Apple Macintosh Performa 475

Hello, my dear lovers of old iron, and lovers of Apple technology in particular. Today I would like to tell you about the Apple Macintosh Performa 475 computer that got into my home collection.

And it all started when I brought home two cardboard boxes of dubious content on a February winter evening, which, of course, caused a little indignation at home.

From the first box was extracted: 12 "CRT monitor with an apple on the logo, system unit, keyboard, mouse and a bunch of wires. In the second box was an Apple Personal LaserWriter 320 laser printer and an extension cord for American sockets. All of this was covered with a layer of dust. dirt and sawdust, as if lying in a woodworking shop in a prominent place.The

Apple Macintosh Performa 475 computer was produced from 1993 to 1996 and cost about $ 1000. The Apple Personal LaserWriter 320 printer was published in 1993 and sold for $ 805 USA, however, two years later dstvo this model was discontinued.

A few days later, I finally armed myself with two packs of cotton pads and a few bottles of alcohol and was able to bring the Apple Macintosh Performa 475 to a pretty good condition. For the keyboard, I had to arrange water procedures with Fairy (having previously removed the electronics from the case), since inside it there were such deposits of crumbs, dust and other ectoplasm that even an 8-atmosphere compressor could not blow it all out. The body of the system unit and monitor wiped away from dirt with virtually no problems. The printer, for some reason, was clean initially.

External and internal view:

System unit.

The system unit is very different from the bulky PC cases of those times, and it was precisely because of its appearance that the case was called the “pizza box”, which in Aglitsky means “pizza box” (approx. KO ).

The case is made of plastic and weighs 4 kg, and its dimensions are 39x31x7.4 cm.

Removing the cover, you can see how beautiful and comfortable inside the Apple Macintosh Performa 475 is. The

maximum output power of the power supply is 36W.

The focus of the planks of memory. From top to bottom: a tilt SIMM slot, soldered on a 4MB motherboard and two 256KB video memory slots each.

The heart of the Apple Macintosh Performa 475 is the Motorola 68LC040 processor.

Keyboard and mouse.

A single-button mouse connects to the keyboard via the ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) interface, and the keyboard connects to the computer. The keyboard has a button, when clicked, the operating system completes its work and prepares the computer for turning off the power.

I would like to note that the ADB interface is not compatible with PS \ 2 (and, especially, with USB), and although there are special adapters made in China, it is much harder to find them than the original keyboard and mouse with this interface.

Monitor.

The black and white 12 "CRT monitor turned out to be not quite from the Apple Macintosh Performa 475 computer (which was equipped with a 14" color monitor), but ~~due to the lack of a maid ...~~ it’s better than without a monitor.

The power button for the monitor is located on the back of the case. Trimmer resistors are also located there, with which you can adjust the image on the monitor screen, and for this we need a screwdriver that will fit into the holes allotted for the regulators.

The brightness and contrast controls are displayed on the right wall of the monitor body.

Printer.

The Apple Personal LaserWriter 320 printer is no different from a conventional printer, except that instead of the familiar Centronics connector, the Com interface with a MiniDIN-8 connector is used, well, there is no power off button.

The printer is in excellent condition, but I had to look for a cartridge for it. Fortunately, the full equivalent of the Apple cartridge is the HP 92274A cartridge, which was not a long search. As expected, the print quality of the Apple Personal LaserWriter 320 printer with the new cartridge was up to par.

Specifications Apple Macintosh Performa 475:

Processor: Motorola 68LC040 with a clock frequency of 25 MHz.
Memory: 4 MB of internal memory + 8 MB SIMM (maximum capacity up to 36 MB).
Drive: 1.44Mb.
Hard disk: 160 Mb.
Sound: built-in sound card. The output is stereo, 8 bits (22 or 11 kHz). The input is mono, 8 bits.
Video: 640x480, 256 colors, 512K VRAM.
CD-ROM drive: optional, external, SCSI (DB25).

Available connectors and interfaces:

Now you can connect all the peripherals to the computer and try to start it. Having carefully studied the inscriptions on the cases of the monitor and the system unit, I finally found what I was looking for with lust - the inscription 110-240V. The printer turned out to be 110V Only, so I had to buy a step-down transformer for it.

