Apple (and Clones)

Apple was a great contributor of PCs during the '80s and '90s using Motorola and Apple/IBM/Motorola (AIM) CPUs. It helped that I was able to acquire exhibits when my wife retired her old m68k and PowerPC Mac OS desktops. During a brief period in the '90s, Apple even experimented with licensing motherboard designs to PowerMac clone manufacturers. This made them a good source of inexpensive computers that could run Unix. Unfortunately the clone era was also a time when hardware quality was at a low point and both my genuine Apple PowerMacs suffered motherboard failures due to, as I believe, mechanical failures between the CPU cards and moving parts of the plastic chassis.

My Apple and clone exhibits include:

• Quadra 700 — still running a very old Debian release
• Quadra 800 — still running the rare Apple Unix, A/UX
• PowerMac 7300/200 — retired due to motherboard failure
• PowerMac 8600/200 — a neat chassis but also retired due to motherboard failure
• PowerWave 604/132 — a clone
• StarMax 4000/200 MT — a clone, but organized with the other Motorola entries
• Mac Mini G4 — running Debian 8
• PowerBook G4 — running Mac OS X (technically Unix) but kept around for a couple games we still occasionally play