The Macintosh Plus I bought in Japan is BROKEN! Can we fix it?

Last month in Japan I bought this 1986 Macintosh Plus, it was a super fascinating experience finding a machine this old in the junk floor of a Hard Off, but needless to say I quickly brought it back to the US with me. Today we're going to restore it to good working order by diagnosing what's wrong, cleaning it out, calibrating the display, and fixing a stubborn floppy drive! Join me on the first step of a fun retro adventure (with much more to come)

Time stamps
0:00 What's wrong with my Macintosh Plus?
2:40 Teardown
7:20 Floppy drive revival
10:19 Reassembly and testing
11:28 Display calibration
12:24 The final result!

Gear:
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#apple #macintosh #tech #restoration

[kuremaClaimer]

I know somebody already mentioned it, but CRT can be dangerous even if it's unplugged long before you do something. So you have to discharge before you touch. It's been a common knowledge back then but now it's not outside of retro tech community.

[Mac]

I'm glad to see your Plus is happy again! It was fun tearing down the floppy drive over FaceTime, you got lucky with how relatively clean your system was inside. Hopefully you can adjust the video shift fairly painlessly. Now max out the RAM and plug in a hard drive and you'll be set for 1988! 🏎

[captcan]

Btw small correction: You got that write protection on the floppy disk wrong. If you slide it open, the disk is write protected. You have to close the hole to write on the disk. 🙂

[HolgerT]

The MacPlus was my first computer, when I started to work as a technical writer back in 1990. In the end it was maxed out in RAM and having a Radius graphics card plus a Radius Pivot screen. The AppleTalk network was set-up for connecting all of our 8 Macs in the department with an Apple LaserWriter. I have fond memories of that time. We used to work with RagTime and Canvas.

[xbourque]

Remember everyone, please be careful with CRTs... These things can zap you even when the machine is unplugged.

[simonturner]

Great video Luke, thank you. Can’t overstate being careful around the CRT, 25KV you will know all about it if you touch it, or rather your surviving relatives will. Love these early Macs, haven’t worked on one of these but 7200s and 1st / 2nd gen iMacs. I love those bits of fawn coloured velvet like material Apple put into them to stop vibrations or electrical insulation, I don’t know why there are there but they wouldn’t look out of place in Jules Verne’s Time Machine.

[manaphyex]

I've never used a computer older than my age, definitely a very unique experience, really good retro content.

[joepisciottajr]

Thanks for bringing back my youth. These machines were in our middle school computer science lab. I wrote the first sound bite in my class I called "Hendrix" because I took the bootup beep and made like a guitar solo type tempo with it. Back then, there were limited number of tricks you could do. Got an A on that project.

[kromekatdotcom]

My first Macintosh experience was using these machines at my first college in 1986-88, where they were used for typing up thesis and notes. Absolutely fell in love with them from the off. Always loved the floppy eject sound! <3

[Steve_Sn]

If I recall, you can upgrade the memory to a whopping 4mb by clipping the resistor and installing 2 additional 1mb memory sticks. Also they used to make external scsi hard drives that had the same footprint as the Plus. The thing that always impressed me was that I could boot it up, launch Word 5.1, and be halfway through typing my first page in the same time it takes a modern computer to boot up. Ah, the good old days. Too much fun!

[garrettjones]

Would love to see more of these. Would like for you to do a video on people who can work on old computers and repair CRTs like Adrian’s Digital basement. Someone coming up with a list of people across the country who do that kind of work in each state would be an amazing boon for the retro computer community.

[jimwebber]

You give me renewed faith in the younger generation! My brother (who lived in Cupertino BTW) had one of these and was starting a desktop publishing operation. I played with this thing for hours, drawing with the mouse. Thanks for this, Luke!

[cadenchurchill]

These old Macs are so cool, would love to try one at some point! Those older machines have so much more mechanical than modern computers, looks so cool. Looking forward to seeing more retro content!

[lozahe]

Please continue… I’m a Big vintage mac fan. Sometimes looking back at the simplicity in the past helps simplifying the future.

[DanielandYuka]

Very fun that you had a great time with Norm and Sam in Tokyo! Mac SE 20 was my first Apple Mac - Beyond Dark Castle was epic!

[danielwagner]

Go ahead, Luke. This is so much fun to watch (and to learn from). Can‘t wait to see more vintage stuff. Best from Germany

[Bytes]

Get a “floppy emu” and run it in hard disk emulation mode. You can even move the SD card between your vintage computer and a modern Mac to install software on to the SD card via an emulator like vMac.

[GrandpaJeffrey]

My first Hard drive was 10 MB and cost 650 USD. It made a world of difference on my Mac Plus. By the way, look for the signatures inside the outer case. They were molded into the case. Pretty cool nostalgia trip! Thanks.

[ScreenDoorSlams]

If you look inside the case, you’ll find the signatures of the original Mac team molded into the plastic.

[white_mask]

You could plug in the back a BlueSCSI or an iomega SuperDisk to make it more usable but I would personally go with a BlueSCSI and a 32GB SD Card with multiple disk images on it.