One of the advantages of working at a Large Technology Company is that the people who work there are tech pack rats. And occasionally you score some good stuff. At my old job in 1998, I managed to pick up a Mac IIcx and IIfx for free—both were missing hard drives and memory, of course, but just to hold something that ran a Motorola 68030 chip at 33 MHz and could complete an infinite loop in 30 seconds was cool. (The machines both disappeared when my parents moved from Newport News—my dad probably rightly decided to clear out all non-functioning junk in the process.)
I bring this up because I did it again. I now have a Fat Mac (original Mac with 512K of memory instead of the original 128), a Mac Plus motherboard, an extra 400K disk drive, and something else in an original Apple box (external floppy?) sitting in the trunk of my car. Free. The Fat Mac needs some video work, but otherwise represented to be OK. Of course, the question is what can I possibly do with a Fat Mac? I don’t know, but this is the cue to get that soldering iron for the workshop that I wanted…
Update: Low End Mac has a slew of articles about fixing a Fat Mac. Apparently I’m not alone in keeping a fond place in my heart for these older machines.