Mac Motherboards 1986 to 1995

I’ve been doing tech support for a long time. I started doing it for a living at MacWarehouse in February of 1992. But I had been doing it informally at a number of radio stations that I was a DeeJay at since the late 1980s. I tend to accumulate stuff, a disease I got from my father.

If you like to fix things or build things you learn, very quickly, that just because it is used or no longer suitable for the use it was designed for does not mean that it is actually garbage. My father liked to both fix and build things, he liked working with his hands and was pretty good at it. So the family ended up with furniture, shelving, patios and the like over our lifetimes and almost never had to call someone to make simple household upgrades and repairs. I am the same way. Household upgrades and repairs are a lot cheaper if you can do it yourself. And I learned, from my father (as he did from his father) to hang onto seemingly useless bits of household flotsam. Old shelves, screws, nails, and left over raw material from previous fixes. Why? Because they an often be re-purposed for future projects. That (what my wife would call ‘hoarding’) tendency rolled over into my computer hobby and found utility in computer repair (Tech Support) where old parts can often find their way into computers as replacement or upgrade parts. The same goes for old information. And now that information storage (hard drives, CDs, DVD, etc.) has become so plentiful and cheap there is little reason to toss old data as the cost of keeping it around is literally not noticeable.

All that is a roundabout way of explaining why I still have a Macintosh memory upgrade guide from the 1990s and these diagrams, below, of Macintosh motherboards showing the placement of memory slots.

When I worked in tech support at MacWarehouse we sold a lot of memory upgrade kits. And the upper management of the company (Curiously located in Norwalk CT while we were in Lakewood NJ) insisted on selling all of this stuff with sparse to no information on what and how much of what memory upgrade to sell for which computer. So we had to scrounge that information from reference material; usually books but occasionally in CD form.

Google was years away, Yahoo was an index rather than a search engine and most of this stuff wasn’t yet online. Considering how much of my job is now knowing how to search Google for the answer, I often wonder how I got along without the internet back then.

The (B&W low resolution) pictures below are basic diagrams of Mac motherboards (or if you prefer system boards) that were of great help when a customer called and didn’t know a damn thing about memory upgrades. These simple, primitive, diagrams helped us describe to a panicked customer where those expensive little SIMM chips they had just bought are installed on their particular computer.

I have no idea where these came from. My best guess is they were once part of Apple training material that we managed to get our hands on. So if these are still owned by someone or some company who objects to them being posted on the internet, please contact me and I will take them down. They are presented here as a curiosity and possible reference for someone who just inherited some old computer junk and is looking to identify it.

Again, why would I keep all this old junk? I found it sitting on an old backup CD. It was crammed into an old Stuffit archive and took up just about 1MB (that’s megabytes not gigabytes) of space on the CD. By today’s standards that’s a rounding error.

Here they are presented in roughly chronological order from Mac Plus to PowerMac 9500.