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A Mac SE becomes a store sign
This is some fantastically creative use of an old Mac that still has some life left. Bonus points for using it at what appears to be a retro clothes shop, since the Mac SE is a bit of an antique in its own right. I wonder if the Mac is for sale too? [Photo credit: Maduarte]
Retro rarity: spring cleaning unearths a Colby Walkmac
For those of us who have been around the mobile computing space for a while, the name Ken Landau is quite familiar. Landau's currently the CEO of iOS development firm mobileAge, but he's been producing software for handheld computing devices since the true birth of the industry in 1993 with the introduction of the Apple Newton MessagePad. Recently, he was doing a bit of spring cleaning and found a rarity in his basement: a Colby Walkmac. Landau's brother-in-law, David Carnoy, is an editor at CNET, so he wrote about the find in a recent post. The 13-pound Colby Walkmac was actually the first battery-operated Mac as well as the first portable Mac with an LCD display. At the time, amber displays were considered to be much more ergonomic than those nasty green screens: This machine was officially sanctioned by Apple, and used a stock Mac SE motherboard. A later model -- named the Colby SE30 after Sony threatened to sue Colby for a trade name too close to Walkman -- used the SE/30 motherboard and had an integrated keyboard (Editor's Note: I purchased two Colby SE30s for the company I was working for in 1990 because they were much faster than the Mac Portables Apple was selling). Landau ended up with the Walkmac during his tenure at Apple between 1986 and 1992. According to Carnoy, Landau was "investigating sales force automation options when Colby Systems sent him one." The price at the time the Walkmac first appeared was about $6,000, or close to $12,000 in today's dollars. There's more about Landau's find in the CNET post, as well as information about Colby Systems founder Chuck Colby, a man who could best be described as a serial inventor. You can read more about Colby on his own website, which is chock full of amazing facts like the fact that when he was 12 years old, he built what is believed to be the first commercial transistor radio.
MIDI gear of the 80s: 16 channels of want
It was 1987 in a dark Orange County new wave recording studio when I first saw virtual notes scroll past my eyes on a nine-inch Mac Plus screen. The Yamaha DX-7 and Sequential Prophet 5 were lit up like a space ship, and I knew one thing for sure: I wanted to go to there. I wanted to do what Front 242, Blancmange and New Order were doing. I was hooked: high on aftertouch. So began my wallet-killing, girl-repelling high school obsession and summer-break career. I worked in the keyboard department at Guitar Center, bought racks of gear at cost, and set my sights on becoming the next great electronic music sensation of the late 80s. Or... not. So what was left behind? Several lame Skinny Puppy ripoffs, a few decent dance tracks that I still have hidden away on cassettes in my office closet (of course, I don't have a cassette deck on which to hear said tracks), and plenty of fond memories about some beautiful old electronic music gear. I present here for your perusal some of my more memorable axes.
Twitterers remember their first Mac
Reader Sam K. (thanks!) noticed the fun on Twitter -- lots of folks are sharing their memories of the first Mac they bought/used with the #firstmac hash tag, and boy is it fun reading through them. The responses are all over the place, from the old ][e (technically my first computer ever at school, though the first one I actually owned at home was a Tandy Color Computer my Dad bought from one of his coworkers) and //c up to the old iMacs and even a few people who can only claim iPod as the first Apple product they used. The first Mac I actually owned was much later than my first steps into BASIC -- when I needed a laptop a few years ago, I picked up a 12" Powerbook G4 and have been straight OS X ever since. It's great to read this stuff, because you can see just how Apple has shaped people's lives. I was amazed to hear all of the emotion in the calls to Steve on our talkcast last week, but looking at something like this Twitter feed (to put your own memories in, just mark a tweet with the #firstmac tag somewhere in there) really shows you how dedicated Apple's products have made the company's customers. These people have all bought a Mac, whether it was a Mac SE (errrr, a Mac Classic?) or a MacBook Air, and never looked back since. Very cool. And while we're at it, is it possible that you're on Twitter and haven't yet started following us? If not, jump in and do so now!
Mac SE gutted, converted into toilet paper dispenser
We've seen antiquated Macs given new life as fish tanks and living room decorations, but the iWipe takes repurposing to an entirely different level. As you can clearly see in the image above, one particular engineering soul figured a spare Macintosh SE case would look a whole lot better in his bathroom than in the trash, so he whipped out a screwdriver, removed some internal brackets and gave the unit a fresh coat of paint. $15 and a few hours later, out popped his new toilet paper dispenser. Check out the read link for a bunch more pics -- oh, and stop second guessing yourself, you're totally building one of these next weekend.
