It's March, and that means it's "hashtag MARCHintosh!"
Last spring, I found this iMac lying in the street, next to a dumpster.
Can I get it running?
[chiptune and guitar music intro]
Greetings, and welcome to a Mac-tastic episode of Veronica Explains!
I'm Veronica, and while you might know me for my Linux and Commodore-themed videos,
I do have a soft spot for retro Apple stuff.
If you couldn't tell from my other videos, I grew up in the 1990s, and it was an... interesting
time for Apple, who almost went out of business before bringing Apple co-founder and noted
Torx screw enthusiast Steve Jobs back to the company.
Steve Jobs scrapped a bunch of the old models of Macintosh, and with the help of a crack
industrial design team, led by Jony Ive... [stammers at pronouncing "Ive"]
...released the iMac in 1998.
I'm no design historian or anything, but my armchair analysis tells me that you
can roughly break down desktop computer design language into two categories- pre iMac and
post iMac.
Begone was the boring beige after this Bondi Blue bombshell boastfully burst onto the scene
in 1998.
I remember vividly the day my school got a truckload of these for one of the computer
labs.
I watched in the library as the terminals, the Apple II's, and the black and white classic
Macintoshes were unceremoniously wheeled out, and these translucent icons of 90s design
replaced them.
So what's the deal with the one that I found?
Well, my friend Bryce from the band Midnight Notion - who recently did a guest spot on my "Word
of the Week podcast" - texted me a photo of the iMac lying in the grass, and an address.
Naturally, [Ubuntu Linux sound] I sprang into action.
The iMac was labeled "for solid waste".
I... wasn't going to take that lying down.
I'm going to try not to judge this person for leaving it for solid waste.
It's always possible someone was overwhelmed, and I certainly don't know their circumstances.
But still, I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention: never, ever, ever throw vintage electronics out this way.
Always take them to a qualified electronic waste location.
Or just try to find an electronics enthusiast who wants it.
All that said, while many of these are in terrible shape, with smashed in CRTs or botched aquarium
conversions or whatever you might find, this one just... wasn't.
So I drove over there as fast as I legally could, picked it up, and could tell right
away that most of it was all there.
It makes me kind of wonder if someone had started down the work of refurbishing this old thing
and just never finished it.
Maybe someone bought a house and this half-worked on Mac was sitting inside.
Who knows?
All I knew was that I'd found something neat, but that at that point, I just wasn't in a place
to actually clean it all up and see if I could get it working.
So I didn't.
Then life happened, and it took me a few months to get back to the project.
Who among us isn't drowning in a sea of unfinished projects and unrealized ambitions?
[tired mom sigh]
Anyway, a few weeks ago, I finally had a few moments to try and get things working.
How'd I do it?
Well lets check in with Picture Picture over there and see how I got it done.
To start with, the entire thing was taped together along the chassis.
Clearly someone had taken it apart at one point and maybe they didn't
know how to put it back together.
After removing as much of the tape as I could, the bottom cover came off, as did all of these components.
This meant it was surprisingly intact.
That said, it was missing all of the screws.
Well, all except for this one lonely screw which was stuck under the bottom cover.
Luckily eBay had me covered there, but that meant I had to be gentle with it while testing,
since I couldn't "solidly" connect the components together.
Taking a look at the inside components with the bottom cover off, I was worried that the
cables might have been missing, or, worse yet, cut.
But to my astonishment, when I removed the logic board, I found that the cables were
simply tucked into the chassis.
[poorly recorded camera voice] "But it looks like there are cables! Look at that!"
Next, it was time to inspect the logic board.
Now, before you write a nasty comment, yes, I wear a properly grounded wrist strap.
I tend to wear these fingerless gloves just because my hands get cold!
Anyway, looking at the logic board, I was super excited to see that the battery had not leaked.
I took that battery out right away- seems like that's always a good idea any time you're
hoping to preserve vintage electronics.
These can break and it's very destructive when they do.
This battery looks like it was from 1998, so it's probably original.
After that I took the cover off of the RAM and CPU module, and... wow.
It's pretty dirty.
There's going to be a lot of cleaning involved here.
One thing I'm wondering is if someone might have been planning on recapping this board,
based on the marks on the caps.
I don't have other boards to compare it to, but if you know if Apple might have put these
marks on the caps, I'd appreciate a comment filling me in.
