I picked up an external SCSI hard drive at a garage sale this weekend. Listening to the RetroMacCast has left me wanting to play with the Mac Plus in our spare bedroom and see what I can do it with. I have System 6.0.8 floppies, so there’s a lot of things I can do with it in theory.

But that theory hit the brick wall of practice last night when I tried hooking up the hard drive. Apple’s “HD SC Setup” program only recognizes Apple branded hard drives, not the LaCie I bought. I turned to Google for answers, and found that there were third-party hard disk formatters for the early Macs, as well as a one-byte patch for “HD SC Setup” itself. All I had to do was download the files and copy them to an 800K Mac floppy. Oh, one catch: USB floppy drives won’t write to 800K floppies.

I spent the last hour this morning reading Jef Raskin’s “Book of Macintosh“, a compendium of essays and notes from the preliminary stages of Macintosh design. One thing that stood out was Raskin’s insistance that Macintosh’s hardware didn’t need to be anything special, because the real value of the Mac was the ease of connecting it to a network. The Mac was supposed to be just another node on a LAN, Tymnet, or even ARPANet.

Last night, I reviewed my options, and none were pleasant. To get the software I need in a format my Mac Plus can handle, I have to track down a Mac G3 computer that still has a floppy drive capable of writing 800K disks, or spend $150 on an Ethernet adapter that plugs into the SCSI port. Or, and this is the route I will probably go, I can find someone who already has a networked classic Mac who can get me some software, including those hard drive utilities. I’m sure someone in the chiclassiccomp group can help me.

Another Mac product announcement has come and gone without an update to the lowly Mac Mini. So, I did an upgrade of my own.

I stopped at Fry’s on the way home and found 4gb of Corsair’s 667MHz DDR2 notebook memory for $29.99 $22.99 after rebate. That’s an insanely great price.

So, now both of my Minis have the maximum RAM they can handle: 4gb (3.1 actually usable) on the Core2Duo upstairs, and 2gb on the CoreDuo downstairs.  Plus, the machine downstairs had PC4200 (533MHz) memory, and I’m sure it’s going to benefit from the faster PC5400 (677MHz) RAM it inherited.

It’s not the bump in CPU speed and graphics performance I was hoping for from Apple, but it’s certainly an improvement.

EDIT: Sold the RAM that was in the downstairs Mini for $10 on eBay, bringing the cost for the memory and a night of geekery down to $19 $12.99.

EDIT #2: Looked at my receipt, and I was charged $42.99 for the RAM, not $49.99 as I thought the sign said.

There were some interesting new Apple products announced yesterday that I’m sure you’re all sick of hearing about, so I’m not going to echo all the breathless geekery you’ve read a million times already.

But, I am going to ask “where’s the new Mac Mini”?

According to the Mac Buyers Guide at MacRumors, the Mini hasn’t seen an update since August 07, 2007. That’s the longest any current Apple product has gone without major changes, with the exception of the Cinema Display line which got a new model yesterday. Now, I have two Mac Minis and I love them. They’re little machines that stay out of the way and don’t have loud fans going constantly. They aren’t particularly easy to upgrade, but if you’re willing to drive two putty knives into the chassis, you can upgrade the latest ones to 3gb of RAM, and they sport Core 2 Duo processors.

What’s missing? 802.11n networking would be nice, but you can get a USB adapter for that. What’s really hurting the Mini is its integrated Intel 950 graphics, which are downright pitiful next to the new Nvidia chips announced yesterday. The Intel 950’s fill rate (“the number of pixels a video card can render and write to video memory” according to Wikipedia) is a “theoretical” 1600 megapixels/s. The Nvidia 9600M GT announced yesterday has a fill rate measured in gigapixels.

I’m not expecting the Mini to get much love in the near future. It’s always been seen as a cheap little machine for switchers to get the Mac experience before diving in and buying an iMac or MacBook. Not all hope is lost, though. There are MacBooks with broken screens selling for about $300 on eBay right now. They’re not the new ones, no, but they pack the same CPUs & features as the latest Minis, plus 802.11n networking and better graphics.

You can lay them flat and call them “squished Minis”. Or, turn them upright and wont take up much space on your desk. They were made to be portable, but they don’t have to be!

Anyway, just a thought from your local Mac Mini afficianado.