The Macintosh Plus is back! Sort of, thanks to an enthusiast who has brought one back from the dead with modern internals.
Posting on Mastodon, user DosFox explained how, over the course of a year, he sourced a clean motherboard, which houses all of the parts found in PCs and Macs, compatible with an old-school Mac Plus build. After some time, he found all of the necessary components for a Mac Plus, except a floppy disk drive. On July 23, DosFox successfully booted up the Mac Plus, sharing a short follow-up to say that the revived computer works with a keyboard. This is an impressive feat, considering Apple stopped production of the Mac Plus way back in October 1990.
This isn’t DosFox’s first foray into reviving past computers. He previously built a clone of the Apple Lisa, originally released in 1983 as the precursor to the Macintosh computer.
DosFox recently posted on Mastodon that he’s an engineer currently looking for work. While he hasn’t mentioned if he’s about to start work on another project, we wouldn’t be surprised to see his dedicated talents put to good use once more.
What made the Mac Plus special?
For the uninitiated, the Mac Plus was released in January 1986 as the third model following the original Macintosh’s debut in 1984. The Mac Plus was notable for offering a SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) port. This meant that the Mac could connect to third-party SCSI devices, such as hard drives, monitors, and more. Another significant feature was its expandable internal memory, allowing users to upgrade their Mac Plus from 1MB to 4MB, which apps like MacPaint took advantage of.
The Mac Plus eventually became the ‘cheapest’ Mac of its time due to the debut of the Macintosh SE and the Macintosh II in March 1987, which were priced at $3,080 and $5,498 respectively. The Mac Plus was discontinued on October 15, 1990, making way for the Macintosh LC line.
How about this for your next project, DosFox?
Seeing a classic machine like the Mac Plus be brought back from the dead is very impressive, especially since DosFox had to source some parts like a clean motherboard to get the computer working.
Although DosFox hasn’t mentioned if he’s got another project in the works, we have a suggestion: the Macintosh Color Classic. Released way back in February 1993, almost seven years after the debut of the Mac Plus, the Mac Color Classic was sold for $1,400, which is the equivalent of $3,043.91 today when adjusted for inflation. Featuring a Motorola 68030 CPU running at 16 MHz with 4MB of memory, it was a relatively powerful computer for its time.
The Mac Color Classic was notable for one standout feature — its 10″ 512 x 384 color screen. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when computers lacked color displays, as having a black-and-white screen helped bring down costs. A fun bit of trivia: when SEGA was developing the game Sonic 3 way back in 1993, the team reportedly admired the Mac Color Classic so much that the design ended up influencing the game’s power-up monitors.
The Mac Color Classic is a computer that doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Although Microsoft’s Windows 3.1 came out a year previously on PCs with color displays, it was still a novelty to see a Mac with a color screen. Coupled with its powerful CPU and compact design, it’s a machine that we hope DosFox considers reviving in the future.
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