John Calhoun is a former Apple engineer who has fond memories of his first Apple Macintosh and so he decided to DIY a Macintosh – with a twist – after retiring from Apple.
John’s “Macintosh” is what a Mac would look like in an alternate dimension if it were futuristic like in The Jetsons. Instead of a blocky machine. John’s “Mac” is paper-thin. OK. Maybe not one piece of paper but a number of pieces because it was literally made out of a piece of a 3 mm thick acrylic sheet.
It is a retro-futuristic take on the original Mac, complete with a monochrome display – courtesy of a 5.83-inch e-ink screen. However, Calhoun’s “Mac” is not actually a full-fledged.
This “Mac”, named SystemSix, is an emulator that does a fixed set of tasks. It is able to display the calendar events and the weather forecast, presenting them in a nostalgic vintage Mac UI.
The software is written in Python and the hardware is the aforementioned e-ink display and a Raspberry Pi 3 mini PC which is mounted at the rear, on the “Mac”’s stand.
All told, John spent around US$100 to put this super cool and functional Macintosh homage.
In case you want to build one yourself, you may check out the detailed process posted on John’s blog, Engineers Need Art. John has also posted the source code on his Github page.
Images: John Calhoun (Engineers Need Art).
via Yanko Design.