The Quadra 610 Experience



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Author	The Quadra 610 Experience (Read 43339 times)
mac-cellar 128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7	on: June 28, 2021, 21:57 One day during my junior year of college (circa 1994), I checked out one of the smaller, less-travelled computer labs on campus to check my email. The main lab was huge and well apportioned with Macs, PCs and X Terminals, but it always crowded and almost always frustratingly noisy, so this smaller, sleepier, all-Macs lab was more my speed. Back then, checking email meant connecting to the university network via telnet and running a command-line program like pine or mutt. I launched NCSA Telnet on this Mac, and away I went. A little while later, done with my email for the day (imagine?), I started poking around the applications on the Mac and noticed something called Mosaic. I launched it and was greeted with a screen that looked much like the university’s standard page of announcements, directions and instructions that appeared in the telnet session after login, but this one had highlighted words, that launched other pages of information when clicked. I soon found that students and faculty had their own pages with links to other pages, some of which were on other university systems or elsewhere. Of course, I’m describing what I remember as my first interaction with the internet and a web browser, and it all happened on a machine very much like the one I acquired last week - a Macintosh Quadra 610. Since those days in the computer lab, I’ve had both a soft spot for these machines, and a sentimental urge to buy one. Now, I’ve owned dozens of different Macs over the last 25 years, including, much to my wife’s amusement, the 20 or so in my house right now, but never the Quadra 610 nor its older, slightly less capable cousin, the Centris 610. I was excited to find this one on eBay in fine shape and for a price within hand-grenade range of reasonable, so I picked it up. It arrived last week, and I’ve been working with it here and there since. In this thread, I’ll share my experiences with this Mac so far.

cballero 1024 MB Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever	Reply #1 on: June 29, 2021, 05:46 What a wonderful window into into university Macs and the outset of your Internet experience in the mid-nineties, Mac-Cellar! And to think you now have a mini-Mac lab at home, well, you know we're all immediately jealous, lol!!

Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #2 on: June 29, 2021, 18:03 First and most important question: How did you get your wife's approval? :-D Seriously though, thanks for sharing your experience! It's interesting how good memories give us this pleasant feeling using things. For me, the Macintosh LC was the first "Mac experience" and I still keep it around even though it is painfully slow (even more so then when we were young and days had what felt like 48 hours). I'm wishing you good luck with the Quadra 610. It's a very nice machine and certainly one that deserves to be preserved. If you get it online, you can use it to visit Sys7 Today and post here :-) (I'm actually using my 8600 right now)

mac-cellar 128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7	Reply #3 on: June 29, 2021, 23:07 Bolkonskij - My wife used to think my Mac hobby was a little nuts, but after 22 years, now she knows it's harmless and even cute... so long as the Macs stay in the basement Well, except the laptops that is! cballero - Isn't amazing how much has changed? Thanks for the reply! I have notes for a few more posts on the Quadra including, to Bolkonskij's post, my adventures with networking this past weekend. Right now, until my AAUI transceiver arrives, I'm limited to a localtalk-ethernet bridge. I'll do a post from the Quadra as soon as I can.

