Somehow over the years, I collected a number of Apple Macintosh machines. One I’d been meaning to get back to was a legend in it’s time, the Macintosh IIfx. This machine was a powerful workstation for the day and I was interested in seeing if it would be up to the task of running a period correct copy of A/UX. (Apple’s UNIX distribution) I pride myself on keeping all of my collection in working order, but I hadn’t used any of the classics in a couple of years and probably hadn’t touched this one in at least 4 or 5 years. I got the IIfx down from the shelf and set it up, but it wouldn’t even turn on. Strange I thought… I hadn’t used this one in a while and I’d even removed the batteries recently to keep them from leaking and damaging anything. What else could be wrong I wondered. As it turns out, quite a bit.

I knew of a range of common issues that seem to have occurred to many of these machines in the community, but mine had always worked flawlessly, so I’d assumed just taking good care of them had been enough. The Macintosh II came out in 1987 and the IIfx followed 3 years later. Mine was originally purchased as a Mac II, but has the IIfx logic board upgrade fitted. At 35yrs old, this machine is now starting to show it’s age, and as I’d find out, so are many others of this vintage and beyond. The primary issue plaguing my machine was a pair of surface mount capacitors that failed and leaked onto the logic board. This was resolved easily enough by removing them, cleaning the board and then soldering on a new set. Once it was all back together, I whipped out a set of MacOS install disks and found the next problem. While the machine did start up, the floppy drive wasn’t working quite right. The disks didn’t go in the way they were supposed to and the drives no longer even attempted to eject the disks. (one of the coolest features back in the day that made the Macs feel so special)

As it turns out, there are multiple reasons for these issues. Some are related to material science issues as the polymers used in the casing and some internal parts have destabilized and are starting to degrade. (the source of the eject issue is a plastic gear that becomes brittle and crumbles away) Others are due to electrical components that have passed their shelf life and are starting to give out. 2 of my other Macs, a Performa 550 and a PowerMac 5500/225 (both all-in-one machines) have cases that have become brittle to the point I hesitate to work on them. The Performa is severely yellowed over the entire case and is only held together with a few screws. (the mounting posts for most of them have disintegrated on the inside) The PowerMac isn’t as bad, but the floppy drive just broke and I’m hesitant to remove the front cover to extract it because it’s also in the same condition. It’s too bad really because they are interesting and unique machines that I’d really like to keep in good condition.

One good thing that’s come of all this is I’m nearly done with repairing the IIfx I initially set out to restore, but it’s also made me realize that my Mac gear and software is living on borrowed time. I’ve started disassembling several other machines and all of them are showing the same symptoms or worse. I’m also starting to archive as much of the software as I can, but some of this will have to wait until I have at least one of these Macs fully restored. (GCR encoded 800k floppies are a strange beast and archiving them on anything but a Mac is a dark art I haven’t quite mastered) These and more deserve an entry of their own, so I’ll come back and do that another time.