No Cameras Allowed by Computer Clan #012 - My Early Niche: Diving Into Vintage Macs

Show Notes: Welcome to #MARCHintosh My First Vintage Apple Tours Episode (2012) Super News: Gates vs. Jobs Patreon.com/KrazyKen

Transcription*: Hey guys, how are you all doing? If you're new here, welcome. My name is Krazy Ken, and welcome back to another episode of No Cameras Allowed, the autobiographical podcast, the journey of the Computer Clan YouTube channel, and how it has affected my life because it's been a major part of my life for the last 14 years or so. And in fact, I probably sound like a broken record by now. It is one of the longest running, still operational tech YouTube channels in the history of YouTube. So what are we talking about today? Well, it's officially March, so it's time for March and Tosh. This is actually the first annual MARCHintosh, and there's a lot of cool retro Macintosh content being posted out there. So make sure to search Twitter and YouTube with #MARCHintosh to see what other people are doing. And I will have another YouTube episode later about a rare Apple computer for #MARCHintosh But today we're just doing this podcast episode, but it'll still be a lot of fun. I received a question recently, which related to an idea of an episode I wanted to cover a while ago. So I thought this would be the perfect timing. This one comes to us from Poland, from Lasiczka. They wrote hi. I had a question for a long time. How do you start collecting vintage Macs? That is an excellent question. So I do have some tips and tricks that could help you, and you may pick up some nuggets from my story as well. And that's actually where we're going to start. We're going to start today with my story about an early niche that I got into on YouTube, collecting vintage, Apple computers, and Apple Macintosh's back in the earlier days of the YouTube channel, I didn't really have a focus. I didn't really know what I wanted to make videos about. It was a few months later that the tech stuff started forming, right? The idea kind of started coming together and some of those early video, in fact, probably, I don't know, at least half of those early videos had to do with vintage, retro, Apple hardware and stuff like that. I was really into it. So I wanted to make videos about it. That's the thing you got to make videos about stuff you'll love. Otherwise, you know, people can tell, you know, your stuff may not perform as well. If you're not putting your all into it. And the best way to put your all into it is to do a video about a subject you like, and this was one of the first niches I dove into. So here is that story of how it started when I was about two years old, probably, you know, living with my family, our family computer was a Macintosh. So later we switched to windows. That was our daily driver for like six or seven years. But then we switched back to an iMac and I do talk about that story in past episodes as well, particularly episode nine and episode two, we got this iMac in summer of 2007 and I liked it. It just worked the way my brain worked. I was able to click on things and figure it out really easily. I don't remember exactly how this started, but I ended up discovering Apple related videos on YouTube. Now this was 2007 YouTube. So there were a lot fewer videos, a lot fewer users. And you had a, you know, a 10 minute video limit. You had a hundred megabyte file limit at standard definition, quality, probably 360p resolution. So times were very different 14 years ago on YouTube, but I somehow stumbled upon Apple related videos on YouTube and they captivated me. I actually tried to load my favorites archive on YouTube. And I don't know, maybe it's just too big, but it would not scroll back to the beginning. I scrolled back as far as the website would load. And some of the oldest videos that I favorited on YouTube were old Apple commercials for their computers back in the eighties. And I just kind of fell down that rabbit hole. And I don't know how powerful the YouTube algorithm was back then, but I ended up finding more Apple related videos. So perhaps the algorithm was catching on here. You know what I'm saying? It was recommending more of that stuff to me. So I ended up finding video from super news called Gates versus jobs. You might've seen it, look it up if you'd like it's a cartoon of Steve jobs and bill Gates fighting and stuff like that in a computer war. It's hilarious. Funny enough. That's actually how I learned who Steve jobs was. I knew who bill Gates was, but I didn't know who Steve jobs quotes. So then I started going down more rabbit holes. And I talked about this in other episodes too, but Alfred DiBlasi from the Adiblasi YouTube channel and David Di Franco, who used to be called thecreativeone. They would make Apple-related videos, too, you know, upgrading computers, fixing them, stuff like that. A lot of Macs in particular. And again, that was the brand that got my attention. It was the Apple brand. So I started watching a lot of their stuff, right. And then I started finding more videos on YouTube. Again, that algorithm was probably just poking me like, Hey, Hey, you're watching this Apple related stuff. We're going to give you more. And you know, my young like teenage brain is just like, yes, I just want to consume this content. I'm not even thinking about it. Just give me more. So then this had to be the big thing that did it. I found the old Apple, no, it's where Steve jobs would be on stage announcing new products to cheering audiences. The dude was so gifted at