mac-cellar 128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7	Reply #4 on: June 30, 2021, 06:10 Over the years, I’ve watched eBay and classifieds for these Centris/Quadra machines with the low-profile case they shared with the PowerMac 6100 series. The design is rather simple, with all of the components mounted on, more or less, a single horizontal level in a squarish bottom case box, with the top case designed to fit over the box, secured with two plastic tabs on the rear edge of the top case. To remove the top case, simply pull up slightly on one tab at a time until in releases, and then pull the top case up and off. The whole machine rests on 4 oblong, kidney-shaped plastic feet, attached to the bottom case. As I’ve searched for one of these machines, in all too many cases, time and movement had not been kind. Typically, the plastic tabs on the rear of the top case were either cracked or broken off, the plastic feel break and go missing, and surprisingly the plastic at the rear of the top case shows big chunks broken off. I can only imagine that as these machines were used or later stored, they were handled too roughly for the increasingly brittle plastics, banged against walls or perhaps stacked too high, resulting in damage. Who knows? For my part, knowing that there were still all sorts of things that could be wrong with a machine that was last sold 27 years ago, I jumped on the one I bought because there was no damage to the case at all, it was free of any real fading in the plastics, and most importantly it had been tested to power on. There were a few other reasons I jumped on this particular Mac. The Quadra 610 was an upgrade to the earlier Centris 610, when that name was discontinued. The Quadra 610, with the exception of an entry level model, received the full 25 Mhz 68040 processor, instead of the 20 Mhz 68LC040 used in the Centris. This one turned out to be the better of the two Quadras, and as a bonus, had the full 1 MB of VRAM, 24 MB of RAM, a 230 MB hard drive and, one my favorite pieces of quirky tech - a caddy CD drive. When it arrived, I was happy to see that no damage had occurred in shipment, thanks to the seller’s superb packing. I set it up on my workbench, and quickly realized I needed to dig up a few items in order to get started, namely a keyboard, mouse, video cabling and something to let me at least connect to the Mac Mini I use as a file server. I managed to find an Apple ADB mouse in box of parts, and for a keyboard, I connected my AlphaSmart 3000. I found the Apple monitor cable and a VGA adapter in with my Powerbook 5300ce (one of my other prize eBay finds). That left networking - the Quadra 610 has the standard Mac serial ports (modem and printer), and it also has an AAUI connector. Sadly, I sold off my last AAUI connector years ago, so for time being I resigned myself to some kind of serial port networking to transfer files I might need. It was then that I remembered I had both a Farallon iPrint Localtalk-Ethernet bridge and an Asante Microprint... somewhere! I dug out both, and after a quick online search, I located the drivers for the Microprint - no such luck for the iPrint. Finally, it was time to fire everything up. I’ll tell you more about that in the next post.

mac-cellar 128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7	Reply #5 on: July 09, 2021, 05:24 Last weekend, I was able to have my first real session with the Quadra 610. After making all of my connections, with the exception of the networking gear, I pressed the chunky round power button on the front of the Quadra and to my relief it booted right up. It was so nice to hear the old startup chime - what a pleasant, relaxed, understated sound. The machine had System 7.5 installed, and I quickly discovered that it had been a classroom Mac. There were lesson plans and gradebooks saved on the hard drive, and its copy of Claris Works 2.1 was licensed to a school district. I had a brief look around, fooled around a bit with Claris Works, SimpleText, Notepad and the Extensions Manager, and then got down to making some improvements. I quickly made a mental list of a few things I thought I should do, now that I'd poked around a little: 1) check the hard disk with Norton Disk Doctor, 2) uninstall software I didn’t want and update the system software, and 3) get connected to my home network so that I could access the classic software archive I have on my Mac Mini. First things first, a hard disk check. I have Norton Utilites 3.5, in fact it is installed on my PowerCenter Pro, but unfortunately in this case, my copy is on CD. With a CD caddy still days away, this wasn't going to do me much good. Then, I remembered that the Norton CD contains images for boot floppies - one of which has Norton Disk Doctor. I used the PowerCenter Pro, and its recently resurrected floppy drive, to make myself a Disk Doctor boot disk, and within a few minutes I had the Quadra booted from a floppy and running Disk Doctor. The doctor found no bad blocks, but unearthed a bunch of errors and was able to fix all of them. On to more exciting things like getting rid of 20 year old elementary school software. I needed Yank! As I mentioned, this Quadra 610 had been a classroom Mac, and I needed Yank to remove a number of elementary school spelling, math and drawing software programs that were taking up quite a bit of space on the Quadra's 230 MB hard drive. After giving the Quadra's floppy drive a workout searching through a tall stack of floppies, I found an unmarked white floppy with just what I was looking for - Yank, one of my favorite utilities. Yank is an uninstaller, that will trash applications along with their preference files and any other associated application files stashed in some place or another on the hard disk. It will search your hard drive, and ask before moving each file to the trash, though this gets kind of annoying. If you have an application stashed in its own folder, along with saved files or documentation, you'll have to trash this folder separately. You'll still have to empty your trash manually, but for me, this is a good failsafe. Yank does a couple of other housecleaning tasks. It will search your System Folder for preference files that are either abandoned or haven't been used in a while, and trash these. It will also "slim" FAT applications - those written to run natively in either 68k or PPC. After a drag 'n drop install, Yank made quick work of the unwanted software. With that accomplished, I moved on to the system software, and boy did I get into the weeds trying to make this happen. That’s a story for the next post.

