One of the constraints around my interest in old computers is that I don't live in a very big place, and I don't enjoy clutter. I have a mixed relationship with legendary collections like the Retro Computer Museum. It brings me joy to visit, but if I lived there, I would eventually start tidying up. It's probably a healthy constraint. With no counterbalance an interest like this could get out of hand.

So before I ventured into this world, I made a few decisions. The first being, every computer must have a unique purpose, and I will select the computer that best fulfills that purpose. I find the Macintosh Quadra 605 utterly adorable, but it fulfills a similar purpose to the Centris 610: a 68040-based Macintosh great for running System 7. Between the two, I have stronger nostalgia about the Centris, because I used one in the computer lab at college, so I pass on the Quadra. 😢

The second decision was, only form factors that fit in my space. Specifically, 8-bit and 16-bit wedge-shaped computers that display nicely on the wall, or pizza-box/outrigger workstations that stack. That means no towers, no NeXTcube, no iMac or other all-in-one computers, as magical as so many of those are.

And then I made five exceptions.

There are five computers whose shape doesn't fit those rules, but which are so interesting or special to me that they would warrant a slice of the very limited tabletop real estate in my collection. These are my "white whales". If I have an opportunity to get one of them I'll consider it, even though it breaks my other rules. This entry is about those computers and what they mean to me. Let's go newest to oldest.

1: "Trashcan" Mac Pro (2013)

2013 Mac Pro

Sorry, the "cylinder". The last truly weird computer that's ever been released, in my opinion. A bold weird experiment which produced a workstation that's quite decent on most dimensions except for upgradability. Easy-to-upgrade turns out to matter quite a bit for professional workstations, it turns out, and so Apple returned to the sensible but unoriginal PC tower form factor for the next generation of Mac Pros.

Max it out with a 12-core Xeon, 128GB of RAM, and a recent M.2 SSD, and this decade-old (as of this writing) looker can turn out CPU performance comparable to (and GPU performance better than) a new Macbook Pro (citation: YouTube). This makes it the fastest Macintosh that can run macOS Mojave and by extension, the fastest Macintosh that can run 32-bit applications.

Which means there are a handful of programs - games in particular - that this is the ideal computer to run. Apparently many of these computers are in use to this day, especially in film and TV production, where some popular editing and effects workflows still depend on 32-bit software.

Its weirdness appeals to me. Apple just keeps trying to make cubes and cylinders and slabs happen, and I love them for it. As a piece of design, it works for me. The fact that it's the last of its line feels a touch romantic, as odd as that sentiment is about a computer. When it was new, the top of the line model would have set you back $7000, with upgrades pushing that well into five figures. And while nobody would call retrocomputing a cheap hobby, with a little bit of effort you could find one of these at more than a 95% discount today. They're square in the value trough where they're too old to be useful but too new to be collectible. There's something fun about something you remember being exciting but prohibitively expensive, and now you can actually get one for not that much.

2: "Mirrored Drive Door" Power Macintosh G4 (2003)

Power Macintosh G4

UPDATE: I caught one! Read: "Mirrored Drive Door" Power Macintosh G4

The fastest computer that can boot a "Classic" (pre-OSX) Macintosh operating system. Technically the best-specced model was released in 2002 with dual 1.25 GHz CPUs, although in practice Mac OS 9 had no ability to do symmetric multiprocesssing so the second CPU just sat there idle unless you were using one of the very few applications (like Photoshop) with multiprocessor support. So the 2003 single-CPU 1.25 GHz model may be tied for first, if a Classic Mac OS experience is what you're after. And that's indeed what I'm after. I got hooked on the classic Macintosh UI the moment I saw it in 1984, and I still think the Platinum design language is the pinnacle of great-looking software.

While there are faster PowerPC machines that can Classic programs in run Mac OS X's "Classic Environment", for a pure, no-apologies Mac OS 9 experience, this is as good as it gets. It's big and it's loud, but also it's shiny and it's thoughtfully designed for easy upgrades. Sign me up.

3: Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (1997)

Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh Image credit: MHzModels (ko-fi)

The stereotype about Apple products is that they're underpowered, overpriced, overhyped toys for gullible fanbois. And then there's the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, which was delivered to your house by tuxedo-wearing concierges.