Key to start, ignition, gong! And the sound of a gong in macs is a good sign. But the image on the monitor did not appear. The monitor died - Stirlitz thought, and went to the forums to look for the wiring of the adapter to VGA. However, it turned out that in the absence of an image on the monitor, a 3.6-volt dead battery was to blame. Moreover, to find such a battery is quite difficult, it is much easier to stick there the usual CR2 at 3 volts, with little effort.

After replacing the battery, the image appeared on the monitor, but System 7 boot (Mac OS had that name until the eighth version) did not start - instead, a flashing image of a floppy disk with a question mark appeared in the center of the screen. And you could also hear how the hard drive was trying to spin up, but he clearly did not succeed.

Perhaps he simply does not have enough power - Stirlitz thought again, and began to inspect the power supply for the presence of pregnant capacitors. But unfortunately (or fortunately), the power supply turned out to be completely healthy - the + 5V and + 12V voltages at the time the computer started up were normal. After the fifth attempt to turn on the computer, the hard drive changed its mind and rattled. Download started.

First of all, I decided to reinstall System 7 OS on the Russian version 7.5.5 (the installed OS was English). Eight diskettes and a free time car - and voila - the OS has been installed. In principle, it is quite possible to install MacOS 8.1 on the Macintosh Performa 475, but it will slow down quite a bit on the existing 12MB of RAM.

Pleased with myself, I postponed further research for tomorrow and went to bed. Imagine my disappointment when the Performa 475 the next day simply did not want to boot. From the word at all.

The hard drive pierced piercingly with read heads, and sometimes even let out a rattling rattle. The king is dead, long live the king! - thought Stirlitz, and taking a Phillips screwdriver, he began to remove the cover of the Hermoblock. But, instead of scratched pancakes, a perfectly smooth working surface appeared to the eye. So the matter is in the mechanics, and most likely in the parking mechanism. Something did not let the head block out of the parking zone. Turning on the computer (without closing the memory block of the hard drive, there is nothing left to lose), we look at the behavior of the read heads. Pushing them with a match ... There is contact!

However, this dirty hack is not a solution to the problem, and, unfortunately, I can not fix the mechanics. The simplest thing to do in this situation is to replace the hard drive. Having found a suitable 50-pin SCSI FUJITSU M2954SYU 4 GB hard drive in the bins of the Motherland, I set about installing the operating system and decided to try my luck with MacOS 8.1.

And here one more disappointment awaited me - the Apple HD SC Setup program, available on the Disk Tools diskette (taken from the System 7 distribution kit), could not identify and format the newly installed hard drive. After checking the position of the jumpers, I spread my hands - the disk is configured correctly. As it turned out, Apple HD SC Setup only works with hard drives designed specifically for Apple (with the appropriate firmware).

There are several solutions to this problem - format the hard drive using third-party software or use the modified Apple HD SC Setup utility. I chose the second option.

We format the hard drive, divide it into partitions, drop the MacOS 8.1 distribution on one of the partitions and install it, using the System 7 Disk Tools diskette for initial boot. The

installation of MacOS 8.1 lasted about an hour. And since it is boring to contemplate a bare OS, all kinds of software of that time was found and installed on the Internet. Since the Macintosh Performa 475 computer does not have a CD-ROM drive (in fact, any other drive other than a drive is also missing there), I had to use another Mac by inserting a SCSI 50-pin controller into it in order to copy the OS and software to the hard drive.

As expected, 12MB of available RAM for MacOS 8.1 was not enough - the system actively used the swap file and noticeably slowed down when programs started. I had to urgently get a 32MB memory module, and on foreign forums they advised me to look for exactly FPM memory, since EDO memory is not determined on all old macs.

But I was, as always, wildly lucky - the 32Mb EDO SIMM I found from an obscure manufacturer made excellent friends with the Macintosh Performa 475, increasing the total amount of RAM to 36 MB. We live with.

In order to add support for the Russian language in MacOS 8.1, I had to use the Dialect 4.0.4 Russifier, after which the coveted checkbox of the keyboard layout switch appeared.