Restoring Apple's fastest Mac (in 1990)

[@izzieb]

Part of me wonders if this was connected to some kind of electron microscope, hence the capture card and other cards for controlling it.

[@cherenkov_blue]

Yeah that was my thought. Either a microscope or some sort of medical imaging machine.

[@wayner8088]

Just glad that was a coffee spill on the keyboard, and not blood 😅

[@rcairo2595]

Either they wore gloves or had very soft hands because even though the keyboard was dirty, the lettering is still in good shape. If they spent hours on it, the keys would be worn.

[@lindoran]

I used a logic analyzer that connected to one in tech school that had a capture card for recording data from a spectrum analyzer. But most like some kind of instrumentation. Also see these in simulation kits. Kind of runs the gamut but the capture card is usually there for joining data from offline instrumentation -- this is my first guess too because the BNC to RCA adapter most high end sopes and instruments had video out on BNC in the 90s

[@whophd]

Once spilled coke on a worthless PC keyboard and told others it was water. Except a curious half of the keys stopped responding, so …

[@RikerJoe]

Awesome score on the IIfx, Colin. I was one of the fortunate ones who used one back in the day during my early career as an engineer at NASA, and I was similarly thrilled when I was able to obtain and restore one a few years ago for my collection.

[@organiccold]

The good old times 😊

[@masterkamen371]

​​@@organiccold when you could realistically become an engineer and be competitive on the market, before every single company abused the crap out of cheap workforce in other countries. It sure is not fun being young and trying to become someone and something in 2024.

[@whophd]

Wow so my neighbour who had one for university (CS assignments) proooooobably didn’t need that level of power. Rich dad. I do blame them for starting my Apple fanaticism haha.

[@gt2847c]

As soon as I saw the GPIB board, it brought back memories. I supported a bunch of Mac boxes for the Georgia Tech School of Chemical Engineering in the early 1990s, first as a student assistant, then as a full-time employee. We had a couple of the IIfx boxes, but mostly had IIx, IIci, SE/30, and a few IIsi boxes. They had a bunch of IIci with HPIB/GPIB boards in them along with Labview to run their unit operations lab along with some scattered about in other research labs (mostly 4MB RAM with 80MB SCSI drives). When I left in '97, they'd mostly gone to PowerMacs or PC compatibles and various flavors of UNIX workstations. We never bothered to do as much repair work on the floppies as you did here - they were much easier to just replace back in the day. We'd clean/lube them a bit, but rarely a full disassemble/clean/reassemble.

[@pseudotasuki]

I used a IIfx a bunch of times when I was a kid and had no appreciation for how insane it was.

[@johnsimon8457]

19:57 must be wild to join Apple as a system developer and work alongside someone who’s a veteran of veterans, principal of principals. “IIfx, Quadra? That’s me.”

[@StephenFarrow-gx6qu]

I live in the UK and these machines are rarer than Hens teeth but I managed to acquire a perfect example 20 years ago and paid the princely sum of £40. I also by an amazing stroke of luck found 128Mb RAM (x8 16Mb modules) that originally cost £495 per chip. I also found a brand new 80Mb Hard Drive. I have two superdrives installed and a 24~Bit Graphics card. I love these machines and will never sell mine!

[@generallyhelpfulsoftware646]

When I was a grad student at the University of Wisconsin (Center for X-ray Lithography), my research group put out a bid for an infrared spectrometer and we ended up with one controlled by a IIfx. Being a Mac user, I was happy about that but oh the price tag! I think the Mac alone was $7000. My boss also bought an A/ROSE (Apple Realtime Operating System) NuBus card for it and I was looking into controlling an older spectrometer with that, but never got around to it.

[@framebuffers]

A/ROSE is wiiiiiiiild. It's basically runs in a whole embedded 68k system that actually had pre-emptive multitasking, when the machine it ran on didn't.

[@creato938]

That's the advantage of something that was high end for the time, be watches, computers, cameras or cars, someone did pay good money for it and didn't want to see it going to waste later, hence the maintenance and being in good shape after all those years.

