Released in 1984, the original Macintosh was a wonder – not only did it have a GUI and a mouse, it was actually one of the smaller computers of the day. Now that we’re nearly 30 years past the release of the OG Mac, it follows that a smaller version should be possible. [John] did just that by creating a 1:3 scale replica of the original 128k Mac.
As you would expect, this tiny Mac is powered by a Raspberry Pi running Mini vMac, an emulator for these olde tymie 68k Macs. The display is a 3.5″ LCD with a resolution of 300×200, not quite up to the standard classic mac resolution of 512×342. At least this version has color, though.
Also inside the carefully crafted PVC case are a WiFi and Bluetooth dongle, along with an off-the-shelf phone charger. It’s a remarkable piece of craftsmanship, and given the games and applications (i.e. Photoshop 1.0) available for these old Macs, its possibly more useful for general computing than a stock Raspberry Pi.
You can check out the video walkthrough of everything this tiny little Mac can do below.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-x-RseAns8&w=580]
I really don’t get the trend of making everything use a Raspberry Pi
I believe it’s ease of use as better than an Arduino, and I think its smaller than an Arduino. I’m not too sure, though.
is better* My is still learning my actively used words, and I’m using Swype which makes more typos than normal keyboards.
It’s really not comparable to an Arduino at all. An Arduino is a microcontroller development board with an 8 bit AVR microcontroller. It usually does not run an OS and can be used for projects where not much power is needed, but strict timing can be guaranteed. A Raspberry Pi is a full computer, with a 32 bit ARM processor, that can easily run a full OS, output 1920×1080 video, connect peripherals, etc.
It makes perfect sense for this project; I can’t think of a more appropriate solution. What did you make your mini Mac with?
I agree that this is cool. As to your comment one could make a complete hardware replica using an FPGA or maybe a coldfire MCU? Maybe a parallax propeller? The options are available. Maybe us a printed case?
Yeah why bother with the best bang for the buck? What could possibly be the point of that?
Apples marketing slogan from 2003-2007
Because it was hyped a lot. Then once people finally got theirs, they realized they had no use for it, so you so things like this made in a attempt to try to justify the expense. It isnt even a good replica, it is missing the brightness/contrast knobs on the front, the RJ-11 keyboard connector, and all the rear ports. For christ sakes it even lacks audio out (and probably the internal speaker).
If you look at the actual page, you can even see a bunch of sloppy seams, and that it is missing the air vents.
Have you built a better one?
That’s what I thought.
As for the Raspberry PI, I have found plenty of uses for mine. Just because you have no imagination don’t expect that the rest of us can’t do better.
I can do better. I’m sitting in front of a full blown PC right now that only cost me a dollar. So Raspberry Pi’s are too expensive, and underpowered compared to other hardware.
By those standards, everything is underpowered and too expensive. Forget any and all microcontrollers, processors, disc drives, peripherals, etc, if they cost more than $1.
Sometimes one needs the micro in microcontrollers I suppose. Then you have to be prepared to pay the premium for it too. But the Raspberry Pi was created specifically so one could afford to fry it. In that respect it is somewhat of a failure as I can get PCs for cheaper, and more easily afford to fry those.
@pcf11 You can get PCs that are less than 6 inches square and weigh less than 5 pounds for under 40 bucks? Please reveal your source, maybe the rest of us will start using that instead.
No I get regular sized PCs. I’m not that pressed for space here yet. I still have a few acres I can fill up.
It’s a shame that he wasted your time scratch-building a model of a classic PC, on his own dime, to entertain himself. If there’s any justice in the world, he will smash it up and go sit in the corner and think about how he disappointed Matt on hackaday.
Ping!
Why would someone justify the expense of $25? If I buy something for $25 and find I have no use for it, I throw it away.
So…. What about art? paintings? sculptures? Why don’t people throw those away? It’s a waste of space, it costs very expensive, and most art have no purpose but to amuse people. So why does THIS toll differently?
I have no idea if you meant to reply to me, and if so, why. Art doesn’t fit into this at all. People keep it because it does give them something, namely the pleasure of looking at it, collecting it, preserving it for the ages, etc. On the opposite spectrum of that is garbage, which everyone throws away. I guess something in between is a functional thing whose function you have no use for. Whether you keep it, throw it away, or pass it on to someone else, depends, I guess, on how much space you have, whether you think you’ll need it in the future, whether you know anyone who will take it off your hands (fee or free), and other such considerations. My point was that, considering it’s $25, it doesn’t *matter* what you do with it if you don’t end up needing it.
Really cool project. Well done.
#boycottpcf11
Well, I reported both of your comments, so hopefully the moderators will take care of that for us. In the meantime, fuck off you assclown.
You probably don’t see the irony of someone reporting a comment then using crude personal insults in their reply. But I can assure you it was not lost on me.
“I am so mad at the big mean men on the internet. I’m going to cry to mommie and daddy because they hurt my feelings”
Ugh, throw the twitspeak out. There is no limit on message length here, so write why you want to boycott pcf11?
“given the games and applications (i.e. Photoshop 1.0) available for these old Macs, its possibly more useful for general computing than a stock Raspberry Pi”
Yea sure, if you don’t count the thousands of programs in the Debian repositories that run natively on the pi and can be installed with a one liner apt-get command…
A very neat piece of workmanship none the less, now it just needs a matching keyboard and mouse!
How’s that Linux version of Hypercard coming along?
Why bother, you can emulate a mac already.
I took the quoted statement to mean having one or the other, if you make use of both the linux and mac environment then the statement does become true.
Either way, who still uses hypercard?
“A very neat piece of workmanship none the less, now it just needs a matching keyboard and mouse!”
