Many years ago, I ordered a surprisingly cheap Power Macintosh 9500/132 off eBay. When it arrived, the box was completely obliterated, with a hole in the middle that looked suspiciously like a forklift tine. Naturally, the Spindler plastics were nothing but dust. The seller sent me a replacement machine, and life went on, at least until I had to clean out that room and found the box of broken parts.

As I was dismantling it to look for spares, I realized that the motherboard was completely intact, possibly through some kind of miracle. As I took more and more intact parts out of the pile, it became obvious that the machine itself was alright.

I took it up to my workbench and put it together, and the Forklift Mac was born.

Excuse my crappy Sun bench monitor: something went wrong with it one day about halfway through an extended work session and has been drawing faulty lines ever since. It’s a future project, if I ever run out of more interesting things to fix.

It’s not a powerful machine at all, but it was able to come up and do its own thing, and it’s a PCI PowerMac, so lots of upgrade potential. I’ll have to find a new case for it, which isn’t easy considering the awkward size of the 9500 motherboard (33cm x 30cm) and very short power-supply cable, which I will likely have to extend.

Stay tuned!