[@thedopplereffect00]

It's more the software wouldn't run on anything newer so they had to keep it working as long as possible

[@whophd]

@@thedopplereffect00 Two things can be true haha The IIfx got replaced more often than not, when something more powerful came along. The PPC transition wasn’t as painful as the OSX transition, so it’s more likely to see a G3 or early G4 tower put to work until the 2010s. For instance maybe a DAW. But the 68030 era was also the 386 era, and that kind of thing was far more common in MS-DOS applications that didn’t transition to Windows.

[@arthurmorrien3643]

We used the same mac in the robotics lab in the technical university of Athens (Greece) in 1994. It was used for all sorts of things, including research into the control of an industrial robotic arm, which probably had a camera for feedback.

[@DanLoudShirts]

Used one in 1990-92 in desktop publishing. 21” monitor. Aldus PageMaker and MacDraw for technical drawings and diagrams. LaserWriter IIg. Loving this!

[@whophd]

LIVING THE DREAM! Bet you knew what that badge was about, “Windows 95 = Macintosh 89”

[@framebuffers]

I remember being around 10-11 years old here in KZbin, and I found a 3D animation demo for the IIfx. I was *fascinated* by it, how 80s it was, and how a little crystal was floating. I went on a wikipedia rabbit hole and then got into retro tech. And here I am some 14-17 years later. This is one of my dream machines, maxxed out so I can run AutoCAD or Photoshop, or try run some Pascal (or C) compiler and try develop some fun thing.

[@nickspeakman7919]

I worked for 4D.inc in 1990 (called ACI at the time) and I used to go to trade shows demonstrating the database's graphical abilities using a IIfx with that Neotech card connected to a CCTV camera. I'd take attendees photos, trigger the capture from a video source and add it to the database. Seems run of the mill now but was a "show-stopper" back in 1990 when databases were nearly all text based.

[@whophd]

Right? This is before AV Macs were a thing in Quadras. Any kind of TV image was remarkable.

[@malamar467]

These restoration videos are sooo good. The content, the editing, and the narration are all superb. Thank you for making them!

[@disklamer]

What a beaut. I caught me a Mac II back in the day, the upgrades and expansion were something else. They were really nice workstation chassis with more expansion options than you could ever afford.

[@36iRealisedImOldToday]

I know people complain today about hardware not being repairable, but it's very rare you need to repair it as everything is so reliable now. You could leave a PC today for 30 years and come back to it and it'll work fine, but hardware back then always had so many issues. Also clock batteries leaking, capacitors exploding or what I always used to have an issue with is socketed chips needing to be reseated all the time. Now we have SoC and everything being put into a single bit of silicon, hardware will last for centuries.

[@nikkiofthevalley]

PCs are actually quite repairable. It's laptops and phones that aren't. They are so compact that you need to actively design for repair, which a lot of companies don't do. Additionally, some (like Apple, for instance) even actively implement measures to make it harder to repair.

[@lovemadeinjapan]

This machine is just from the dark ages. All stuff before is as reliable as new semicondutors. Basically the 68030/68040/80386/80486 era is a nightmare. Before and after is fine. It has to do with the state chip manufacturing was at in that era. I heard from ASML staff that their machines, still Philips at that time, were delivering junk quality semiconductors. We do have serious reliability issues with things like screen backlights and software nowadays, especially embedded software can be a rampage.

[@sinisterpisces]

It was lovely to see this one come together. It looks great. My dad had one of these in his home office for work. It was the first Mac I ever used. I fell in love with System 7 then. I *still* want one of these, even though I know it's not even the most powerful or desirable retro Mac I could get.

[@dennisud]

I had an Mac IICi on my teacher's desk for a few years, with 2 monitors, a printer (on a side table) and connected to 6 apple IIs as a server. It rocked before my school switched to Dells and it subsequent network. My Mac had a buttload of Cards too! That National Instruments card looks like the one I hooked up those Apple II in.

[@larryroyovitz7829]

Classic Nubus. I had some ancient Digidesign recording DSP cards and interfaces for these macs before switching the PCI based TDM cards and interfaces on the 9600, eventually moving to a G4. Such great times.

[@PotatoFi]

That keyboard cleaning was soooooo satisfying. Love that one chapter name, too.

[@Jasontyo]

came here to say this, love it.

[@av_oid]

Still have mine. Lovely Alps switches.

