Performa 630

Published / Modified

2025-08-14
2025-08-18

Not so happy Mac

Visually the Performa was in relative good shape: minor scratches, dirt and dust – which had been accumulating outside and inside for some time – and the usual uneven yellowing of plastic parts. Almost all feet of the display stand, however, had turned into a gooey mess which adhered to anything it touched. Those feet needed to be replaced immediately. Disassembly and scrubbing was required for sure. This computer's design was and still is unconventional: while you can slide out the mainboard from the back of the machine, you need to follow a special procedure to take apart the rest, and quite early on the case front's latches can test your determination.

I removed all drives, dedusted and cleaned all parts, imaged the hard drive with my G4 Power Mac and inspected cabelling and power supply before putting it all together again. Then came the time for a first start-up! Switching on the CRT gave me a green power light and the typical satisfying degaussing thunk followed by a faint electric crackling caused by high voltage. So far, so good. Next came the computer itself: I hit the power key on the keyboard and the Macintosh sprung to life: a lit power LED, the healty sounds of hard drive spin-up and seek and on the display fading in... a dead Mac accompanied by the chime of death. What went wrong?

Double-checking mainboard and components gave me no clues as to what the cause auf the problem was. The disk image, though, showed a strange byte pattern all over the first blocks of the disk. This is where the Apple Partition Map (APM) resides, a critical data structure which describes partitions and provides information required by the machine to start an operating system from the storage device. Repeatedly imaging the drive lead to identical results. Was the drive corrupt or defective even?

Happy Mac

First I disconnected the hard drive: instead of displaying the Sad Mac again the Performa did behave normally and was looking for a bootable device. My attempts to boot the machine from CDs were to no avail but floppy diskettes worked like a charm. So I erased and initialised the hard drive with the G4 Power Mac under Mac OS 9 and put it back in the Performa. In contrast to the Macintosh System 7.5 diskettes Mac OS 7.6's Disk Tools Disk 2 – which contains Disk Setup Lite B1-1.2.2 – should allow to initialise the drive on the Performa itself, as it was laylored to state-of-the-art Apple computers with IDE drives and PowerPC or Motorola 68040 processors (but this I only learned after I had set up the Macintosh unfortunately).

After creating a fresh set of System 7.5.3 installation diskettes (from the Apple Mac OS 7.5.3 CD) with RawWriteWin under Windows 98 on my Pentium III PC a clean install of the operating system did commence. Installing from a dozen or more diskettes kept the Performa and me busy for a while but in the end the Macintosh was happy again. Which made me smile.

Additional software I transfered via serial connection (see Serial Transfers), updated the system to version 7.5.5 and enjoyed the Performa 630 as it was. As a side note: After a few days I did a more thorough analysis of the disk image and managed to restore the APM from backup data stored in blocks at the end of the disk. This way I was able to recover all data on the disk and so I created a virtualised Macintosh with Basilisk II from it for the previous owners.

Make it better

Following the credo still obsolete – but much more convenient to use there were a few things, I wanted to improve upon: at the top of the list was networking, followed closely by an easy to use storage solution to emulate internal and external storage devices as well as optical media. And yes, more memory, of course.

RAM

The Performa was configured with twelve megabytes of RAM: four megabytes directly on the mainboard (this is variant 820-0548-B) and an eight megabytes module of the 80 nanoseconds variety installed in a single 72-pin double-bank SIMM slot. While a total of 36 megabytes – realised by a 32 megabytes SIMM module – are officially supported by this mainboard, I decided against the maximum amount and went with 16 megabytes which resulted in a total of 20 megabytes to play with. With this setup more demanding applications ran happily even when network software was loaded.

42 years of Ethernet

Did you know that Ethernet was standardised before Apple released their first Macintosh? The year before, in 1983, in fact. When the Macintosh Performa 630 was introduced 13 years later, Ethernet was already well established and so – as I mentioned in my previous article Serial Transfers – Ethernet-based options were availabe for this computer.

