Dumpster dived Macintosh Performa 630, time for a look. #MARCHintosh

I've had this machine sitting in my collection for a couple of years now after rescuing it from a local recycling centre but in all that time I've done nothing with it.

Since its MARCHintosh here on YouTube this month I thought it the perfect time to finally pull the Performa out of storage and give it a look. In this video I treat some light battery corrosion, replace the motherboard capacitors, make a VGA cable for the video and just see if the machine even works!

[livefreeprintguns]

22:38 My God... not only was the Macintosh Performa 630 my first ever computer, but the first video game I ever had was Myst. Unreal!

[rimmersbryggeri]

My friend had one of these. These were already old when they were new.

[esseferio]

I've learnt 2 things from this vid: hard drive is IDE on a 630. And there is just about enough sun for retrobriting in Northern Ireland ;-)
I love macs from that era. Always wished back then I had one. :)

[RavenWolfRetroTech]

Great Video. Its good to see another classic live to see another day (or decade)

[garyhart]

I used something similar (Macintosh Quadra 605) for Photoshop back in 1997-98.

[Mac]

Great video, I'm glad you were able to get the Performa 630 working again! If you happen to come across an external SCSI CD-ROM drive, that would be another option to add a CD-ROM if you can't find the original edge connector adapter.

[tenminutetokyo]

Ah the machine I had at Novell when NetWare was still big. Wrote many a NetWare network test tool on this machine.

[PaulinesPastimes]

Interesting to hear that the postage from Australia to the UK is as expensive as the postage from the UK to Australia! I hate to think how much money I have put into the coffers of Royal Mail with all the stuff I have purchased from the UK, and it takes ages 😄 Hope you manage to find a CD drive. 😊👍

[douro]

I have a 636 which is sitting in storage right now. These are basically a Quadro 630 with an LC processor. They were (including the Quadro model) all lower-end machines which used an IDE hard disk rather than a SCSI one and were a bit more limited in terms of expandability. I would like to find a regular 68040 to put in mine so I can run A/UX on it.

The PDS slot is for the Power Macintosh Card which will basically make it into an LC Power Macintosh.

[RetrRewind]

Excellent Video! Never had a Mac back in the day but used them at a training course I went on.

[TomTom]

You were pretty close to being right about the RAM. There's 4MB soldered onto the logic board, and that SIMM was indeed a 4MB SIMM. The other 8MB of RAM shown in the Apple menu is virtual memory that is paged to the hard disk. You can configure that in the control panel.

[kaitlyn__L]

I wouldn't be surprised if the original owner gave up on that exact typing exercise precisely because of the astoundingly bad decision to not print how to get a # on the UK Mac keyboard layout.

Assuming it was the same in the 90s as in the 00s and today, hash is alt-3 on UK Mac keyboards because shift-3 gives £. On American boards, and most other locales, shift-3 gets # instead. 

Thankfully they actually print that on keyboards now so hopefully this doesn't happen anymore, but at least in the 00s you could Google for how to do it. Not so much in the 90s! And I wouldn't be surprised if the makers of Mavis Beacon didn't include anything about this one specific layout quirk. So much for teaching you everything you need to know to type!

[mhzbrain]

Cool video! I just got one of these complete with monitor, keyboard and software pack. It posts to the chime but nothing appears on the monitor. First mac I've ever touched! I've yet to take a look but at least I now know how to get into it, cheers 😁

[TheBasementChannel]

Marchintosh had lead me to another great channel! Subscribed! 😄

[tenminutetokyo]

PDS stood for Processor Direct Slot - a successor to NuBus. The best PDS ACARDS WERE DOS and Apple II compatibility cards.

[Arcticretro]

Nice video. The capacitors could explode. Have you ever experienced that ?