presenting. He worked story and suspense and cool visual AIDS into a product presentation and an awesome demo. He was so good at owning the stage. I know he had help. I know it was a team effort, but he was so good on stage presenting new products. And they are so much fun to watch. If you have not watched older Apple keynotes from Steve jobs, watch them. They are easily rewatched. They're hilarious and fun. Sometimes we call them Steve notes. You know, that's what we call them. Steve notes. I started watching those and I vividly remember one of the earliest ones I saw was when he introduced the first ever iMac that G three, you know, cathode Ray tube bond. I blue colored CRT iMac thing. Oh my gosh. That thing was so pretty. And remember at the time, pretty much every was bathed. So the fact that they had this frosted transparent, bluish green, cool looking all in one computer, that was an attention grabber. And even though this was 2007, me seeing this recording from 1998, I was still super captivated by how he presented and how the older max looked. And I started getting intrigued by Apple's history, how they design their computers back then, how the software looked a few months later, I start the YouTube channel. I start doing kind of just random videos with my friends. And then I start doing it more of the tech stuff. The first technically tech video I released was computer showdown, which that's a whole different podcast episode in and of itself because that ended up being a, kind of like a mini mini cult classic in the early days of the channel. We'll get to that some other time. But then a few months after that, I, I guess I pulled enough money together and got permission from my mother to borrow her, her eBay account. I started searching for max because I wanted to start a Mac collection. So I'm borrowing and your eBay account. I wasn't old enough to have my own. I'm pretty sure that that was the rule. And I, I had 50 bucks. I had something like that, 50 bucks. So I look around and I wanted to get a computer that looked like that iMac, that Steve jobs presented. And I found one on eBay time. I thought it was the same one that Steve jobs presented it. I later found out it was actually a three-year newer model. That was a different color. But like, Hey, I didn't really know back then. It just cool. I found a 2001 imag T3, Indigo color for $50. I think the shipping was even free. And I was kind of surprised because you know, it's like a little television, it's got a CRT, those are heavy. These things are like 40 pounds and they were shipping it for free and I was elated. So I was like, okay, mom, can I buy this shirt, honey? Okay. Here's 50 bucks. Boom bought it. It arrived like a week later. And I loved that dang thing. It was so much fun to play on to experience the old Apple hardware and software. That was my first Mac in my collection. In fact, the software wasn't that old, it was running tiger, which at the time was the latest version of Mac iOS 10. It was able to run it. I just ran it slower than my dual core, 64 bit Intel machine I had as my daily driver at the time, but it worked and you could still install maca with nine on there and run all these classic games and stuff like that. I was able to bust out some old Macintosh CD ROMs from my childhood, put them in the slot, loading disc drive and play them because they would work that backward compatibility was on this system. And it was so much fun. I actually have a picture of it in the show notes PDF. Again, I like to attach pictures and links and also aid a full transcription and automated transcription of these episodes. So go ahead and check the link in the description to get to those show notes and the transcription in case you need any of that cool stuff. And there's also that other picture of me. Oh my gosh. One of my old YouTube videos, just my old geeky self with that Apple shirt and my glasses. And it looks kind of funny looking back at it. Oh man. And you could see the imag T3 in the background there. That was the Indigo iMac in the background. So yes, first vintage Mac in the collection. I was starting a collection. Where do I go next? Well, I don't exactly. I remember the precise order I received my next computers in, but I do have my old videos saved and archived in places. And I can kind of use them as a reference point. I remember getting an Apple two E enhanced from my piano teacher. She was generous enough to give me hers when her monitor burned out. And I also remember getting some imag T3, snows, those white IMX, very beautiful, a power Macintosh 5,200, that all-in-one beige kind of computer. I was, I was actually donated quite a few things. A lot of my early Macs were in fact, a lot of my max in my collection in general were just very general donations. So to everybody out there, whoever donated meals dramatic or anything in general, thank you. I really appreciate it. So those are some of the early ones. Now I was obsessed with breaking things back then, I guess, plain rock does that for those who don't know. And like he does, he doesn't, he'd do a lot of like smashing things like he does videos of breaking computers and stuff like that. I was doing that stuff like in 2007, 2008 on YouTube. Cause I thought it was fun. I will break things. I don't like doing that. Now. I actually regret breaking a lot of those older computers because to me they're kind of special. They're not never going to get made again, those vintage Macs that I smashed in those old videos, they're never going to exist again. So it was like