mac-cellar 128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7	Reply #6 on: July 11, 2021, 07:04 I was going to devote this post to my adventures with networking the Quadra in order to update the system software, but I need to leave that for another post. I’ve run into an issue with the power supply that I’d like to share, in the hopes that someone has a suggestion that doesn’t involve finding a new one. It started last weekend. The Quadra had been running for several hours, including a number of restarts, without any issues. At one point, I moved over to the Power Computing machine that I was using to grab software from my file server and from the CDROM. I spent a few minutes gathering a few applications into a folder I had shared with the Quadra, and then moved back across the room to the Quadra. Before I touched the keyboard on the Quadra, the screen went blank. I quickly realized that the machine was off, but the main power switch was still in the ON position. I pressed the switch - nothing happened. I tried it again and this time I heard a faint "tick-tick-tick" noise from inside the Quadra. I removed the cover, and confirmed that the noise was coming from the power supply. Figuring the power supply had met its end, I removed it, but as I was doing so I noticed my can of compressed air on the shelf. I figured I'd blow the dust out of the power supply as best I could and try it one more time, not expecting it to work. I blew out as much dust as I could without cracking open the power supply, plugged in the power cord and pressed down the plastic power rod. Much to my surprise, the power supply came alive and the ticking noise was gone. Sure enough, after reseating the power supply in the Quadra, plugging the main cable back into the logic board and connecting the Molex power cables to the hard drive and the CD drive, I pressed the power switch and the machine booted like nothing had happened. Sadly, this was not the end of the story. What I described above happened near the end of the day, so I was soon turning the machine off. Over the next several days, I didn’t have much time to spend on the Quadra so it sat dormant. The next time I turned it on, the power supply started acting up again. When I pressed the power button, I heard a rhythmic “tick-tick.. tick-tick... tick-tick”. What’s more, the small green power light on the front of the machine would flash with each tick. I opened the machine up and removed the power supply again, blew out more dust, gave it a good shake, and plugged it back in. After two attempts, the Quadra booted normally. This pattern has repeated itself each time I’ve tried to boot the machine after it has sat for any length of time. Thankfully, it does eventually boot each time, but I’m not taking chances. I’m looking into replacement power supplies. Anyone have any other suggestions?

Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #7 on: July 11, 2021, 13:19 mac-cellar, that's the "ticking of death" as I'd call it. As a former Mac LC owner, I'm all to familiar with that sound. (the Mac LC PSUs have been failing in masses with this very issue) What it means is that your PSU is in dire need for a recap. If you have a multimeter, you can check on what voltage is present and google what the psu should actually deliver. That will verify the problem. The good news is that chances are good you will be able to continue use it after the recap. If you don't have the skills, have someone professional fix it for you. I don't touch PSUs either as my soldering skills are simply not good enough. It's usually pretty crammed inside the case.
Last Edit: July 11, 2021, 13:21 by Bolkonskij
mac-cellar 128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7	Reply #8 on: July 13, 2022, 22:35 It's been just over a year, but my Quadra 610 is up and running again. This time last year, I had a mostly dead power supply and the original 230MB hard drive was starting to fail. About 2 months ago, I picked up a replacement power supply on eBay for under $25. This week I treated myself to a BlueSCSI module to replace the hard drive. Installing the BlueSCSI was very easy, and the Quadra booted from it on the first try. I'm having a little trouble with getting the disk images just right, but I'm willing to mess with it to get the install just right. So my lone 68k Mac is back in action, and I'm looking forward to playing around with a couple of interesting old software titles I picked up used recently (Crunch - a way-back spreadsheet program, and Full Write - a word-processor from the late 80s/early 90s).

Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #9 on: July 14, 2022, 10:29 Wow, great to hear an update and that the Quadra 610 is doing fine! Now let's find a CPU upgrade and you got yourself a very neat all around classic Mac :-) In fact, I have a comparable-in-performance machine (my IIci, sporting a Daystar PowerCache 68030 at 40 Mhz upgrade card. Would be interesting to compare benchmarks between the two!). It's no sports car, but I can take it to here and post on the forums (I do at times!) and of course do all the other stuff we used to do back in the day. Even playback of mp3 files works with MpegDec, but can't do much else meanwhile :-) Since I'm a bit of a sucker for spreadsheet alternatives to Excel (see here) I'm really interested in your experience with Crunch. Feel free to open up the probably first and only Crunch thread on the www to talk about your experience with it, please :-)
Last Edit: July 14, 2022, 10:37 by Bolkonskij
cballero 1024 MB Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever	Reply #10 on: July 14, 2022, 20:37 Yay! I'm happy you TLC'd your Mac back into existence! I second MpegDec for MP3 playback (it can even display teeny poster art and basic MP3 album and song info as well) You may also have tried WriteNow which should do just dandy on your Mac's specs! Note that these applications were both written in Motorola 68k Assembly language but they also play nicely in later generation PPC Macs (granted that MpegDec has more and more robust competition in that space of course) Bolkonskij, I'd love to see some videos of some of these redo's (I suppose the makers of these items like BlueSCSI may have some posted somewhere online) but just maybe both S7T and Cornica.org could both have sections specially devoted to 'Mac-pimping', I mean, Mac-upgrading, motherboard recapping how-to's and similar upgrades! Maybe the next-level of things might be 3D-printing of spare parts and cases for our ever-degrading plastic elements! Then again, I don't know.. might that be just a bit overkill for our beloved Macs? I'm actually curious as to our group's thoughts on that!

mac-cellar 128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7	Reply #11 on: August 15, 2022, 07:48 The Quadra 610 is up and running with its spiffy new BlueSCSI! After a few busy weeks during which I was just too fried at the end of the day to tinker with the Quadra/Blue SCSI, I finally got some time today to work on the Quadra and I’m pretty happy with how things have gone. The instructions linked from the blue.scsi website helped me setup a 4GB micro SD card with a 2.1 GB blank disk image. I popped the SD card in the Quadra along with a boot disk and booted the Quadra. From there, I loaded a copy of the 610s original system software CD that I pulled from Macintosh Garden, and set about installing System 7.1 (I went old school). I know the installation can be done from an emulator, but I don’t have one setup on my Linux machine, and I wanted to do the install from the Quadra. Despite the glacially slow CDROM drive in the 610, the install went smoothly, and I was able to reboot from the disk on the BlueSCSI without any issue. I’ve spent the rest of tonight installing other software, some system updates, and a few helpful extensions (e.g., StickClick) with my PowerCenter Pro acting as a bit of bridge machine on my network. I’m excited to have the 610 up and running smoothly. The Blue SCSI turned out to be deadly simple to install and setup, and I know I’ve only scratched the surface of its capabilities. Action Retro has a nice video on adding a Blue SCSI to his Color Classic, and I’ve already ordered one of the nifty microSD -> SD ribbon cable extensions he uses in that video so that I can bring the SD card outside of the case. It’s kind of a pain to pull the top-case off to work inside, and I’m always afraid I’m going to eventually snap one of the two case latch-tabs at the rear. So, my little pizza-box Mac lives. Now, I just need to find a real keyboard - the Alphasmart 2000 I use now works fine, but it just looks kinda weird. I’ll add a screenshot when I have the chance.

snes1423 256 MB Posts: 458 A Man born of Mechina	Reply #12 on: August 15, 2022, 15:52 oh yeah I forgot about the alphasmart as some of you know I have horrible punctuation back in elementary school they had me use one of those to type out assignments hated the thing the keys would always get stuck on something the screen was tiny and black and white yet it had no internet connectivity so I always had to run down to one of the teachers rooms where they would print it out for me it seemed really useless... -snes1423

