there appears to be a belief among the masses that there is just this magical space where data is stored and it will always be there, as somebody has to be held accountable if it is lost. What is forgotten though, is that all of these repositories are run by a human element and subject to human whims, and the reality is that they are mostly operated and maintained on a large scale corporate basis, which means that when these enterprise fail to turn a profit or enough of one to be considered worthwhile investments of time, money and resources, they will simply fall by the wayside, and the only accountability will be relating to the shareholders... Nobody will be held accountable for lost data, as it can't be traded on a stock exchange. Furthermore, this same commercialist, capitalistic logic can reasonably be seen to dictate that if a tangible gain isnt seen to exist from keeping said data viable into the future, that no effort will be made to do so.

In a nutshell, as digital technology progresses, so do the standards by which it's operations are governed... formats change or become obsolete, breakthroughs are made that cause old storage technologies to be pushed into the past and become unsupported... ie the tape->floppy->CD->DVD->Bluray/Laserdisc progression that has happened in the past 35 years. If no forseeable benefit (other than posterity or heritage... we shall leave them out of this equation at this stage for arguments sake) exists that justifies the continued transference of said data across standards, it can be expected much of it will not be transferred and is as good as lost... It'd be the digital equivilant of finding parchments written in the language of a long extinct race. I actually just recently came across a real-world example of this on a vintage computer forum I'm on. A guy recently came across a stack of data cartridges from NASA containing data pertaining to the Voyager space program dating back to the dark ages of computing. This stuff is no doubt going to be of some historical significance in years to come, if not now... the only issue is its in a platform-specific format that makes it very difficult to access even with some of the more modern old-tech computer equipment that is more readily available. Whether the data still exists in another form is unknown... it no doubt does. However I'm sure there are many similar cases where data has not been ported to keep up with a rapidly advancing technology. I know for a fact I myself have boxes of floppies, even 5.25", that i need old equipment to read. My PC which is now 8 years old doesnt have BIOS support for a 5.25" floppy drive, and Apple made a concerted effort to make the 3.5" floppy media obsolete in 1998 with the release of the iMac. Put simply, we just cannot rely upon everything being preserved in a form that is usable.

Then there is the second point which relates back to the new and still largely uncharted nature of the digital meta-sphere. Even if we assume an ideal world where a concerted effort was made to maintain data in the name of heritage and education and free of commercial interest, what is to say that some sort of natural terrestrial, or extraterrestrial (no im not talking about aliens, but then again...) phenomenon thus far unforseen or unconsidered wouldnt lay waste to large portions of digitally-stored data? For instance natural or man-made electrical or magnetic phenomena, or even, far-fetched but still theoretically possible, technology-specific threats such as a malicious supervirus coded by somebody with the worst of intentions or internal issues that havent presented themself yet... Has everybody forgotten about the fear of the world caving in as a result of the Y2K bug? Whilst it turned out to be a false alarm, it still should be a reminder of the insidiously hazardous nature of the unknown. The next big flaw we discover in computer technology may not be such a harmless, overstated fart in the breeze.

The all-encompassing point i am trying to make in summarising is, that the technology available to us today cannot and should not be trusted at this point in it's development, nor should it be trusted entirely for decades to come, due to the volatility that exists in it's development and the fact it is complex enough that it could actually get the better of us... only a select portion of the world know what they are actually dealing with, and among them, you will not find names like Mark Zuckerberg. Printed or other hard media on the other hand has had thousands of years to be developed and refined, and has proven itself well. It has limitations, it has faults, but the difference is that they are largely physical, and we are aware of them have a full understanding of how to mitigate the risks associated with them to minimise loss of data. Meanwhile, this digital realm we have at our fingertips is realistically the product of 30 years of development... 70 if you want to stretch the boundaries of how modern computing is defined... with much more to be learned for both better and worse before we can credibly say it is to be depended upon as the carrier of the entire human story. As such we should not be encouraging the abandonment of the printed media or it's management systems, as if we do it will reach a point of irrepairable decay, and in the event that the media and systems that replaced it failed, we may very well find ourselves with very sizable gaps in our recorded heritage with little to no recourse... It doesnt take a genius to see this would be a very sad state of affairs indeed.