I kept looking for network cards designed for the COMM Slot 1 and when I had the opportunity I went ahead and bought an Apple 10BASE-T Ethernet CS Twisted-Pair Card (M3065Z/A, 630-0734-H, 820-0607-A). Fun fact: it was even more affordable than the serial adapter I had built earlier – shipping included. This card was in great condition and after thorough cleaning I tested it with the Performa.

After upgrading from MacTCP to OpenTransport 1.1.2 and quickly configuring this network client I visited suitable websites like FrogFind and this website in HTML2 mode. with iCab (2.9.9). This worked without any problems and probably was the first time this Performa was connected to the internet.

Sadly I could not access my Netatalk-based AppleShare server because it simply did not show up in Chooser and there was no way to enter its IP address. I suspected my WLAN bridge to be the cuplprit (not forwarding network discovery packages). To veryfy my theory I connected a Raspberry Pie 4 directly to the same wired network the Macintosh was on and ran a Netatalk server over TCP/IP on the Raspberry Pie: this server showed up in the Performa's Chooser just fine. Thanks to excellent websites, however, I finally discovered that the button Server IP Address..., I was used to from Mac OS 9, was introduced with a later version of Chooser for System 7.5 as well So I installed AppleShare Client Version 3.7.4 - for System 7.5.3 to 7.5.5 – which updated Chooser to version 7.6.1 and allowed me to connect to my trusty AFP server after all.

SCSI rules

You would like to add peripherals or external storage to your computer without any hurdles? And you need to transfer data to your external storage quickly? Easy! Just use your computer's USB ports and Bob's your uncle. Well, back in the mid 1990s the situation was very different: Apple would not adopt Universal Serial Bus (USB) until the end of the decade and its theoretical top-speed of 12 Mbps (USB 1.0 and 1.1) – 1.5 megabytes per second – was nothing to write home about. SCSI was the only choice if you wanted to connect fast and reliable storage or use storage media like tape, Iomega ZIP or CD-ROM drives. And Apple was aware of the issue. Although the Performa 630 shipped with an IDE hard drive it still used SCSI to drive an internal CD-ROM and offered an external SCSI port (DB-25) even in the stock configuration.

Intrigued by the BlueSCSI project the moment I heared about it I ordered an assembled BlueSCSI v2 DB-25 as well as a 3d-printed case from One Geek Army. Not only can one emulate external disk drives but also other media like CD-ROM drives are an option. Disk/disc images can be made available and with additional software on the 68K computer images can be swapped and files can be copied to and from the SD card directly.

Conclusion

I was delighted to see that this 31 years old computer could be brought back to live and all it needed was a little bit of ellbow grease paired with persistence. Luckily neither electronical components nor the case were damaged and all parts cleaned up well. Even the diskette drive and internal disk drive worked after some well directed attention. The CRT was bright and relatively sharp although the image width occasionally did twitch a little during warm-up – So the display may need some extra love in the not so distant future.

It is great to have an opportunity to experience how being a Mac user in the mid 1990s may have felt and to enjoy playing around with software from that era on real hardware – from input to output. sure, with all that knowledge at your fingertips (a.k.a. the internet) this journey is much more comfortable and fast-paced today than it was three decades ago. But when it comes to sitting down in front of the Macintosh and endulging mysself with a somewhat nostalgic session of WarCraft (until recently I had played this game on PCs exclusively) I can't but think that the excitement it brings has not lessened since 1994. And yes, one can play strategy games with a one-button mouse.

There are, of course, more serious applications this Performa is well suited for. For example, now that this Macintosh is an Ethernet network client I can use this machine as a LocalTalk-to-Ethernet bridge. All it needs is software like Apple's LocalTalk Bridge. This probably will become very handy when I get the old Macintosh PowerBook 140 up and running which I was given together with this Performa 630. But – that's a story for another day.

Resources on the web

Here are some websites which helped me greatly in getting the Performa 630 up and running again:

Part I: Pursuit of Happiness