Next I popped the heat sink off of the CPU, and then gently pried the CPU board out with
the heat sink bracket.
The CPU on this iMac is a PowerPC G3 clocked at a whopping 233 megahertz.
After carefully removing the video RAM, I set about cleaning the area under the CPU
socket as best as I could.
This board could probably use a more thorough clean, but I wanted to do a function test,
and most importantly, do some research, before I really start into any restoration work.
For now, I'm just going to do a surface level clean, looking for any huge signs of trouble,
elements having leaked into it, that sort of thing.
And to my astonishment, on the surface, it's all looking pretty good, and I'm eager to
perform that function test.
So, I reinstalled the RAM, the video RAM, the little battery cover, the CPU, the heat
sink, and the cover over the CPU.
Next, I'd need a storage drive of some kind.
The original spinning disk hard drive was not found in the logic board assembly, so
I decided to try out this SATA SSD and this IDE adapter from StarTech.
I've had good luck with these on other retro machines, but I've never used one on a Mac
before, so we'll see.
I plugged the SATA drive into the IDE adapter, which is pretty much just inserting the drive
into the receptacle- there's really only one way to do it, which makes it easy.
I then installed a 2.5" SATA drive into a 3.5" adapter.
I know a lot of folks just tape the drive to the chassis, but I prefer to use these
adapters to keep it snug in place.
Besides, I have like a hundred of these lying around from old PC upgrade gigs I used to do, so I'm gonna use em!
Now on the adapter, it's super important to make sure you know where pin 1 is, and to
line pin 1 up with pin 1 on the computer's cable.
It almost always matches the striped wire, but I always double check, because you never know what the
last person in the case might have done with the cable.
I unscrewed the built-in drive bracket from the iMac logic board assembly, and then had
to work it out of the housing carefully, because these little tabby bits were holding it in
place.
The bracket has this little lip on it, which means the IDE pins can't clear that side. ["wrong" buzzer sound]
Flipping it around, you can see that this side is the correct orientation for the drive.
So from here, I can screw the SSD adapter bracket into the built-in drive bracket, and
be pretty confident the cables will be able to clear where they need to.
I attached the assembly, making sure that the stripe was on the pin 1 side of the IDE adapter,
then I installed the drive assembly into the logic board assembly.
This took some... patience. [Windows "ta-da" sound]
Next was plugging in the 24X CD-ROM drive that was apparently misaligned before.
I plugged in the ATAPI cable, but was not able to get the drive properly seated on the
chassis.
This took a few tries, but I was eventually able to get it in the housing.
I think this tab here wasn't properly lined up before.
I gave some thought to removing the fan, and taking apart the rest of the CRTs housing
to look at the power supply. ["wrong" buzzer sound]
But I decided against it for now, because I didn't want to expose the CRT before performing
some basic function tests.
I did give the fan a light cleaning though, just to get some of this caked on dust out
of there.
If this machine ends up working, I'll probably consult with some experts on CRT evaluation
and repair.
While I have a small amount of experience working around CRTs, you should never be afraid
of getting a second opinion from someone who's been doing it longer.
Fitting the logic board back into the rest of the iMac chassis is an exercise in humility.
This was... challenging.
Patience is your friend, take it slow, and try not to break anything as you work the
cables around where they need to be.
I then reconnected the power, front panel, video, and what I think is the IR sensor cables,
which is hard to do on camera.
Sorry my hand was in the way.
The one screw that I found in the bottom cover didn't fit any of these holes, so again, it
was gentle off-camera work moving it into place for a first function test.
[Mac startup chime]
[me, laughing in the moment] "Oh my god it works."
I couldn't believe it, but this Bondi Blue iMac G3, that I found in the street...
actually worked!
Next, it was time to try installing an OS and playing around on it.
A friend of the channel donated some early iMac related goodies (bells) so I could have
a more...
authentic experience.
Of particular interest to me were these installation media disks, which apparently came with one
of the early iMac G3s.
The disc I needed was the second of the bunch, the one marked "Software Install".
I don't know if these disks were an exact match, but they worked well enough for me.
And yes, before you leave a comment- I did check and all of these are already available
on Internet Archive.
I hooked the power up, plugged the keyboard and mouse in, plugged in the ethernet, and
booted it up [Mac startup chime], pressing "C" to launch from the CD.
And it worked like a charm.
