OK, I'll admit to creeping senility. We went to an estate sale Friday
and I bought a "fat mac" Macintosh from 1984 for the magnificent sum of
$1.

I'd planned on making a "Macquarium" out of it, but just for the heck of
it I plugged it in. It came up and beeped with an icon of a floppy with
a question mark. How about that.

Now I'm intrigued. I did some research and found it uses 400K 3.5"
floppies in some strange format which a PC disk controller can't write.
I also found that Apple has no interest in supporting anything that old.

I did find some disk images of various O/S releases, but they do me no
good because I can't write them in Mac format.

I'm going to look for Macintosh newsgroups as soon as I get through
here, but I've seen such a wide range of interests and expertise on this
group that I thought I'd give it a try too.

Does anyone have the fat mac software and the ability to copy it and
send it to me? I'd pay a few bucks to cover expenses, but obviously
don't want to put a lot of money into a $1 obsolete computer :-).

By "Fat Mac", I assume mean you got a 512K, the second Mac? The early ones are
starting to get valuable, as far as older computers go. Good find. Don't chop
it up for an aquarium.

It uses 400K, single-sided disks. Same media as the 800K (or 720K for PCs). It
was the first coomputer to use "modern" Sony floppy diskettes. PC makers didn't
catch on for another few years.

If you can give me some time, I can find and copy most of my original System
disks. I have about 50 vintage computers, mostly Apples and Apple Macs. That
includes an original 128K with a 337 board serial number. I could have sold
that for $1000 a couple years ago when the Japanese collecting market peaked.

GTO(John)