OMT

Graphite running OSX finally... and an RF shield... and I have no tools!

That's right... OSX. Only Panther though, as my Tiger discs have grown legs.

I finally pulled the test drive out this evening, threw in some decent quantities of RAM and put in a 60Gb Barra out of an eMac as an interim until I can be bothered getting an even bigger one. that said, it's not like I'lll ever really fill 60Gb... It's all for the wank factor really. Anyway, having done that i set about installing a fresh copy of OSX on and then halfway through the install, an epiphony....

It was really way too easy swapping hard drives in and out... iin fact it was way to easy putting the thing back together at all!... and then it dawned on me.... Some dicknose had either pilfered or was too lazy to reinstall the RF cage over the logic board sometime in the past. Needless to say as soon as the System install was done the iMac was apart again and not too much ferretting around in a cupboard turned up a spare RF shield I'd saved off one of the past parts hacks. And thats when things turned sour...

I found myself have to try and put in the ridiculous cage screws down the sides, with a multi-bit screwdriver with a pozi-drive bit in the end, meaning after several failed attempts i ended up with a screw floating around inside the case, refusing to come out. this is the part where I completely ragequit at the fact some asshole has taken every single one of the 3 sets of expensive screwdrivers ive bought over the past 5 or so years. Of all of them, gone, leaving me stuck struggling with this single, miserable excuse for a screwdriver that I found floating around in the sink of the Kombi. And it's not a matter of me lending them and them not returning... i stopped lending tools long ago. Nooooooo... somebody, somewhere, has actually got the audacity to just take whatever they feel like from my toolbox and not put it back, and when I find out who, I WILL break their fingers, as I dont feel like spending half an hour of wrestling trying to get a rogue screw out of an iMac because some puss-wad is too much of a cheapskate tightarse bitch to buy their own tools! 

Anyway, eventually with the help of a buggered iMac speaker magnet and a bit of luck i got the screw out, and after a few more failed attempts at starting the screws with my non-magnetic, chunky, piece of shit screwdriver, I got the shield back on, got the machine back together, and now it goes a little something like this....

OMT.

Restoring a Graphite iMac DV SE... a teenage dream is fulfilled.

So... about a fortnight ago now I procured another iMac to add to my collection of at least a dozen in all kinds of condition.

I've owned and even built a few slotload iMacs in my days of playing with Macs.The first was a bit of a test of the water to familiarise myself with the platform back in the mid 2000's. I had an early iMac DV Indigo with a blown flyback transformer, an iMac 350 Indigo that functioned, and a 350 Blueberry minus the logic board, also with a blown transformer... a fairly common condition on iMacs that see many hours of use. I basically wanted an iMac DV souped up a bit, and in Blueberry, not boring, mainstream Indigo... I had been charged with the task of keeping a whole lab of indigo machines (including the very DV i was about to dismantle) functioning in High School, so was thoroughly sick of the colour. The iMac DV differs from the 350 machine in having a 400mhz CPU, a DVD-ROM drive, dual-firewire ports, and an external VGA socket behind a removable flap on the rear. the 350 has the rear flap but no port or corresponding hole in the RF shield, no firewire ports (so virtually no way to connect external drives as USB1.1 is far too slow), and only a CD-ROM reader. In a nutshell, I used a process of trial and error to part out the trio of machines and reassembled them such that I had the logic-board, DVD-ROM drive and RF shield of the busted DV mounted in the chassis with the working analog board that was formerly a 350, which was wrapped in the Blueberry case plastics of the non-functioning 350, and had it running a 20Gb drive I'd sourced from a dead iMac somewhere else. It was satisfying... and the machine became known as Frankenmac.

As a teenager however I had always wanted a brand spanking new iMac DV SE when they were released... They were the upmarket top end of the iMac line in 2000, running at 500mhz with a 512k L2 cache, with a 30Gb HDD standard, 128Mb RAM and a DVD-ROM drive, and available in either pristine Snow, or sexy, sexy, professional as all get-out Graphite like the Powermac G4's of the time. They were both equally sexy and very capable for their time. The snow and graphite colours were rereleased later (graphite was also available previously in the upspec iMac 400 DV SE), but snow seems the most common, and graphite the most sought after.