At 1:3 scale! (c:
Every bit yes.
anyone else remember Digital Research’s GEM ?
on the atari?
Wow, that was incredibly vague. I’m pretty sure I had GEM on my ancient Atari ST 520. I don;t remember much about it (It was my first computer ~ age 4ish) except that now to have a windows-like GUI that included sound and ran on 512k with room to spare can’t have been *that* bad. Could it?
I meant that was vague on my behalf, not stevebb, just to avoid confusion :)
I only just remember it from an Amstrad PC(think that was a 286 – wouldn’t run Doom :-( ), but yeah it did run STs too didn’t it . no need to apologise- It’s all a bit vague on my part too. Indeed I thought I’d imagined it until I came across FreeGEM recently- on modern hardware it is fast.
Yep, I think I have used it in the past. I recall using it on top of DOS.
I remember a friend at school had a laptop with it. Awful…
putting a raspberry pi in a pvc case is now a hack. nice.
The hack is that it’s a computer that looks just like a 1:3 scale Mac, while acting like a Mac. The problem’s not what passes for a hack these days, but what passes for a comment.
> The problem’s not what passes for a hack these days, but what passes for a comment.
Paging Dr. Burnsides to the burn ward to treat a massive burn…
+1 LOL!
This guy has a real hard on for Steve Jobs, eh?
No, I’d say about a 1:3 scale hard-on.
This would be an homage to Bill Atkinson, not Steve Jobs
This phrase you are using, I don’t think it means what you think it means. I’m guessing you don’t have much experience with this sort of thing.
Click the link in the article and you will see what I mean there, Chum.
hackaday comments are terrible on the regular…wish I would have noticed that a couple months ago and saved all that ragemode for work.
Hackaday is one of the few sites I still read the comments but even slashdot is getting overrun by the im-in-tech-cause-i-read-wired.
If he ran Basilisk II on this thing, it would have network connectivity and support for software newer than what the Plus could run. If you add MacTCP, NCSA Telnet, and MacX to the mix, you can do almost everything related to the underlying Debian install from the emulated Macintosh environment. (Connect MacX to Firefox running on Raspbian, for example.) It could even run a web proxy behind the scenes, to request mobile sites and convert images for the ancient browsers that run on 4 megs of RAM and System 6. (MacWWW and I believe the first version of Mosaic will work.)
If he ran Basilisk II on it, he would also no longer be emulating an actual Mac. Basilisk II just emulates an ‘040 processor and doesn’t actually emulate any of the rest of the Mac hardware; it more or less just intercepts accesses to the toolbox ROM, simulates a generic arbitrary-sized framebuffer without emulating the actual Mac-specific video controllers, and re-directs network access to your PC’s networking hardware without emulating the actual controller IC. It’s no more a Mac emulator than VirtualPC is a PC emulator.
MacX is a piece of garbage. You won’t be able to get a firefox window to work. MacX will crash and burn. Even if it doesn’t crash, the colors will be a mess, screen updating will fail, and you won’t be able to interact with anything. Don’t bother.
MacTCP is not compliant with modern TCP/IP specifications, you will have a tough time if you put it on your network. Even at its best it cannot keep up with a 10 megabit ethernet. It will drop packets left and right. Running a remote X session is far too challenging for this clumsy mess. Other systems will have a tough time talking to it. Again don’t bother unless you like pain.
Don’t bother with prehistoric browsers either. They don’t work at all on any actual web site. Usually the browser just crashes, sometimes it doesn’t crash, but it’s not usable.
Yeah we all get the urge to boot up those old computers but then it just brings back memories of how badly those old systems sucked even when they worked.
That’s why you run a new enough System on Mac emulation to be able to use Open Transport for networking.
#buyapple
There, the two comments should annihilate and disappear, right???
Typical Apple consumer mentality.
Typical moron.
Speaking about yourself?
funny considering no component of this was purchased from apple. I suppose that eating an apple is also typical consumer mentality?
Funny strange? Funny that you didn’t get it? I don’t find that particularly funny.
this was very clever, and well executed. nicely done!
Very cool! But… no 1/3 size floppy? Would’ve been cool to use the slot in front for the SD card…
That’s what I was hoping for as well…
Yea, me too, and at about 1″ an SD card would be about 1/3rd the size of a floppy, maybe he could hook up a USB SD card reader and stick it behind the floppy hole.
I’m suddenly sad that we don’t have SD slots that eject the card with a motorized mechanism.
An ejecting SD reader might be a good hack for you to put together. Just don’t tell anyone here about it. We can see what that leads to.
1/3 scale golf clap…
what is this, a computer for ants
Introducing the Macintosh mini.
I find these comments more entertaining than the article.
It was (the origional) of that machine that caused me to go to IBM arch, I dont feel much different now.
I was an apple guy, Linux rules!
Still Think Different do you?
Add feet, paint it yellow, call it the Plantain Junior 2000.
(Now to wait for the needlessly hostile reply about how “plantain” doesn’t refer just to starchy, undersized cooking bananas.)
Great idea actually, I like it.
Unfortunatly the idea trolls over at Apple will now steal the idea for a micro system that is modeled after their earlier works, and call the idea their own.
So where do I find floppies that size? =p
Mount a SD Card reader where the floppy slot is and the problem is solved.
A lot of haters posting but really this is pretty cool esp considering the workmanship of the custom case.
I wish I had one, because after my Timex Sinclair 1000, and my TRS-80, my 128k Mac, was my first “real” computer. I loved that little box. So, even though it would serve no “real” purpose, I would like to have one of these, so that when I see it sitting there on my shelf, I can more immediately remember those days when I had one, and recall those lost days of my youth.