1990, meet 2018: How far does 20MHz of Macintosh IIsi power go today? | Hacker News Reader

1990, meet 2018: How far does 20MHz of Macintosh IIsi power go today?

arstechnica.com

35 pointsvaleg13 comments

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I used my IIsi till ~2000 for burning cds. Two things i did to speed it up:

1) I overclocked to 25mhz -- I soldered a new crystal on the motherboard

2) Ran in black and white or grey (the graphics card seemed slow)

wow, fellow IIsi owner!

I tried the crystal swap but it turned out to be glitchy.

I upgraded the machine little by little, 17MB, NuBus coprocessor, Radius 24bit color display card, 240MB APS technology SCSI external drive...

Good old days of simpler computing when every little thing was magic...

PC user here, but yeah it was magic. Installing a new ISA or PCI card was like entering a new world. I remember my first sound card, modem, and 3d accelerator vividly.

Upgrading modern PCs is still fun, but it isn't nearly the same as giving your machine a whole new capability it never had before.

Same thing for us Amiga-owners. While the Amiga had pretty decent sound/graphics-capabilities in the early 90's, expanding the computer with something like a hard drive (which wasn't standard on the smaller models), or more RAM, or video processing hardware, was simply mind-blowing.

I badly wanted a 24 bit color card for my SE/30, but lost interest after I got my NeXT Cube.

I'd like to see a comparison of a IIsi (or a 25 MHz 040 NeXT Cube) to a Raspberry Pi, or even a microcontroller.

I had a Mac classic for freshman year at university. I hated that machine and Apple for many years afterwards.

What year was that?

1990, 1991, or 1992, most likely, the years the Classic was on sale.

Yup. Door #2 is correct.

91. Im ancient.

Why so, may I ask? I loved my Beige box, but I could use a different perspective.

Eh, frequent crashes. Black and white display. Uninspiring machine. It was more of a symbol of my dislike of the college i chose.

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