deskthority

I saw a Dayna MacCharlie recently on eBay and that reminded me about something you might like to see.

The Dayna MacCharlie is very rare add-on to the Macintosh 128k that allows the Mac to run MS-DOS. From the pictures below, you can see the main unit with the dual disk drives. This has an 8088 based motherboard in it and connects to the Macintosh via a serial cable. The Mac runs what is essentially terminal software that starts a session to the MacCharlie unit and runs DOS in a window. It's an early version of a physical virtual machine (if that makes sense).

The normal Apple M0110 keyboard doesn't have enough keys to work as a proper PC so Dayna added a keyboard enclosure that adds the extra keys. The M0110 plugs into this Dayna keyboard extension and the extension then plugs into the Mac. The construction of this enclosure is almost identical to the M0110 including the same Alps SKCC key switches. Anyway, here are some pics.

Mind = Blown

I've read about this one before, but only seen it in print ads. What a weird product! First time I've seen the keyboard photographed properly. Well done and thanks for that.

Does yours work? If so, care for a picture of the Mac running something in a DOS window? Some pictures of the MacCharlie keyboard by itself would be interesting, too. Shows just how weird it is.

Muirium wrote: Does yours work? If so, care for a picture of the Mac running something in a DOS window?

Thanks. Yes, it works. I will have to remember how to hook it up but I'll try to take some more pics tomorrow once I have better light.

Whoa. what a find.

I've never actually seen one of these things before.

Wow, cool! I too would love to see it in action!

Talk about a functional idea! It's a TKL "adapter" done what 25 years ago? Brilliant. Looks good too.

Muirium wrote: Some pictures of the MacCharlie keyboard by itself would be interesting, too. Shows just how weird it is.

Yes please!

snuci wrote: Better get this in before Seebart does

deskthority-f17/post-your-deskthority-h ... ml#p313288

Wow, that's fantastic! Finally it becomes a normal keyboard!

so... a keyboard docked in a keyboard... I want a modern version (60-65% for the go and the rest for the work )

Im here just to post 'wow'!... ok all, done!
ps: amazing find

Ahah, awesome!

Giving the middle finger to 60% boards. LOVE IT!

More like the paper…

Here's a couple of quick pics of the MacCharlie running. The first pic is the MacCharlie Macintosh boot disk. It has a MacCharlie application that you launch that communicates with the MacCharlie.
Once the MacCharlie Mac application runs, it boots up the MacCharlie unit and you see the familiar Phoenix BIOS and memory count to 640k. After it does this twice, if loads MS-DOS 3.1 in this case and you are off to the races.
Voila! A PC on your Macintosh! The menus in the MacCharlie application allow you to transfer Mac files to the PC and PC files to the Mac which was unheard of at the time. It is a pretty cool unit.

The name "MacCharlie" comes from a play on words. Charlie Chaplin was the spokesperson for the IBM PC so Dayna called it the "MacCharlie" whose logo showed the transformation of the Macintosh logo into a Charlie Chaplin hat like this:
More info on the MacCharlie (and where this last image came from) here: http://www.vintagemacworld.com/charlie.html

Great find dude.

Incredible looking thing. Fantastic to see it's still working.

That's definitely the most interesting classic Mac setup I've seen.

This is very cool, thank you for sharing.

Thanks guys. This was going to be my Deskthority awards "Most awesome find" entry. I guess I was a little early

snuci wrote: Thanks guys. This was going to be my Deskthority awards "Most awesome find" entry. I guess I was a little early

It's a very strong candidate for DTA6 I can tell you that.