Mac Museum Activity

The Mac Museum tends to be a seasonal hobby to which my interest waxes and wanes over time. My collection is in the basement, whose cool temperature tend to be enticing in the summer and unattractive in the winter. Interest also tends to follow buying spurts. I check eBay on occasion and it only takes one item to fall into my price range to kick off a shopping spree that lasts a month or more. Once I’ve exhausted all of the items that are new and within my price range I take a break for anywhere from months to a year.

I hadn’t done a lot with the museum in 2017 and ended up moving a lot of it around into storage-mode when the new furnace and kitchen were installed last year. After swapping out the cabinetry with the cabinets from the kitchen I finally got around to cleaning it up and reorganizing it early this summer. Moving it all around got me interested again.

I’ve been on eBay for the past few months picking up a variety of items including PC notebooks (a couple 486’s, a Pentium, and a Pentium III), boxed PC software (Windows, Office), CPUs to add to my collection (AMD Athlon, Pentium Pro, Cyrix), PC magazines, and even an uncut microchip wafer. I’ve also spent a lot of time in the museum working with all of the items that I own.

I’ve been playing a lot with my collection of PowerBook G3’s (four Wallstreets, a Lombard, and a Pismo) circa 1998 – 2000. I’ve been swapping memory and hard drives and installing applications to bring them up to their original condition. They also make nice bridge machines to get software onto my other Macs – I download software on my 2016 MacBook Pro, transfer it to a CF Card, pop the CF card into a PCMCIA reader, put the reader into the CF slot of a PowerBook Wallstreet. From there the files either go to a floppy disk (1.4 MB) or an Iomega Jaz disk (1 GB) to be transferred to other Macs.

I’ve been cataloging my Macs as I go, capturing the status (does it work), installed memory, hard drive size, operating system, and other software. It’s fun to tinker around for a few hours at a time. That’s all for now; I’ll leave you with some photos of what I’ve been doing lately.