maybe after I did that for about two years, maybe I kind of made a personal vow to myself, never to break on purpose, a vintage mask or any kind of vintage computer period. I want to preserve that stuff. But my high school, Holy crap, there were a lot. I cannot stress the word. Oh, a lot of old Apple computers stored there. Also some of the teachers there had computers as well and word got around that. I collected them. So sometimes they would just give me they're old Macs. I remember one super awesome teacher just gave me a power book. I think it was a power book, five 20 and I was blown away. I couldn't stop playing with the dang thing. I remember getting Mac to see, I still have that one. I did get that from an old video production lab. Cause that was like a full man with the video card. That was maybe like a $10,000 workstation back in the late eighties, another Apple two E enhanced power Mackintosh, 6,100, which was Apple's first power PC Mac, actually another teacher, one of my favorite teachers I've ever had. He was super nice. And he comes to me one day. I think I'm in the library working on a book report or something. I don't know, but he comes to me in the library and he's like, Hey Ken, we have this. Do you want it? And in his hands is a Macintosh color classic. That was the first compact Mac with a color screen. It had a beautiful, crisp Sony Trinitron monitor in it. And he was giving it to me for free. And I was like, Holy crap, thank you. He told me it doesn't boot up though. But I was like, okay, challenge accepted. Here we go. Give me the computer. I'll figure it out. Our drive was dead. No big deal. As my collection expanded, I had spare parts. I did a video about this of me doing the hard drive. Swap it. Wasn't a very good video. I definitely didn't make good videos back then, but I documented or like time-lapsed me swapping the hard drive. Yeah. And boom, it worked. So now I had a fully operational Macintosh color classic for free running system, 7.5 or something like that. It was so freaking cool. I was so grateful to get that donated to me. So the collection kept growing, kept doing videos about the stuff. I actually started a series called vintage well tours in 2012. And that was kind of a mini pivotal part of the channel because I'll be honest up until 2012. I kind of just filmed stuff and was like, whatever, but vintage Apple tours. The first episode of that was important because that was the first video I did on the channel where I actually intentionally focused on production value and I planned shots to make things look better and I would film at different angles and try to light stuff better. And I remember getting comments from people saying, wow, your video quality has improved so much and made sense because I was actually taking time to compose. And I think I'll do a whole separate episode about that because that that's kind of a story in and of itself. I kept the collection growing. I kept making videos and our YouTube channel started shifting towards that niche. We predominantly had retro Apple tech. Like that was our main topic. I guess you could say that was our bread and butter. Back in that day in the channel kept growing slowly. You know, I wasn't very good at networking or marketing, but it was growing slowly and everything was great until 2014, I kind of wanted to downsize my collection. And the main reason was I just needed more space and I was going to be moving out soon and I didn't want to have to lug all this stuff with me. And that's the main reason I remember, but I don't recall if there was another reason maybe I was getting less interested in this stuff. I don't know. Maybe there was a bit of that. Cause there was like in 2014, 2015, there was a period of time where I didn't buy like any new computers. I didn't get any donations. I actually wanted to sell more of my collection. So there were a couple years there between like 2014 and 2015 where I just wasn't really interested in the retro tech thing anymore. Regardless. I took a bunch of computers together. I have the picture right here, nine computers from my collection, possibly more that I just can't see put them together in my garage. My parents' garage took a picture of it and posted it to Twitter. And I said something along the lines of, Hey guys, I'm downsizing. My collection. Does anybody, we want any of these computers? They're free. Just pay shipping. I leave it up for maybe like a week or so. No nibbles. Nobody wanted any of the money theaters in my collection that I tweeted about. So about a week later, loading them up in my mom's car and she took them to an e-waste facility. The next freaking day, I got two tweets saying that these people wanted something from the collection too late at the time. I didn't care. But looking back at it, I regret recycling, all that stuff. I really do. I have the photo open. My iMac G3 Indigo is in there. The first piece in my collection. I recycled, I think I also recycled a duo doc. Those are kind of rare. I ended up recycling a lot of stuff and there was like another period of time. And I think two years later where I recycled even more and at the time I didn't really care about looking back at it. I really regretted recycling all this stuff and just doing some quick math, there was probably at least $2,000 of collector's items. Just recycled. If I would have sold each thing individually, I probably could've made two grand or so, or I could have just, you know, kept them in my collection. I encourage people. If you have those old ones, max, whether