Rare Macintosh Quadra Prototype Hits eBay (and I Got It!) - Krazy Ken’s Tech Misadventures

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This Macintosh Quadra 700 (aka the Jurassic Park computer) landed on eBay, but it's special… it's a prototype (codenamed Spike).

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[ComputerClan]

Enjoy the new episode and hold on to your butts. 🚬

[billhubauer]

Hey Ken, my name is Bill Hubauer and I'm the author of "CopyRIGHT Pro". We were a small software company and while I can't remember how many units we sold, it wasn't a lot, I'm sure. It was unbelievable for me to see you boot up that computer and find my software on it. Thanks so much for posting this!

[theoldone]

In my experience when a EBay listing says "untested" it means "tested and not working but we'll get more if don't admit that"

[Haffmatthew]

Ken- love the added effort you seem to be putting into the production of your videos. They’re getting offensively good at this point and i enjoy every one you upload. I consider you, techmoan, and technology connections to be my favorites

[BollingHolt]

I'm sure a million people have already commented, but good batteries are required for some of the older Macs. From my own experience, the II line and the portable (which is a little bit of a different case). You can "jump start" at least the II and the IIfx with a 9 volt battery. That probably works on some others as well, but I have only jump started my II and IIfxes .

[utkarshdharmadhikari]

Those Apple fonts on the rear sticker still feel fresh to this day! What a legendary calligraphy artist was Mr. Jobs!

[jasonskerrett]

"Untested" aka I tested it briefly and it didn't work so I want to cover my ass against returns and entice a potential tinkerer into buying it for more than if it was sold as faulty

[realgtasacramentodashcam]

I wish I could take you back in time to the property disposition warehouse at the University of Michigan in the early 1990s...piles of "vintage" Macs and parts so cheap nobody wanted them. Lisas, 512k Macs for $30, stacks of you name it everywhere.

[DavisMakesGames]

Cool, always love seeing prototype hardware!
I own a PBT Radeon card, but the strange thing is, its date code is from a month after the official release (but it still has an engineering sample sticker). And it appears to have been sold as regular stock at some point, since it seems to have been used daily like any other video card. These are always such a mystery.

[macinman]

Hey Ken, good video as always. I really miss the classic Mac OS at times. I have most of my old Mac software backed up on a flash drive, after I was able to get it off floppy to a CD, and then moved it to flash storage. Used to run it in BasiliskII on my current Macs. It was nice to play around with again.

[saintguardian]

Love these videos. Computer history is something I grew up in and admire the past for how much they change.

[egmccann]

Man, I miss my Quadra 700. It and a IIsi got me into older Apple PCs for quite a while. Loved the thought put into the toolless (or nearly toolless) designs.

[JVHShack]

Unfortunately, Ebay sellers these days are like "Gibme monays neowwww!!!!" That and a vast amount of them are just purely lazy. Example: I bought an Apple IIgs 3 years ago with the same "As-is, for parts, not working", etc. Once it got here and I got a keyboard, mouse, and some sort of monitor on hand to try it out, I just yolo'd it and it worked out of the box. Like I said, "lazy". Great video as always, Ken!

[scottcol]

Another amazing video! I loved the little Jurassic Park easter Egg "ahh ahh ahh, you didnt say the magic word" LOL I saw that movie in the theater when it first came out and my sister and I drove our parents' crazy saying that phrase over and over endlessly. And even as a adult I still say it from time to time. Mostly nobody picks up on it or knows where it comes from.

[Mirroxaphene]

In 1999 I worked at a store called Computer Renaissance.

In the back of the store they had a Quadra 700 style computer with a 68040 processor at 20 MHz. It had no label & on the back of the computer it had a label saying “SPIKE PVT” just like yours.

[GameDev]

2:30 - Actually, for vintage stuff, it's generally not that good to pre-test systems / devices that are rare by the layman.

They can be damaged if a component is bad and they aren't tested properly for proper functioning parts -- eg: taking the psu out and testing it independently, testing the caps on the mobo, etc..

[FMRG]

The intro was wayyyy tooo funny. I love taking a look at pre iMac Macs.

[bwc]

The Quadra/Centris era was such a fascinating one! Full featured (for the time) web browsers running in a few megabytes of RAM as opposed to needing gigabytes today. Today's browsers are practically whole operating systems of their own (and sites like Facebook and YouTube are practically whole applications), although I guess that's what it takes to safely and reliably have multiple tabs open. And very interesting that an Apple prototype would use an IBM hard drive. The smoking character was hilarious because it still doesn't feel like that long ago to me that so many people still did smoke indoors at their desks without giving it a second thought, and it's one of the very few things I don't miss from that era but it is very accurate to when this computer was made, and above and beyond what most tech content creators today would do. Finally, seeing you literally stuff a cleaning cloth inside a computer like that with your hand made me so nervous, how is that safe from static electricity? Anyway keep up the great work.

[jsubuntuxp]

Best I can tell, it looks like the black menu bar seen in 10:06 is achieved by using the Kolor control panel, which I found on Macintosh Garden.

[LordDewi]

Another great video. I'm pretty sure that the seller just didn't have the rest of the old Mac equipment like you do or they would have sold it as a bundle. Was there even a power cord? I assume a Mac like that is like old Windows PCs where you couldn't get far without a keyboard plugged in. Plus if they didn't have a monitor they couldn't be sure it really booted.