NYC Resistor

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24th Anniversary Macintosh

January 13th, 2008 | By: davec

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This is a Macintosh 512k which I upgraded to run OS X by replacing the innards with a modern Mac Mini and various supporting components, including a grayscale CRT monitor, an LS-120 floppy disk drive, and a microcontroller-based USB device that interfaces the Mini to the original keyboard and mouse. Why? Mainly because I wanted to experiment with creating a custom USB device. Also I guess I wanted to waste hundreds of dollars and countless hours building a semi-useless computer with a 9 inch black and white screen and no arrow keys.

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6 Comments so far

  1. Charis Tsevis January 14th, 2008 10:47 am

    Incredible work. Congrats.

  2. Dave Wilson January 14th, 2008 2:32 pm

    Very cool project..thanks for sharing your work. I love the way that old keyboard looks. It is minimalist to say the least. Great work, sir.

  3. Reed January 14th, 2008 8:34 pm

    That is epic…

  4. Kevin Boggs January 22nd, 2008 5:41 pm

    I want one! Fantastic job.

  5. Herb Johnson March 4th, 2008 1:02 am

    This is a considerable “hack”, to use a microcontroller to read the early Mac kbd and mouse. BTW the Mac Plus keyboard is the same scheme AND it has “arrow keys”. Or, you can get a numeric keypad which has some additional keys which daisy-chains on the 128K/512K keyboard.

    With a little futzing, you might have used the original CRT, if you could generate the proper “VGA” scan rates and tickle the CRT drive circuit to accept grey-scale instead of B/W. Where did you get the VGA class CRT mono monitor?

    Herb

  6. Jim Fisk March 17th, 2008 9:59 pm

    How about the Classic Mac COLOR tube? Bet those are hard to find.

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