The mac bug bit again in 2011 when I procured a couple of damaged Snow iMac 600's (Summer 2001 models), and a bunch of iMac 500 Indigos. With this came my most recent build... a Snow 600 known as Frankenmac II, built from the best-working 500 chassis, the better set of Snow case plastics, the 600 logic board from one of the Snows, a DVD drive from a DV that had bitten the dust and caught fire, a healthy 60Gb HDD from an eMac that had been handed over with the lot of iMacs, and had it maxed at a full 1Gb of RAM. This more than satisfied my longheld desire for a shiney Snow iMac. To many the iMac is throwaway technology... but to me, they are a beautifully styled, functional computer that single-handedly pulled Cupertino from the doldrums and changed the direction Apple, and indeed personal computing, would take forever, just as the Macintosh did in 1984. The iMac is a huge part of Apple history and indeed computing history and as such, deserving of preservation and recognition, just like it's great grandfather from the days of monochrome screens and bad Hall and Oates video clips.

Anyway, back on track.... I've always wanted a Graphite, even more than a Snow. My English teacher in high school, Miss T... also rather the Mac nerd, would gloat constantly about her then spanking new Graphite 400 DV SE affectionately named "Orac". Unfortunately I wasnt going to get one back then as I had already spent a fortune on a Powermac G3, which being still a far more capable machine for my purposes, made it hard to justify to my parents why I needed an iMac. Fast forward a decade and a bit and I had realised that the Graphite machines are actually quite a rarity in this country, moreso in working condition 12 years later, and are still actually somewhat sought after, and as such, most people who get them in amongst bulk lots of Indigo's from old school inventories want drug money for them on eBay etc.

Needless to say when I found this seemingly intact example of a Graphite DV SE in the bottom of my brothers wardrobe, which had been left by my other brother when he moved out of home and forgotten about, and which appparently had spent most of its life in a high school store room, I wasted no time in requesitioning it. It seemed basically intact at a cursory glance but for some scuff marks, However after I inspected it closer, I realised that in typical DET form, when it came time to dispose of it among other old equipment, it would appear to have been roughly handled, quite possibly dropped, meaning the internal chassis plastic is demolished. Not just cracked due to it being brittle, but completely falling to pieces in chunks... when I removed the case plastics the thing fell apart. In addition, it was missing the hard drive which i believe is my brothers doing, but oh well.

So, cutting to the chase, I made the decision to rebuild it...I opted to use the existing chassis with the CRT and PSU which to my knowledge were functioning and had low hours, and set about replacing the smashed structural plastic with stuff from one of my junker iMacs, in this case an iMac DV that was formerly my jukebox until my drunken housemate spilled American Honey in it. Anyway... the build went something like this....

This was the Graphite in the initial stages of dismantling... Note the yellowed piece of plastic inside the lower tray. That was the top of the inner-bezel that was broken clean off. The entire bezel ended up in about 50 pieces on my floor as soon as I took apart the outer shell...



These were a fairly impressive set of specs back in mid-2000...



And heres the donor Indigo iMac DV 400 that met an unfortunate demise due to alcohol, which was to provide a mint condition inner-bezel. Luckily for me I had part-stripped it so it was easier than it could have been...



8 screws later and the Graphite looked like this...





Whilst I had the two bezels detached, I thought I'd take a picture of them together to illustrate the difference between the early and late model items...


The complete bezel is from the donor machine shown above, a very early iMac DV (yellow power LED) that was running almost permanantlly its entire life in a school computer lab. The broken one is from the later iMac DV SE that hardly saw any use it seems. Tho identical parts they appear to be two entirely different plastic compounds... the later one being far more brittle and prone to breakage and fatigue and subject to very noticable deterioration. When taking the screw caps out of the late bezel, it is quite common for them to crumble or snap, and its also enevitable that the clips for the removable bottom tray will snap when it is removed after some use. The earlier one however, is a far more durable and flexible plastic that seems to deteriorate very little if at all with age, doesnt yellow over time, and most importantly, resists breakage during removal of case plastics or as a result of less than couth handling, or even just general movement. Having pulled apart many different iMacs, this appears to be an actual variation in manufacture... All 500 and 600mhz iMacs I have had apart appear to have the yellowed brittle plastic inside, whilst all 350s and 400s Ive had apart have the nice, pliable grey plastic.