[@esecallum]

Just wash it under running water

[@CrassSpektakel]

I remember when my Amiga 3000 outperformed the Mac by a good margin, with AmigaOS and MacOS running at the same time and back then the Amiga 3000 did only cost a fraction of the Mac II. Both had pretty much the same hardware, 68030+68882 at 25Mhz. But the Amiga had blazing fast Static-Column RAM and the fastest SCSI controller in a desktop computer back then while Apple used - as always just the cheapest RAM they could find, blunt FPM RAM with one Waitstate. And just wait until you put an 80Mhz 68060 with 1GByte of memory into that beast. Yes, 68060 and memory boards with 64MByte and upgradeable to 1GByte were an option back then. And still cheaper than the bare Mac IIci.

[@KarlBaron]

Maybe if they had charged more for the Amiga they wouldn't have gone bankrupt

[@CrassSpektakel]

@@KarlBaron The Amiga Branch was always making good profit, it was the PC Branch which bankrupted CBM. Funnily even today the current holders of the Amiga Properties are making good profits, they still sell the Operating System.

[@headlessmike]

There are a few reasons why electrolytic capacitors are preferred over tantalum or ceramic caps in certain applications. Two common ones are 1) that electrolytic caps have better linearity with voltage and are therefore preferential in, for instance, audio circuits, and 2) electrolytic capacitors have a greater equivalent series resistance (ESR) which can be very important for power regulation, hence why they are common in power supplies. Replacing electrolytic capacitors for tantalum or ceramic capacitors with the same rated capacitance may thus not always be a good idea.

[@marshallgs]

This is correct, high ESR (electrolytic caps) are usually required in linear regulator circuits for loop stability. I've used a handful of LDOs in the past which specifically warned against using MLCC/tants. Also, putting tantalums into a switching regulator may not always be straightforward - tantalums are VERY sensitive to both reverse voltage and overvoltage, even short transients. You must design the original circuit around them. If the switcher is poorly designed or aged, you may unknowingly be subjecting your replacement tants to stresses that will sometimes lead to very sudden and explosive failures.

[@8BitNaptime]

Radius made large grayscale monitors for the Mac. Also, tantalum capacitors as shown are also electrolytic, the other type is aluminum electrolytic. Tantalums may not leak but can short.

[@SlevinKalevera]

Just wanted to pop in while I watch this great video: I can never click on your videos fast enough when I see them. As someone who does board work for a living; it's oddly theraputic to watch you restore these old beauties.

[@deusexaethera]

Apple could've been great if they weren't so goddamned proprietary. Every time I have to do anything to a Mac, which is fortunately very rare, I get pissed off by how everything seems to be done differently on purpose just to make them incompatible with PC hardware, PC software, PC accessories, PC usage standards, and every other aspect of PCs. Apple is like that one kid in high school who's convinced if he alienates enough people everyone will start to think it's because he's too cool to be associated with them, and start looking up to him. There's a reason that company has nearly gone bankrupt repeatedly.

[@Raptor50aus]

Great restore work. Thanks for the memories. I worked at Apple back then and worked on this and many other models. Great times.

[@keithsweat7513]

The IIfx was a rocket for its time

[@zemmel63]

Beautiful machine - great work. Greetings from Germany and happy new year!!

[@IOSam]

Amazing project as always! The intermittent switches on the keyboard probably had to do with the bath, since Alps switches are not well sealed against dust and (especially) liquids, and the water could be shorting the switches' metal contacts inside. As the water evaporates they'll likely work properly again, although you might want to take the long hard path of opening them all to ensure they are clean and dry inside (and to ensure the springs and metal contacts don't rust). Blowing the dust from the bottom housings (which includes the metal contacts assembly) and then cleaning the stems, springs and top housings with an ultrasonic cleaner is usually a good idea on filthy keyboards (to remove any gunk that might make the switches operation too scratchy). As an extra step, you can put a tiny bit of Nyogel lube on the sides of the cleaned stems before you close the switches up, for a smoother operation. These AEKs are some of the best mechanical keyboards ever made, so preserving them is totally worth it!

[@matthewdavies7697]

That floppy breakdown and repair was actually quite relaxing to watch. Maybe not so much when you're doing the work, but I've never tried.