This thing was designed to be a hype factory, and in 1997 I would gladly eat a heaping bowl of Apple hype every morning for breakfast. Jerry Seinfeld had one! Chandler Bing had one! Batman had one! It cost $8,000 (about $15,000 in today's money), entirely unattainable for somebody less than a year out of college.

It looked like nothing else at the time, and it was so influential. Jony Ive's first product for Apple, it made clear reference to the original all-in-one Macintosh 128K (yet no mouse! 🤯), but it was sleek, modern, and bronze instead of boxy and cute. The first iMac followed in its conceptual footsteps, and even today's iMacs are clearly still of its kind. I lived in a tiny dark apartment, but dreamed of an stylish, modern loft with an artsy piece of tech like this on my desk, Everything But The Girl pumping out of those Bose speakers.

It was not a success. As a computer, it was straight up weak. You could get a more powerful Macintosh for half or a third the price, and it certainly wasn't going to win any price/performance comparisons with something running Windows 98. It was not very upgradeable. The LCD was neat, but CRT monitors were bigger, brighter, and cheaper. Fewer than 10,000 were made before it was discontinued. Which, as a collectible, makes it hard to find one of these today. (For comparison, there were somewhere north of 12 million Commodore 64s sold.)

I still fondly remember dreaming of a life with one of these on my desk. It's not too late.

Okay, this list isn't all Apple computers. That was the final one, I swear.

4: Silicon Graphics O2 (1996)

SGI O2 Image credit: MHzModels (ko-fi)

I was bouncing between startups in Los Angeles in the 1990s, and I remember a recruiter telling me about a company that hadn't even figured out what they were going to build yet, but if you worked there, you would get an O2. And I considered it very seriously.

The O2 wasn't SGI's top-of-the-line, not by a mile. They had just bought Cray, after all. But their top of the line stuff was for movie studios and universities. The O2 was aimed squarely at me: somebody doing a mix of software development, design, graphics, and media, before those disciplines settled into their respetive lanes and you would be well-advised to select one and specialize in it. It may have been the only Silicon Graphics product you could get for less than $10,000. Certainly too dear for me to buy for personal use, but not unreasonable as a pro workstation in the era when my peers were using Power Macintosh 9600s.

I didn't take the job. Hey recruiter, if you're still out there and the offer's still good, 📞.

5. BeBox (1995)

Image credit: MHzModels (ko-fi)

There was a period of time, which felt years long to me, where it seemed that BeOS could very well represent the future of computing. Apple would acquire Be, Inc., slap Appearance Manager on top and SheepShaver underneath for Classic Mac OS compatibility, and bam! A PowerPC-native Mac OS 8 with pre-emptive multitasking, symmetric multiprocessing, and protected memory, written top to bottom in C++. Faster, safer, and easier to use than Windows 95, a thousand flowers would bloom, as OEMs raced to build CHRP-compatible BeOS-powered Macintoshes. The sins of Copland are forgiven. Peace reigns across the land.

Anyway, that didn't happen. In fact the whole period between the release of the BeBox and Apple's acquisition of NeXT that spelled Be's doom turns out to have been only fourteen months. Why did it feel so long to me? Why did it all feel so inevitable?

Probably it had a lot to do with being young. But also, BeOS objectively ruled. Modern operating system niceties like multithreading, multiprocessing, and multitasking felt like magic to somebody who had only used consumer operating systems up to that point. BeOS made them available for, essentially, free. Sure, consumer Linux distributions were showing up around the same time, but the user interfaces they offered were very much an acquired taste. BeOS's UI was clean, consistent, and tactile. The freshness really showed - there was no legacy compatibility or legacy software to worry about. There was a POSIX-like command-line terminal! The error messages were haikus! The yellow tabs were fun! The BeBox had blinkenlights on the front and a GeekPort! What even is a GeekPort?

I grabbed every preview release of the OS I could, and pored over every pixel. I stealth-installed it onto my computer at work, and I tried building some BeOS apps. A surprising number of developers dipped their toes into the Be ecosystem, ready to be a first mover when it took off. In reality, there were many ways in which BeOS was not ready for prime time, but everybody I know who used it talks about it with fondness.

Be got out of the hardware business almost immediately after entering it, but they released two generations of the BeBox. Between the two fewer than 2,000 were ever made. They're incredibly rare today. And to me, they represent a moment of optimism and creativity in technology that was unique and special.