And now this is with the new bezel in place place. Below that are a couple of photos of the screws that need to be removed to take the bezel off as well. Whilst it seems straightforward, these screws create headaches... These headaches become obvious when you unscrew them.



Top CRT/bezel screws... The bezel screw is in line with the rounded notch in the plastic, the CRT one is the big washered one at the top. My apologies for the shit iPhone camera and it's retarded light adjustment.



And here's the bottom screws...



Then for the outer casing... First the top BACK cover goes back into place, despite all indications to the contrary. The screws are shown below in case anybody wanted to know. Two down each side, two at the top covered by a plastic cap each, and one in the rear behind the back of the CRT with a plastic spacer permanently attached.









And then after that, the front outer bezel gets clipped into place and a pair of screws at the bottom hold it in place and get hidden by more plastic caps.



Finally, the bottom tray goes back on and I now have me a non-smashed Graphite iMac again.



After that it was time to RAM it up and boot into Open Firmware to suss out the firmware revision before placing a boot drive in. This is of particular importance before putting in any drive that may contain a bootable OSX volume, including bootable OSX CD's. The reason for this is that the iMac G3 slotload models require Firmware revision 4.1.9 in order to run OSX. If FW 4.1.9 is not installed, you will get an error when you try to install OSX... but that is not the worst of it. Booting into OSX with firmware prior to 4.1.9 will rouse a video incompatibility (which was fixed by the 4.1.9 update, and was documented, albeit poorly, by Apple) that will generally cause your display to either do strange things and eventually fail, or just simply not show at all. On some rare occasions there will be no immediate symptoms, however over time the overstressed video circuitry will cause the display to degrade til it's unusable. The only way to fix this is to install the firmware update... if you have an iMac DV you can boot with an external monitor on the VGA port at the back and then install the update. If you have a 350 however, then it becomes a monumental headache which can be dealt with but I shall not go into detail with here. Usually the firmware update will fix the issue, however there are some cases where the video hardware has suffered permanant damage from running in an unsupported mode... so please for the sake of your iMac, dont take the risk!

Anyway, I had a dodgy bootup with RAM beeps to start with, but after swapping in a different stick of SDRAM, it booted right up to a flashing mac icon....



After ascertaining it would power on, indicating initial success, a reboot into Open Firmware told me it was running Firmware 4.1.7, so an update would be required before booting OSX... I have a 10Gb HDD out of an iMac DV with OS 9.1 and a copy of the Firmware Update package installed on it specifically for this purpose, so in it went, and that is where things went pearshaped.Whilst the iMac booted up just fine, it had somehow in the time between bootups developed an unusual issue whereby the display raster was tilted quite badly to the left. Geometrically it seemed basically fine, and purity and convergence seemed normal which seemed to rule out any major analogue video circuitry faults, however the display was rotated to the point where the corners were actually outside the maximum viewable area of the screen. It was skewed to the point where even at the maximum adjustment possible with the software geometry control panel in OS9, it was still wildly rotated. After a bit of research and deduction, I ascertained that the impact that had necessitated the rebuild in the first place had probably caused the deflection yoke on the neck of the CRT to be shifted out of allignment, creating the twisted display I was experiencing... This was both the news I wanted to hear, and the news I didnt want to hear. If this was the cause of the troubles, it was an easy fix. A simple case of loosening the glorified jubilee clip that holds it in position and twisting it back around the neck into the correct allignment. However that meant making contact with a CRT component, which is a positively frightening prospect by any stretch of the imagination... the operating voltage of a typical CRT screen is around 20,000 volts, and even at rest, they can store 2000 volts and shock you with enough current to kill instantly on contact in certain parts, and this charge can be stored for months or even years after the component is de-energised... For this reason I'd advise not to go near one if you are the slightest bit unsure of what you are doing. AFter doing some more intensive cross-referenced research on the composition and operation of a CRT, and then equally intensive research on servicing procedures from a number of sources, I ascertained that in this specific instance, the component I was concerned with was relatively safe, however to make 100% certain I took all the usual precautions... insulated my non-conductive screw-driver from thbottom of the shaft to the top of the handle with insulating electrical tape, wore rubber shoes, stood in a carboard box, moved all possible earths out of the way, removed my ring, put one hand behind my back, and went for gold...with the computer off and unplugged for a number of days mind.


