Racintosh Plus – Rackmount Mac Plus

Summary

4 months of work just to make a stupid pun. 1986 Macintosh Plus at home in my music studio. I own a Macintosh Plus from 1986, I found it in the mid 2000's on my college campus on a free-to-a-good-home shelf (Mad Marc's shelf in the chemistry building) in great shape and with its mouse, keyboard, and an HD-20 external hard disk drive. That silly computer has been on the journey with me ever since, leaving college with me and occupying a spot in all of my music studios in all of my homes. I even used it in the production of my first full-length studio album Church Music For Robots. As much as I adore this little champion, it has some glaring issues that I was struggling to ignore: It is big and bulky. It eats up an awkward corner in my studio right now and there really isnt a good place for the mouse and keyboard to live when I need to use it. It is old!The components are nearly as old as I am and could fail at any moment. It has already blown through a few CRT drive capacitors and that stupid RIFA cap across the AC input lines, the screen flickers really bad no matter what I tweak, and the hard drive works by spinning 40 year old plates made of rust. This thing gets pretty hot.I don't have the best AC in my studio, and this beige thermal generator belches out a lot of heat from the power supply as it drives that dumb flickering screen. This just wont do! I ought to make a rack-mounted version of this computer so it can fit cleanly in my studio rack cabinets along with all my other conveniently packaged gear. I will even give it a sleek look and a clever name, something like Racintosh Plus... Hahaha yeah that's pretty funny. Logic Board. The brains of Racintosh Plus is a 1986 Macintosh Plus logic board (oh don't worry, my original computer is perfectly safe, this one is a spare board). R8 was clipped to allow the full 4 MB of system RAM, but I left one lead still in place so the resistor doesn't get lost. A diode (IN4001) was soldered into position CR1 to provide +5V ...