Early Life

    I used a series of Macintosh II computers at work, but my favorite by far Mac II was the IIci, and it’s the only one I ever had at home. The footprint of the Mac II series was generally too ponderous for home use. I got this one when the IIci first came out, and it’s the computer that replaced the Mac Plus on my home desk. That was in 1989. The attraction wasn’t speed.  The IIci had a 25 MHz 68030 and a 68882 floating processor.  Although these were nominally better than what was in the accelerated Mac Plus, it didn’t translate into a big change in user experience.  For me, the IIci was all about the graphics.  The 13” screen (640x480) was marketed as Apple’s High Resolution Monitor.  It is a Sony Trinitron, and it was the most beautiful display I had ever seen at the time.  It’s the one sitting on top of the IIci box in this picture and it still works as well as ever.  The main technical innovation of the Mac IIci was 32 bit memory addressing.  Previous macs had only a 24 bit memory address space. Of couse, the operating system had to be altered to make use of the new memory system, and part of the operating system was installed in the ROM on the motherboard.  The IIci was the first Mac to have a ROM that was compatible with 32 bit addressing.  The first version of the operating system that could be used in 32 bit mode was System 7.  Some programs had to be altered too, and so the Mac IIci can be switched between 24 and 32 bit addressing in a control panel.  The IIci is the coolest Macintosh II, in my opinion, but it isn’t perfect. The video system in the IIci is on the logic board, and uses logic board RAM for the video display.  When in 24 bit mode, this limits the memory available for programs, and this drew some fire when the IIci first came out.  The IIci has 3 NuBus expansion slots, and a processor direct slot.

The Carrera 040 accelerator

   L2 cache memory wasn’t a constant feature of computer design in those days, but the IIci had a processor direct slot and Apple offered a 32K level 2 cache card for the IIci that made a big difference in performance.  Later, this slot became an easy place to put an accelerator board.  I got a Carrera 040 board from MicroMac, with a 33 MHz 68040 (marketed as 66/33 MHz as was the fashion in those days).  The 68040 had a built-in floating point processor, and was the basis for the Quadra line of Macs. It was a great processor, but the built-in floating point processor wasn’t as good as previous ones.  Clock speeds on the 68040 never got above 40 MHz.  MicroMac sold a 33 and a 40 MHz version for the Carrera.  Mine is a 33 MHz version, which gave it the same processor as the Quadra 950, which was the last 680x0-based Mac I ever used at work. 

Radius Video Vision Studio

    The Radius Video Vision Studio is still a startling thing to use.  It’s a high resolution NuBus video board, and also a daughterboard that does hardware real-time jpeg compression and decompression allowing a late 1980’s mac to do real time video acquisition and s-video output.  It’s performance is not quite up to broadcast standards, even when connected to a more powerful computer than the IIci, and it is more limited on this machine.  But together with Adobe Premier, it can capture pretty impressive simultaneous video and audio from an analog source, and store it in quicktime format.  It can output just as good a signal to an analog monitor or recording device (VHS was popular back then).

As It Is Now

    My Mac IIci recently underwent a logic board capacitor replacement, as many of these old machines have.  I have 2 working logic boards, both with new capacitors, and 3 working power supplies (two of which are repaired Astecs, one is an unmodified GE). 

   I don’t use the IIci for video capture these days. Of course, this is an area in which much progress has been made.  My black macbook, iMovie, and a dazzle can do a much better job with no effort.  But the Radius VideoVision is a great display board and I have it connected to an old ViewSonic pivot monitor (1024x768) as a second monitor.  It amazes people that dual-headed displays have been part of the Macintosh experience from the time of the Radius Full Page Display for the Mac Plus.  System 7 immediately recognizes that I have 2 monitors, and I can arrange their spatial relationship in its control panel to give a continuous workspace. 

    I have 80 MBytes of memory in my IIci (16 Meg in Bank A and 64 in Bank B), and I have given it a 1.25 GB internal SCSI disk. I have an Apple CDROM drive attached (the viewsonic monitor is sitting on it).  This was Apple’s original CD drive, and it is 1x (seriously) and read-only.  The Mac IIci also sports a Zip drive.  The Mac II series didn’t have built-in ethernet. I have an Asanté NuBus ethernet board.  I don’t try to connect my IIci to the internet, but I use it to connect to other macs in the room.  The Mac IIci is still a favorite.  It is currently running System 7.5.5, and has working versions of Mathematica (v3), Adobe Illustrator (v5.5) and Photoshop (v3), MPW (v3.3.2), Resourcerer (v1.25), Canvas (v3.5.1), and WriteNow (v3).