[@YawningAngelRetro]

Great video. I do enjoy watching your material as the pace is just right and you explain things really well, making for an informative watch. I was late to the Apple party in the 90s, finding my feet with the original iMac, but I find learning about these older machines really interesting. Keep up the good work. 😎

[@GarthBeagle]

I have a Macintosh IIx that was upgraded to a IIfx, has the bottom IIfx sticker, but retains the original IIx top case Always a good idea when seeing Macintosh II models for sale to look inside to see if they've gotten the upgrade

[@jellepetje]

I have the II with IIfx upgrade but the original sticker on the bottom. But the asset tag on the back suggests that it was former Apple property.

[@electricmiragemedia]

Love your astute attention to detail and commitment to restoring instead of throwing away! Keep it up!

[@pmr1wrt53]

What a great Mac that was. I worked with the Mac IIfx and mainly with DTP, with an external removable hard disk for the fonts. Most used software was: FormsExpert from Purup Electronics, Denmark. Unfortunately my colleague was ahead of me... he was allowed to have the IIfx. Great video. Memories to old good times.

[@enzofitzhume7320]

A tantalum capacitor generally has a significantly higher frequency response compared to an electrolytic capacitor, That's probably why Apple used the two electrolytic caps. Great video Colin!

[@davekendall5273]

I'm still kicking myself for not removing the batteries from my IIfx when I moved house and had to put it in storage. The batteries bombed it so badly that even the 128Mb of RAM suffered corrosion from battery spray. There seems to be something about the IIfx, or those specific batteries, that makes it prone to this issue. A company I worked for had around 20 older IIcx Macs in storage for a decade before they were disposed of, and I didn't see any leaking batteries when I was stripping them for recycling. I know they hadn't ever replaced the batteries as they all had a 1989 date, and they were a different battery brand to the ones I've seen in the early 90s Macs like the IIfx.

[@regenjo]

this restauration doesn't seem to have been done in 1990

[@2dfx]

I too have a IIfx that has fallen victim to the battery bomb, but at least there are replica motherboards that can save them!

[@davekendall5273]

@@2dfx Replica motherboards? Do you have any more information about that?

[@Lexistechthing]

Woah that's a sweet set of cards. Reminds me I should still build a retro PC for logging and programming my T&M equipment

[@logiclust]

i used to service these things so that's why i enjoy watching these vids.... nostalgia. their industrial design back then was fantastic.

[@shmehfleh3115]

From what I understand, capacitance on tantalum caps tends to drift a lot more with heat than electrolytics. Maybe Apple found that they drifted too far out of spec as the machine warmed up, so they used electrolytics in those specific circuits.

[@thecrow3461]

20MB in 1991 was a huge amount of ram

[@JoriDiculous]

and at 40mhz the mac was twice as fast a the average pc.

[@masterkamen371]

​​@@JoriDiculousnot gonna lie, that's quite unimpressive for the price, when the average PC was a 16 MHz 386SX. A total piece of crap, those 386s were.

[@SidcupRC]

​@@JoriDiculousAnd x3 as expensive

[@whophd]

Yeah I was dying to have 4MB of the boring variety in 92,93,94 eventually got it in 95 and had to resist the temptation to steal some … so yeah, 20 is ludikris

[@JoriDiculous]

@masterkamen371 Really? I had a 386sx, it kicked the nuts out of the regular 386 and even the 486 when it came out. What really was the massive drawback with this MAC was the RAM, rest was far ahead of anything 'desktop'

[@jasonhbush]

Great video. I used one these as my daily driver when I worked in the prepress / service bureau

[@rudge3speed]

I had a IIfx purcased second hand after the Quadras came out. That was the snappiest Mac experience I ever had. I loved that machine, using it for years. Macs got increasingly sluggish even after the PowerPC hit the scene.

[@MasterYodaJEDI4]

I entered high-school at the end of summer in 1990, and I remember the Apple IIfx! This thing was fast then.

[@JoriDiculous]

yeah, compared to a desktop "pc" at 16-20Mhz this was killing them.. And the price killed you 😂

[@thedungeondelver]

Also the 64 pin SIMM form factor was also used by GVP, Inc., a manufacturer of Amiga accessories including some well regarded 040 and 030 accelerator cards for that machine. There's a way to source new ones if you wanted to bump up your IIfx to outrageous RAM levels. I think you could put as much as 128 megabytes in it, which when the IIfx was new would have set you back about $14000.

