
Macintosh 128K Teardown - kjhughes
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Macintosh+128K+Teardown/21422
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ableal
One of the ifixit commenters tossed in the story of the floppy drive:
[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Hide_Under_This_D...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Hide_Under_This_Desk.txt)

 _" But American business practices, they are very strange. Very strange."_
said the Japanese engineer, when he figured out they were hiding from the boss
...

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joshmlewis
It's surreal when you take a step back for a second, like marathon runners at
one of those drinking stands, and you take in how far we've come in the last
50, 30, and 15 years even. Then you have to think what's next because
computers are getting skinnier and faster from the original design and we all
know that eventually something else will take over. I wonder who will do it,
what it will be like, and how it will change the world even more.

We aren't just going to stop once our laptops are paper thin and lightning
fast (ha ha), so what will it be? The future is a vast frontier even today
with how far we've come.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
I probably just lack imagination, but I don't see the general model of a
digital computer with a Harvard architecture going away for a very long time.
Rather, our focuses will be on getting higher power and complexity on
increasingly smaller sizes, while ubiquitously integrating them in virtually
everything imaginable (in short: ubiquitous computing is the future).

Although we likely will see huge world-changing advancements that will be
taken for granted in the future, much like the integrated circuit is now, the
concept of a computer as we know it today probably won't disappear.

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joosters
The repairability score of 7/10 seems unfair. Opening up this computer could
kill you! Surely that deserves a 0/10 ?

~~~
julespitt
The bane of my childhood was hysterical, clueless adults warning about how I
could die from opening anything with a CRT in it... yet here I am!

~~~
bri3d
For all the sarcastic responses to this post, I can't find a single record of
a death by CRT. I found lots of references to people accidentally touching the
HV side of CRTs and receiving a painful shock but none of the shock causing
any lasting issues.

Death by CRT is definitely possible in theory and the lack of real-world
examples could be an issue of shoddy reporting (i.e. cardiac arrest due to
electric shock minus a CRT as the specific reason) but I'd think think that
across the millions and millions of CRTs sold there'd be at least one concrete
report of a death.

Does anyone know of any?

~~~
tibbon
Same with guitar tube amps. "Deadly voltage", but I can't find many/any
instances of people actually getting killed from tube gear repair.

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coldcode
Amazing to think that was an 8mhz 68000. I can't even compute how many times
faster a new Mac Pro is today (even if you ignore the GPU). Or even how many
times more powerful my iPhone 5 is than this.

~~~
mikeash
That 68000 could manage about 1 MIPS. No floating-point unit, so the FLOPS
will be painfully low.

The low-end Mac Pro has four cores at 3.9GHz each. I believe they'll do in the
neighborhood of 3 instructions per clock cycle at peak performance, so that
means the total is 3.9 x 4 x 3 x 1000 = 46,800 MIPS. Roughly. So in the
neighborhood of 50,000 times faster when looking at the CPUs.

The GPUs make it outright ludicrous. The low-end Mac Pro does 2 teraFLOPS on
the GPUs. Even if we're charitable to the 68000 and consider its 1 MIPS
roughly equivalent to 1 MFLOPS, the Mac Pro is still two _million_ times
faster there.

And of course the Mac Pro is substantially cheaper when adjusted for
inflation. Although it doesn't come with a display, nor any input devices.

~~~
gaius
And yet my Amiga and my ST display a menu as soon as I click, can keep up with
my typing, and scroll documents without lag. My MacBookPro can do none of
these things.

~~~
billforsternz
+1 I can remember coding up tricky algorithms on 1Mhz embedded processors back
in the day which would be instantaneously responsive. Today, although we have
supercomputers in our pockets that can do decent speech recognition and other
extraordinary things, many really simple I/O operations seem to lag. Is it
really possible that all that performance can be effectively neutered
sometimes simply by too many layers of software ? If not, what else could it
be ?

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protomyth
Its amazing to me how the later Apple platinum color and aluminum make the
original Mac look sickly green. I wonder if that was the intent of the
platinum change.

~~~
kens
Plastic cases often yellow over time due to flame retardants in the plastic,
which is the cause of the sickly color. The Mac case was a originally a much
more pleasant beige than it appears in the teardown photos. For more info on
case yellowing, see [http://hackaday.com/2009/03/02/restoring-yellowed-
computer-p...](http://hackaday.com/2009/03/02/restoring-yellowed-computer-
plastics/)

Apple used to be much more open about their products. The service guide goes
into great detail about how to disassemble the Mac - it makes the teardown
almost redundant:
[http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/legacy/macintosh_128k.512k.pd...](http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/legacy/macintosh_128k.512k.pdf)

A hardware note: the iFixit teardown points out the "74LS393 Video Counter"
chips - these are just plain TTL binary counter chips, not special video
chips, so I don't know why it's pointed out as notable. The 6522 Versatile
Interface Adapter (bottom center) seems much more notable.

~~~
drivers99
Thanks. That actually answered my main question: how did they manage to remove
the big scary red wire. It shows how to use a discharge tool connected to
ground to discharge the anode wire. Even before doing such a thing, I'd do
some more research on servicing CRTs before attempting such a thing.

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caycep
All that 80's isms must represent years of historical research!!!

