This is the first Mac I actually got to work. I have two of them, always a good idea when dealing with old computers. Since I paid $20 for them apiece including a 15" monitor each, it was not a big deal.

The 630s were the last 680x0 based Macs produced, introduced in summer 1994 and discontinued less than a year later. They had a 33/66 MHz chip and roughly equal a 486 DX. They cost only $1.200, some extras could be ordered.

While I read somewhere that the built-in video drives monitors up to 15", this is obviously not true, I am using it with a Multiple Scan 17 Display now. However, at 832x624 you only get 256 colors, and that's the highest resolution you get.

The Performa and LC versions have a downgraded processor (68LC040) without a FPU, but this can be replaced by a full 68040. They are not very popular among Mac people, because of the crippled CPU, because they had an inferior SCSI controller, and because the hard drive ran on IDE anyway, a mortal sin in the eyes of true Apple freaks. Low End Mac has only a short description together with the Quadra and LC of the same number. Remy Davison has even listed them under the ten worst Macs ever built.

Be ashamed. Be very ashamed. If you own, have owned or laid down good, hard folding for these lemons, you, like Microsoft, have no taste. Hang your head. You're a 'bozo' who doesn't 'get it'. Now go away and cry in your coffee.

Well, I feel no need to hang my head or cry in my coffee, then again, I didn't pay very much. And they are a lot more expandable than most of the Performa series. I was lucky, mine already had a lot of goodies installed.

I mentioned earlier that it's a good thing to have two of the same with old computers. The idea is that you usually can get one good out of two mediocre ones, or even one working out of two that aren't. Here, soon turned out that one of them had all the goodies: TV tuner, video-in, CD-ROM. But the CD eject button from the front panel was missing, so it was still a good thing. I swapped front panels.

The case is rather peculiar. You can remove all the plastic parts, a kind of metal tube will remain that can or at least should not be opened. But you can slide all the parts out of it, the drives and the motherboard. I noticed that both my 630s still had the original 68LC040 CPU, but both had been upgraded with 16MB RAM (additional to the 4MB already on the motherboard).

I replaced this with a 32MB chip I had lying around. To do so, I had first to remove the video-in card, which, by the way, is fixed with a screw to the back of the case.

It is a peculiarity of Macintoshes that they work only with a small range of system versions. For the 630, this is 7.1 to 8.1. Mine both have 7.5.1 installed.

So this is my first step into the world of the Macintosh. I am not likely to become a switcher. But at least I have watched videos again the first time since years.

Things I Did on This Mac

At first, watched videos, mostly. At first it was annoying to have to choose the channel from a pull-down menu (channel 60 means to have to scroll wayyy down), but after all, I had to do this only once, and otherwise the Apple Video Player works very well—with PAL videos at least. I cannot watch NTSC videos, though my VCR supports them. They are displayed all crooked on the screen, and in black & white only.

Games

Besides, it has become my default Mac to play games on. Here are some of the games, in order of release year:

This Ain't Othello	Othello	86		More fun on a compact
Glider	Arcade	88
Zork Zero	Adventure			Nicer on a compact
Pipe Dream	strat	89
SimCity	strat
Darwin's Dilemma	Puzzle	90
Ishido	Puzzle
Oxyd	Puzzle	92
Strip-Mac!
SimCity 2000	strat	93
CyberDreams	Adventure	94
Poker Party	Strip Poker
SimTower	sim
Transarctica	Adventure
Wolfenstein 3D	FPS			512×384, a bit slow
Cabol II	Arcade	96
Super Othello	Othello
Simon	Puzzle	97		Fernando Lagos
MacStones	Puzzle	99		Craig Landrum

Basically all these games ran well on this Mac. Wolfenstein 3D really needs a faster machine, I did not even try 640×480, and it was a bit sluggish even at 512×384. This game really needs a PowerMac, playing it on the Performa 6400 made a huge difference. Pipe Dream, on the other hand, simply didn't look well. I was charmed when I later played it on my new Macintosh SE. I guess it doesn't like system 7.5.

Internet!

Ironically, this was also the first Mac I put online. The Ethernet card in the CommSlot worked, so when I got a router in early 2006 all I had to do was connect it. Netscape 3.0 was already on the harddrive. This site looked rather boring in it, since it gets all its design from stylesheets and nearly all the graphics are PNGs, but it did display and was quite usable. I also tried iCab, which supports both PNG and CSS, but got several things wrong (like the menus in the games section), was excruciatingly slow and tended to crash.