So, anyway, after a simple (and ever so careful so as not to die) adjustment of the deflection yoke, I have more or less cured the display misallignment, with only a couple of minor H,V and R adjustments from the control panel being needed to get it squared up and centered where I wanted it. Next time i have the plastics off i will probably make a couple more yoke adjustments and see if i cant get it squared right up without any adjustment from the control panel needed at all. 



So here it is currently still running the OS9 test drive.... no more twisted picture.




And that, people, is the story of how I restored an iMac and finally filled a hole that has existed in my collection that has existed for over a decade. I know most probably havent gotten to this part of the post without falling asleep, but if you have... kudos. Grab yourself a cookie. hehe


As an aside, this machine is getting a decent sized hard drive put in it, from the 60-120 mark, 120 being about the biggest it will support, being maxed out with 1Gb of RAM like the Snow currently is, and there is still a possibility that I may opt to swap out the 500mhz logic board with an 8mb video controller for a 600mhz board I have spare which came with 16mb of VRAM. The trade down is that the 600 only has 256k L2 cache, vs 512k L2 on the 500 board. Also for the sake of heritage, I may still keep the 500 board in it... Thats a decision for another time.

OMT

Hello...

See what I did there? Never mind...

So, as the name suggests, this is a kind of Mac-centric blog docummenting the comings and goings of a long-time Mac guy whom the times have left behind... not really by accident either. You see, in the mid-2000's Apple had the world at their feet with the cutting edge PowerPC G5 64-bit CPU... that thing was, in a word... nuts. Even today the G5, is a more than capable chip in regards to perfermance, but sadly has become a white elephant with the rapid, some could argue slightly forced, move away from PowerPC support that came from Apple's adoption of Intel processor architecture. Even the G4 that preceeded, whilst now dated, and limited by it's 32-bit architecture, is still usable in its faster forms in the 20teens. But I digress...

Basically the point I am making is that I am from the "if it isn't broken, why fix it?" school of thought. The PowerPC was in its prime with the G5 but  was quelled almost as fast as the new wickid-fast 64-bit chip was introduced, to make way for the Core-duo-based Intel-macs that at the time, were the subject of much hacknied debate and division within the Mac using community. There were some who welcomed the change of direction and the supposed  benefits that it offered... some of which are credible, but others could be considered a weak justification at best. Many Mac users, including myself, however flatly believed that we had been stripped of our identity, and been swiftly belted about the face with the long-standing loyalty shown to Apple for in some cases 20 years. It felt as if the very fabric of what we believed in had been torn apart, and that Apple, the "Think Different" company, had suddenly made a decision to sell out and think the same. In an effort to be seen to be innovating, they had made a choice to alienate a large portion of their loyal user base.

It was utter bedlam in the Mac community of 2005-2006... opinions were flying thick and fast... the PC hordes were sitting in their trees wetting themselves with delight at the fact Apple had sold out, pointing fingers saying "nyaa nyaaaa now ya have to use Peeeceeees", in their typical small-minded fashion. It was like the GM/Ford debate of the computer world had gone mental... The sad thing is however, the PC whores were half right. Obviously there was a particularly heated debate happening on the likes of the now-defunct MacAddict forums that was at the time, my online home, TMO, and many pages like it. Mac users were up in arms one way or another... whether it be the pro- or anti- side, people had an opinion.