[@foxdavion6865]

I remember as a kid, my primary school owned one of these computers, exactly one - because they needed one high end Apple computer to govern over all the Macintoshes on the Apple network at the school and this was it. One of the teachers at the school was obsessed with Apple computers and was a big tech geek, I remember him going crazy over the first apple inkjet printer which he linked up to this thing and printed out a really amazing image. He kept the machine in his office, I didn't know if the school owned it or he owned it. But the school used it for designing flyers and posters for all their events and was likely used as the network admin.

[@JoeBurnett]

You really hit the jackpot with that find! Congrats!

[@steinerdreiei]

30 years ago when I worked at a University Institute (Europe) we had one of these boxes for a senior member of staff. Compared to the other PCs the mere mortals had, the Mac was really expensive. I cannot judge the speed as compared to a 486 PC. It is nice to see that these machines still run. B.

[@madcat789]

This was a delightful video. Good job man. I hope you had a great Christmas.

[@Calicarver]

I have a lot of good memories of the IIfx. I was introduced to Photoshop 2.0.1 on a Mac IIfx in the fall of 1991. Was not given any instructions on how to use Photoshop but it didnt take long to figure it all out and master the whole program back then. In addition to a flatbed scanner the IIfx was connected to a Canon color laser printer CLC300 that produced very vibrant color prints. The IIfx I was using had millions of colors, but no idea about the RAM, my guess is it had 8 or 16mb. And like the machine in this video the IIfx I used was also owned by a university.

[@hypercube33]

I would have just honked the board and case into a dishwasher with a dot of liquid non dishwasher soap and let er rip. Then rinse with alcohol and let dry for a few days. As long as there is no batteries, you're golden. DO NOT use regular dishwasher soap as it has chlorine and abrasives and will be a no-joy situation. The rest you cleaned exactly how I would have. Always love your videos, keep making local fun :)

[@VK2FVAX]

I love that you left the asset tags on the systems. I do that with all of mine because it shows the providence of the system and often in conversations I've heard "...and XYZ institution was doing ABC research/development on those systems..." and I have one from there/then and it might have been involved in it. A couple of times there was only 1 or 2 systems in the project so it was easy to identify. I love the stories and history of the old systems almost as much as using them :)

[@BBfanfun]

no Retro-Bright ? LOL i remember when they came out , we got them in Apple's Academic promo. (featured prominently in the comp-Lab of the College) got ppl out of the B&W Pagemaker & into true 16-bit programs; the Nu-Bus slots never took off though. also the period of Laser Printers. so much fun. Sim-City in Color is maybe my fondest memory of IIfx

[@V0S1N0]

The best our schools had was the IIci and it was guarded like a shrine so the IIfx was like a mythical beast for my generation. I was just saying I'd still be very excited to explore one, I've still got a Mac Classic sitting in the corner waiting to power up for the first time in over 20 years. I can only imagine the BIOS battery looks like an old lost piece of tomato.

[@dustinsmous5413]

I owned a Macintosh IIfx with identical cards in it! The capture card seemed to be able to capture analog video stills at standard NTSC resolution as well as higher resolutions, as long as the vertical refresh was at 59.97 Hz. Mine also had an analog HD RGB image capture and playback card. I believe my system was used in some sort of broadcast environment, as it had badges on the case that said Harris Video Workstation.

[@esmphotographics]

I‘ve got a Mac IIfx as wel. And the logic board has all tantalum caps, but they look all like they are original. No sign of being soldered in on a later moment.

[@VanBourner]

Wait, this PC was assembled right on my date of birth? That's incredible lol

[@gentle285]

They knew you were coming to this world!

[@little_fluffy_clouds]

I lusted after these when they were new, but they cost far too much. Years later, I got one at a reasonable price on eBay. I eventually traded it in for a faster Quadra 700 with a PPC 601 accelerator board, which I still keep in my vintage computer collection to this day. The IIfx and the Quadra 700 are my favourite 68k Macs, for nostalgia reasons.

[@okonvick]

Dude, your game with naming the video segments got much better! ddddddddd

[@阿綸的全勳學院]

Most powerful MAC in 1990! Good collect !