mac-cellar 128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7	Reply #13 on: December 02, 2022, 03:41 The Quadra 610 is alive and well as we approach the end of 2022. I've wanted to try out System 7.5 on the Quadra, and create space to mess around with A/UX at some point, without blowing up the nice System 7.1 install I have been using. So, a couple of weeks ago, I setup a new 8GB SD card for the BlueSCSI with a pair of 2 GB disk images. I managed to find the full System 7.5.3 install on an early MacAddict CD and I installed it ol' school using a boot floppy and the Quadra's achingly slow, caddy-loaded 2X CDROM drive. From there, I installed the System 7.5.5 update and a host of other bits and pieces from the Sys7Today list of recommended updates. Then, I set about setting up a comfortable user experience for myself, and in the process, I stumbled across a few software gems. The first is Apollo. Apollo is a nifty launcher app that can be configured in a number of ways. You configure lists/groups containing anything you need to open (e.g., folders, applications, drives, etc). You can access these lists as a pull-down from the menu bar, via a "hot" corner or edge of the screen, or as I do, by holding down option-command and clicking anywhere on the screen (sorta like the right-click application menu in Openbox on Linux). In the spirit of "what goes up, must come down", Apollo also allows you to switch from one application to another AND quit applications all from the same menu. Apollo's other little party-trick is sticky menus, which I haven't tried yet as I have the essential Sticky Menus extension already installed. I was so pleased to stumble on Apollo - it's a remarkably useful tool that sits out of sight until needed and doesn't eat much. The second little gem is the Liteswitch control panel. It's a grudging admission that Windows got something right when it came to application switching. That is, that switching between open applications without taking your hands off the keyboard is very convenient. Just hold down command and hit Tab (on the Quadra anyway... the key combo is configurable) and up pops the box with your open applications. Hit Tab again to highlight the app you want, release and away you go. Last but not least, is the venerable DiskTools Collection. This is a freeware set of 5 very useful desk accessories. How about a Calendar with a built-in notepad feature for each day of the year? Notes are searchable and can be archived. PhonePad is basically Note Pad with more capacity and a built-in index - tagging anyone? DiskTools itself is a file manager (like the great-grandfather of an OS X Finder Window) - find, launch, rename, move, copy or get information about any file on your Mac in one window. Oh, and it comes with to specialty calculators as well. All of these live in your Apple menu. In addition to the useful items above, I had to have some games, and I found a few gems while digging through a BMUG CD I found in my collection. Ambrosia's Asterax, Swoop and Escape Velocity are perfect for the Quadra, and I've been having some fun with those. BOOM is another great little game that I've had fun with lately, as well as Tetris Max. For something completely different, I installed Myst (of course), and also a game called Legions that I picked up on eBay a while back. To round things out, I set myself up with a few key utilities and applications, keeping in mind that I wanted to keep things lean. So, TechTool, BBEdit Lite 4.6, ClarisWorks 2.1, Hotline Client 1.2.3, iCab (which runs more stably on this Quadra than on any other machine I've ever tried it with), HyperCard, TurboGopher, and a few others. I'm really satisfied with this machine now - more than I've ever been. It's about time it moved off the workbench in the cellar and into a more dedicated space... if only I had one Oh yeah, a desktop screenshot to close this out. http://revontulet.org/2022/12/02/Quadra-610-desktop.jpg That's Decor displaying the funky sci-fi-esque vista - a jpeg I found buried on that BMUG CD.
Last Edit: December 02, 2022, 03:44 by mac-cellar
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #14 on: December 02, 2022, 17:22 Awesome report from your 610, mac-cellar. Love it! That's the joys of personal computing .. it's YOUR personal computer and you set it up exactly the way you want it to work for you ;-) You did find some great stuff in the process. I haven't heard of Apollo but I use something simliar on my IIci that probably predates Apollo as it works on System 6 too. I think it was called "on cue" and adds that launcher menu on the top right screen. It can probably be found over on the Macintosh Garden. Escape Velocity is just <3 and so good of a game even by today's standards. An amazing universe if you like the classic "Elite by David Braben" type of space game. And I think I know Legions, played it many many years ago after finding it on the Mac Garden. (ancient history strategy game?) Well, enjoy the time with your 610 and keep us updated. Posted from my 8600 and Mac OS 7.6.1 ;-)

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