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Macintosh Performa 475

Is this the lamest "grail" of all time? The Performa 475 was my family's first ever computer. Burned into my memory are games of Spectre Challenger, and Gopher Golf (the first software I ever bought)... as well as the hardware failure boot chime from when the PRAM battery died, and that time I put ClarisWorks in the trash and emptied it, just to see what would happen.

Our original machine is long gone now, and since I started hoarding--- er, collecting, classic Macs, this model never seemed to pop up on Marketplace, or even eBay. But finally, I saw this one on eBay for $60 (and another $60 for possibly the worst shipping of all time... it's a miracle it arrived in one peice, but I should have expected that from an eBay seller called "Big-boy's-beer-money"), and I had to grab it. Finally, I am once again a Performa 475 owner!

Here she is: yellow and dirty, like a discarded pizza box. In other words: beautiful and perfect.

The board was moderately dirty, but on the cleaner side with just some dust. Annoyingly, there was no VRAM installed.

The HDD: is it alive?

As usual in this situation, I popped open my Quicksilver and hooked the Performa's 160 MB SCSI HDD to my trusty flashed Adaptec SCSI card (which I found in some God-forsaken corner of my old office). The drive... beeped. Several times. I didn't know it could do that.

After a reboot and two more beeps, it made a horrendus churning noise... and then mounted! It's a miracle. I immediately fired up DiskCopy and made an image of the disk. I could see Mario Teaches Typing after the Desktop file rebuilt. I don't think our Performa shipped with that, but I've read they did at some point.

After a successful image, I poked around the files. It was nearly stock, but there were a few ClarisWorks files. The only notable one was this doodle. I... yeah.

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