[@miasma82]

I love your channel. Hope you had a good christmas ☺️

[@LiamLG_Official]

Dang, you got one! Those IIfx’s are very rare nowadays!

[@MrAlan1828]

My Dad worked in a Toy company and their Arts R&D department used one. That was back in 90's where I would go there so see the artists and guys use it. The company was located in Hong Kong Tsim Sha Tsui .The company was called Soma Traders and on the same floor just next door was Remco a leader in RC car Toys. My Dad was Head engineer of R&D. and yes these were meant for businesses

[@Ilix42]

We had a IIvx when I was a kid. It was so amazing at the time.

[@slaphead90]

This was actually my working desktop between 90 and 92. It's other function was testing various nubus cards produced by my company at the time, and because I was the only one responsible for testing it became my computer.

[@victorpalacios1017]

What a wonder My friend, You are SO lucky to have one working, Thanks a Lot for sharing, i appreciate it👌

[@johnsimon8457]

IIfx! Some professor got a grant, opened up an apple catalog and just picked the most expensive one. It’s kinda how in the 90’s SGI octanes turned up in academia.

[@MistahMatzah]

I have one of these monsters. 80mb of ram, a 1gb HDD (WAY too much space), an Asante ethernet card, and a Radius Thunder IV video card.

[@matthewdropco]

I think what would be kinda cool is to find some sort of metrics on what retro macs connect to websites that still log the details of it. I don't recall if websites only gleened the web browser type and version or if they got system info too when you visited. Further in this day and age, I doubt someone would even care about it within most places that have websites, unless it was law enforcement doing forensics. However, there may be a few folks that are into that sorta stuff and would be blow away by a resurgence, if you will, in retro computers browsing the web (albeit with Classilla or InterwebsPPC or another browser maybe used in Unix or Linux, etc, that can still use the Modern Web.). I'm sure back in the day it was pretty important info to have, but nowadays probabably not as much.

[@bakkus82]

I have one of those Macintosh II-upgraded-to-IIfx. Also annoyingly, they didn't swap out the power supply. Performance wise it's not an issue, but the original PSU for the Macintosh II is LOUD! They introduced a variable speed fan in the IIfx models.

[@volvo09]

Some old computers had stupidly loud fans. I always found it annoying when a machine that didn't produce much heat had a fan screaming away at like 4k rpm, back when fans were just fans and no design was put into making the blades quiet.

[@BinkyTheToaster]

As for the tantalum versus electrolytic capacitors on the mainboard, I'd be willing to bet that it's an inventory thing where Apple just had a pile of electrolytics in their inventory but really wanted to move to tantalum and as the inventory shrank they put fewer and fewer of them on the boards.

[@braytonak]

I wonder if Colin Howzitgoin makes these videos and pictures 420k of us silently gazing over his shoulder. Surely his room can fit 512k.

[@Ojref1]

NI is still alive and kicking. I use their software to interface with an oscilloscope, benchtop DVM and DC power supply every day.

[@BobHannent]

More than 20 years ago I used to use RF spectrum analysers that had composite outputs as alternative to their relatively small CRT. Some supported an exotic memory card or floppy, but sometimes using the Vout was simpler for a workflow. I would use the analyser under GPIB control to automate satellite signal measurement tests. There are other good answers here, but that's my example. I used PCs for that, but it was years after this example.

[@shehanum]

John Gruber would be very happy to see another Extended Keyboard restored and back in service.

[@PatrickDunn13078]

I would have loved one of these in the office back in the 90's! We were using a Mac Plus and two SE's at the time and then we put in accelerator cards in the two SE's to 030's.

[@BinkyTheToaster]

I had the pleasure of using a IIfx that had A/UX installed on it. With enough RAM it was quite performant, and shows what the System Software could have been with more development.

[@vha42]

We had a mac lab at high school and since i took two years of multimedia, i spend quite some time there. We had two II FX and a quadra 900, all in network, and different gear connected including an M2 video recorder and a video grabbing card for the quadra. Or to correct my self, this was the Multimedia/ AV room, the Lab had lots of SE’s in a local talk network, and perhaps a II CI, those i remember being slow and sluggish all ready in 1993 😂 Anyway to the point, thinking of the gross keyboard, it all makes sense, 18 year old boys picking their nose, spilling coffee, soda, eating lunch, getting crumbs from danish in the keyboard, or 90s Norwegian cool kids, snus! (snus is a Swedish tobacco product, for simplicity lets call it moist snuff, you stuff it under your lip, and it will certainly leave stains similar to chewing tobacco). It all makes sense now why it looked like it did. Hypercard and photoshop 2.5.1 was hardcore back then 😂 .