you're an enthusiastic collector or not preserve them somehow just don't recycle them, keep them around because they will never exist again. And if you're not a collector and you just have this stuff in your garage or whatever, try to find someone who will take it and preserve it. But yeah, I got, I got back into collecting again. I don't remember exactly what sparked it. It was probably just when I started doing the Krazy Ken stuff, I just wanted to get back into tweaking old computers and tinkering with them. So I started collecting them again. I remember getting some great stuff off of Facebook marketplace. I still did buy on eBay every so often then, but I think it's best. If you can just find local people, use Facebook, marketplace, whatever, you know, vintage Mac group on Facebook. Maybe that, that stuff I think will save you more money. Right. And I, I got a lot more donations through that. People found me through YouTube and they just email me saying, Hey, I love your channel. Will you take this as a donation? And super grateful for that stuff. Cause I like collecting that stuff and doing videos about that stuff. Honestly, if I, if I didn't have a YouTube channel, I probably wouldn't have the Mac collection. Cause I like sharing this stuff with people. And my favorite way, the most accessible way to reach a lot of people is through video on YouTube in my life. So yeah, I like sharing this stuff. So let's each go back to your question. How do you start collecting vintage Macs? Well, I hope you pick something up from my story, but to kind of just boil it down into nuggets, these are my best tips. If you have to use eBay, especially if you're in Poland, it might be tricky to find people local. You have this stuff. So if you have to use eBay, okay. But I would say use eBay as a last resort, try to find someone who would be willing to donate or sell you a computer at a low price. And the tips that are reach out to schools, schools usually have this stuff stored up. I don't know how it is nowadays. You know, my experience was 13 years ago. Try Facebook Marketplace. I don't know how that works in Poland in general, for everyone listening Facebook marketplace, I have received tons of Macs from Facebook Marketplace. I know COVID is going on right now, but when it dies down more computer festivals, computer conventions, where people get together and sell stuff at booths, that's a great place to buy because one you're there in person and you don't have to take the person's word for it. Like, Oh yeah, it works great. Here's a crappy picture of it. Believe me, it works perfect. You can actually see the computer there in person. So that's a great reason. Number two, a lot of times they will sell them for low prices because they just want to get rid of them. That's what happened with my NeXTcube. I got it for a super cheap price because the person just wanted to sell it. And the other cool thing is again, because you're there in person. You don't have to pay for shipping. So if you can get computers at computer festivals, that's a great way to see a bunch all at once and save lots of money. Start small. You don't have to spend a lot of money. Macintosh SEs… If you want a good 87 computer, those are usually a little less expensive because more of them were made. For example, it would be much more expensive to get an original Macintosh because those are more rare and valuable, but a Macintosh SE you could probably get a decent one for a hundred, 200 bucks US dollars. So that's a good one to start with. Those are pretty cheap and those are fun too, because you can upgrade them and do all these cool tricks. MacEffects has a transparent case for them. So Macintosh se system expansion. That's what that stands for. That's probably a good one to start with. I hope I answered your question and I hope you guys enjoyed coming along on this journey with me here. Again, check the show notes for those awesome old pictures. And you can also see my face when I was probably 13 years old. Enjoy that. Also, if you'd like to help fund the future of the computer clan, plus get some awesome perks along the way, feel free to pledge to my Patreon. I'm Krazy Ken on Patreon. So that's patreon.com/krazyken, “krazy” with a “K” you can pledge there and get some awesome perks as well. Also just a little scheduling thing here. The next episode will come out on March 29th. And from there on out, this show will be every other week. We're still going to be on Mondays because we like to make your Monday a fun day, but it's going to be every other Monday. I'm not saying that's going to be permanent. That's just the schedule. That's going to work for me now, because again, I still have to run the YouTube channel, but that aside, the next episode will come out on March 29th. So make sure you're subscribed so you can have that pop up in your feed and follow me on Twitter. I announced new episodes. I also have just lots of general tech fun on Twitter. It's a fun place to be. So you can go ahead and follow me on Twitter at the computer clan. And again, it is March and Tosh. So feel free to look at other people's awesome content in regards to retro Mac computing. That's about all I have for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you guys have a great day, whether you're listening to me on Monday funday or not. Thanks for sticking with me. Catch the crazy, and pass it on.

*Transcriptions are auto-generated by a transcribing software. Sometimes, small edits are made by carbon-based lifeforms, but please excuse any inaccuracies.