In any case, most simply got over it and after a short time, moved on and accepted the change... some more begrudsgingly than others. Not me however. At this point in time I was just out of my senior year at high school, and my pro-user needs were dwindling rapidly after deciding graphic design, publishing, video production which I had so fondly embraced as enjoyable pastimes in my teenage years, were no longer something that particularly interested me after I got into the world of Volkswagens and a particularly mechanical mindset. The Powermac G4 ... my video and graphics workhorse with it's small fortune worth of sweet upgrades including a Sonnet Encore 500mhz cpu upgrade, was becoming little more than an internet kiosk and jukebox. My Lombard Powerbook, also far from stock, whilst a little slow by virtue of its half-supported grapgics controller under OSX, was still more than usable... and the secondhand Pismo I eventually built to replace it out of a Pismo with a broken LCD panel and various lombard parts and new things, picked up that slack with ease. So basically,  as my needs were diminishing and my trusty old workhorses had performed more than acceptably with the worst i could throw at them (the G4 was built for video-editng after all), i decided that I was going to just trundle along as normal, dig in my heals and rock the old tech for as long as possible.

 Not long afterwards, I moved out of home... eventually I moved interstate and became a bit of a meatlifer. In fact I was basically off the internet entirely except for the occasional internet kiosk stint to check out a couple of car forums i was on. In fact throughout the entirity of 2007-2009 i didnt have an internet connnection at home at all, by choice, and my mac spent most of its time gathering dust, while my PC only came on when i felt like playing Flight Simulator 2004. I was living life free of the net and enjoying it thoroghly. My best friend made me a facebook account in 2008 so she could swindle it for farmville things, expecting that maybe one day i might actually use it. Well... one day came towards the end of 2009. Come 2010, I was in a fairly brutal car crash, had my girlfriend cheat on me  three days later whilst pregnant with my son to be, and i finally pulled up stumps and moved back to my home town. After that was when I started to embrace the net again. It was when 2011 came along that I explored my old nerd roots again... That was when I built the Pismo and rememebred how satisfying it was resurrecting an old Mac, or generally making old junk work again. I was given a bunch of iMac G3's from the local school shortly after, and set about building myself a snow iMac 600 maxxed out to buggery known as Frankenmac II (Frankenmac I was an iMac 350 reboarded with a 450 logic board with firewire from a later DV, and a 20Gb HDD and DVD-ROM from another iMac again)... the satisfaction I got from hearing that startup bong and seeing that happy mac face was awsome. I had rediscovered my love of tech.

Since then, I have made it a bit of a pastime of mine again to tinker with, build, fix, restore, preserve old Macs. Lately I've been playing with the NewWorld stuff, paricularly the iMac G3, Powermac G3/G4 and Powerbook G3, all of which I  became pretty expert on as a result of basically keeping 2 computer labs of the iMacs running and maintained for nearly 5 years when in high school and built at least half a dozen up from various wrecks, and having owned a Powermac G3 and Powerbook G3  for over a decade and replaced every bit of both of them. They are fun to play with, nice to look at, and still usable even today. My latest build was a Graphite iMac DV SE rebuilt from the ground up... a machine i wanted since they were new in 2001. However I have a much fabled wall of much older tech that represents my conquests from many years ago... including an SE I was given by my dad in 1998 that was my first ever Mac. I have a 512K, Pluses, SE's Classic's, "pizzabox" LC's and Performas, Mac II's of various models, 5xx LC's, Powermac 5xxx, 6xxx, 7xxxs, Gossamer G3's, IIgs's.... boxes of peripherals and cars... you name it, chances are i probably have it.

Why though? Well... simply it all represents a time in my life, and a time in the history of Apple, and indeed microcumputing in general, that is significant and at least for me, fondly memorable. I guess some might say I am clinging to the past for dear life, refusing to move forward with the times... I guess they are probably right. But who is to judge?  We sit here in 2013.... MacAddict mag is long gone, and more sadly so is the much loved 10-year standing MacAddict forum to which I gave so much time. The internet has gotten fat and clunky, become a capitalistic tool of control and exploitation. The face of computing has changed such that the line between computation and telecommunication has become blurred beyond recognition. In fact the world of technology has become scene of boring conformity, and as much as it has changed to the point where I feel like an alien in it, it lacks so much now in the way of real development. Technology itself has become expendable.... something that is taken for granted and thrown away for the next flashy development or innovation, which seems more and more to be simple eyecandy or token bits of fluff that those marketing gurus tell us we want. Respect for the tech has gone, whic is why I choose to preserve my own little piece of it, and hold onto a time when it was all still happening....

OMT