[@goodtimeswerehad]

Ah! The machine we all wanted back in the day but could only dream of! My first Mac was a IIcx (second-hand) and I absolutely loved it. Classic Apple design, still looks good today..

[@bltvd]

In 1990 this machine made any PC on the market look like a calculator! These were over 10k and you were lucky if you could even buy one at that time.

[@cla3d]

I recently bought a Macintosh II that turned out to be a IIfx with 32 mb ram. My board is just like yours with the same caps. First time a powered it up I was amazed the speed. I also had some cool cards, like a 386 pc card and a pretty nice video card that can display millions of colors. for the $100 a paid for it I was pretty happy.

[@kylek6922]

Not to long ago I went through an old box of stuff and found I still have a similar old Nubus Asante card. Its dual interface but a older '91 model. I think I got it with a load of other stuff when I was about eleven off of a woman my folks knew who worked for NOAA doing IT and was willing to dispose of old stuff by giving it to me lol

[@Eyetrauma]

I went down a rabbit hole with the IIfx a while back because I remember people saying that one of the aspects of its performance came from having some integrated ASICs on some of its IO. What’s frustrating is that there didn’t seem to be much info about them and one comment I’d seen said that their support was linked to System 6. I guess, as you mentioned, the Quadra being released not long afterward kind of rained on the IIfx’s parade, but as a lover of forgotten hardware I’m left wondering what if.

[@fununclenerfs]

SE/30 and now IIfx, can't wait to see what's next on the workbench

[@anthonykoller4459]

I’m surprised how expensive they were during the 1990s and today they are so much powerful and cheaper and last so much longer

[@GlennTillema]

I really loved the song @6:50! In case anyone was wondering it's "Trouble Sleeping" by Baegel

[@glennross78727]

Man you making this video made my day!

[@Charlesb88]

This Mac IIfx was Codenamed “Wicked Fast” as it was the fastest Mac at the time of release.

[@andrewrempt13]

I really enjoyed this video. I never knew about the IIfx except wasn't there some controversy about it being released soon after the IIx? I'm probably remembering that wrong . . . Either way, this vid was particularly soothing, especially the part where you're working on the floppy drive. It's a pleasure to watch you work.

[@Leofwine]

The Mac IIx was released in 1988.

[@leokimvideo]

Back when we see made in the USA, sad how it's drifted away so much

[@MCOfan]

Yeah, you apply that lithium grease like a boss, Colin Howzitgoin!

[@eltrash]

i like the capital descriptions of this video ;-)

[@martinscholer5419]

That makes me thinking of renovating my old one. It is sadly sitting on the Bottom shelf in my home office. Last time I turned it on is may be 10 Years ago

[@EddieClark]

Such a great find. Great work!

[@nvm9040]

Those Mac Two computers definitely were a step up from the original Mac line where Apple could push their computers to do more advanced things

[@PGMR30]

What's the music at 14:43?

[@screencastit]

Runaway Deer by Arc de Soleil :-)

[@Renville80]

In electronics manufacturing, it's not uncommon to make a 'rolling change' where one lot of a given assembly is begun with one part, once stock is used up (and if none can be had reasonably soon), the alternate will be sent to the floor to keep the line going. Your board is obviously a 'cutover' from one to the other.

[@Synthematix]

Random cap changing for no reason always makes me laugh

[@smithyoftherust]

I love the beige-box macs. Grew up with a Performa at home before the imac era. I should see if I can find one again and bring it back to usable condition, have it around for fun.

[@WyomingGuy82201]

Oh man, I'd love to have that 2FX

[@Fifury161]

My IIfx has been in sitting in the attic in standby since 1994. 128MB RAM and 6 gfx cards. I must power it on!

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

dont, open it first to check for leakage.

[@vap0rland]

_The Flying Toasters_ ! I sold Macs to corporate accounts in the 80s / 90s, and remember this machine very well. 40% margins for a long time.