It didn't take long before I remembered how awful these puck mice were,
[me in the camera in the moment] "painfully slow mouse"
so I swapped that out for a trackball as soon as I could.
Next, I partitioned the drive to be 7000 MB.
From what I understand, older Mac OS can't reliably boot off of large hard disk partitions,
so I made this one something more period appropriate.
I renamed my partitions "Macintosh HD" and "Goodies" - I'm sure I'll find ways to fill
up that second partition as time goes on.
Then, I started the installation, which thanks to the quickness of the SSD, only took about
six minutes from start to finish.
A quick restart, and we could get cracking on my favorite part of 90s computers,
the Internet! [FF6 wind sounds in background]
"Do you already have an internet account?"
that's cute.
I'll just hit yes.
Setting up an iMac for the internet is very straight forward, which of course was the
goal of the machine back in the day.
I won't go into every specific here, since it's pretty similar to how you'd set up anything
else in the modern era.
With a wired connection and DHCP or a static IP, it just... works.
As long as you configure your network correctly.
And bonus, it comes with everyone's favorite web browser, Internet Explorer 4!
[Steve Jobs] "We believe that Internet Explorer is a really good browser."
Apple made Internet Explorer the default browser on the Macintosh starting in 1997, which means
this Mac is fully IE compatible!
["ta-da" sound]
I'm planning a future video where I talk about why this seemingly-unlikely pairing took place,
so make sure you get subscribed for that!
[Bill Gates getting booed]
Anyway, now that we've got a TCP/IP stack, let's check out everyone's favorite retro
search engine, FrogFind!
Brought to you by the most action packed retro YouTuber there is, Action Retro.
It works like a charm!
Of course, FrogFind strips out a lot of the modern internet niceties like modern images
and the like, since they don't work so well on vintage computers.
So, let's check out a page that's more 90s-appropriate, Macintosh Librarian.
You can check out her website at macintoshlibrarian.com.
Macintosh Librarian is one of my favorite YouTube channels, showcasing all sorts of
retro Apple and Apple-adjacent fun.
Ms Fox and her pal Maccy are absolutely worth your subscription, so make sure you go check
her out at youtube.com/macintoshlibrarian.
As expected, her page is loading great.
This is more like what the internet was like on one of these back in the day.
Love the spinning Mac GIFs, or "GIFs [pronounced the other way]" if you're one of those people
who's going to leave a comment about it.
And, of course, our 90s internet adventure wouldn't be complete without signing a guestbook.
Now that I know it's working, I could of course take it apart again, and complete a million
maintenance tasks on it.
And I will... eventually.
For now, I'm going to clean up some of the dust around the outside of it, because it
really needs it.
So much grime.
So much tape.
Now that it's a bit more cleaned up, I installed the IO cover, which is very hard to film,
but there are these grippy bits in there that hook on to the cover as a hinge.
And just as I was working on that, my screws arrived from eBay, and I was finally able
to attach this clip near the front panel connector, screw the logic board into the chassis, and
then install the bottom cover.
The bottom cover was a bit of a nightmare, but as one of my favorite childrens' authors,
Andrea Beaty said in Rosie Revere, Engineer: the only true failure can come if you quit.
Persistence and care, and making sure I didn't break any of these tabs, was the key to getting this
thing back on.
I installed the last screw, to hold the bottom cover onto the rest of the chassis, and then
took a few moments to just enjoy this beautiful computer that fell into my lap.
Of course, there's still more work ahead, including figuring out how to get this kickstand
in place, but I'll leave all that for another video.
I'd like to think that the original owner of this iMac, wherever they might be, would
be excited to see that someone managed to put it back together and get it working again.
[child shouts] "1, 2, 3, 4" [punk music plays in background]
Perhaps in a future video, I'll try installing some sort of Linux on it.
I mean, it wouldn't be a Veronica Explains iMac without at least some sort of Linux attempt, right?
Anyway, this stuff is fun.
And don't forget- don't throw out your old electronics, even if you aren't using them.
If you need to find a dropoff location, you can always use a search engine to find "e-waste
dropoff near me", and that'll give you a great start.
You can also just put something on Craigslist, or some other marketplace app, even if you're listing it for free.
Vintage computing parts are often in very high demand, and you never know who wants part of your
old stuff.
Even a single chip might be exceptionally valuable to someone in your neighborhood.