24th Anniversary Macintosh

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Jan 132008

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.

http://tsevis.blogspot.com Charis Tsevis

Incredible work. Congrats.
Dave Wilson

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.
Reed

That is epic…
Kevin Boggs

I want one! Fantastic job.
http://retrotechnology.com Herb Johnson

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
http://digitalstudioonline.net Jim Fisk

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