I don´t know, if it is interesting for you.
I´ve some nice pictures on my website (favorites)
from two dash-towers. I´ve modded them aktually wih 2 G% Mac´s and one PC. The third one is dark green.

Marcus

http://www.marcust.de

The 32MB SIMMs for dash 30fx custom manufactured by a supplier off of Colemen Ave. in San Jose. I can’t remember the name, but the sales rep left to work for this company:

http://www.memoryx.com/

They generated a lot of heat, so there was this contraption we called “the doghouse” that enclosed the RAM had a fan dedicated to cooling it off.

As I recall, the 68ooo products were:
The dash 30fx (the above mentioned, overclocked IIfx in a serious case with a beefy power supply)
The SCSI Bolt (SCSI Card – I believe this also had a differential SCSI connector that allowed linking two machines for high speed data transfers)
The dash 40Q (based on the Quadra 950, had a faster ’040 on a daughter card with a switch to enable the faster clock)
The RAID Warrior (’040 PDS RAID card)
The Imagician (Photoshop acceleration card) – I don’t know if this ever shipped. They laid us all off for Christmas that year.
The Hurricane (this might have been the same as the Imagician, I can’t remember…)

The threat of Radius’ Skylab project and Apple’s switch to the PowerPC processor was the death of the company.

Here’s more 68ooo company info:
–
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NEW/is_1992_August_27/ai_12585557

Macintosh Corporation changes name to Sixty Eight Thousand
Newsbytes News Network, August 27, 1992 by Ian Stokell

(this is a long article, so I won’t quote it here…)
–
http://www.colepapers.net/tcp.archive/cole_papers_91-94/TCP9206.html

From “The Cole Papers” June 1992 Vol. 3, No. 6

49. Sixty Eight Thousand Inc.: Speedy Macintoshes are this company’s forte, taking its name from the Motorola 68000 processor that drives the Mac. But the company’s newest product, the Hurricane, uses an Intel Risc chip, the i860xp, to achieve a 10- to 20-fold speed increase in such applications as applying PhotoShop filters. Sharing the booth will be Advanced Gateway Solutions, showing its ScanMate Plus desktop scanner, which uses PMT technology and will go for $30,000. (408) 438-1777.
——
http://sec.edgar-online.com/1998/04/15/17/0001001277-98-000037/Section11.asp

In June 1994, Sixty-Eight Thousand, Inc., a company which made Macintosh compatible workstations, filed for bankruptcy protection in San Jose, California (Case No.: 94-54123).
—-

I remember fondly running one of the first ProTools TDM systems on my dash, and it worked real well. I guess the bigest problem with the machine was it’s expensive RAM I had 20MB in mine and could never stomach paying out £500 odd for a meaningful upgrade!!

I worked at Syco in the early 90′s (one of the only 6800 supliers in our country) and there was also a machine called the 40Q, which was an overclocked quadra 950 in a very very large case. We used to sell them as an upgrade for the quadra 950, and our last one sat in the stock room unsold for a good few years, eventually when it was sold it was my job to build it, the crystal on the motherboard was over clocked with a pretty crappy clip on … all looked pretty impresive when it was running however.

There were a few upgrades for the 30fx as i remember I had a PDS slot scsi card called the ‘bolt’ when you booted up with a drive on it, you had a cool shark type icon as the firmware loaded in…ahhh happy days

I had been complaining about not having a scanner set up to do this job — the only scanner I have has a SCSI interface, and I don’t have any older Macs with SCSI set up — but yesterday it dawned on me that I was walking by the solution to that problem a number of times every day. We got a new Kyocera Mita network scanner/copier/printer at work a while back that will scan documents to a file. It took about 5 minutes to scan both sides of the pages from these manuals, and the image quality is excellent. It actually took longer for Acrobat to OCR the files to make them searchable.

Dang! Ain’t technology great?

The brackets are a set of modular rails that mount on either side of the drive mechanism, adding sufficient width to get the drive to fit between the mounting rails built into the case. I pulled the drive out to see if it had just shifted or what the problem was, and discovered that the aluminum frame that is attached to the drive actually broke in two places. Holy cow! That was quite a shock.

The night of the incident I noticed that the floppy drive was a little crooked, but that had just shifted a little in the rails; easy fix. The hard drive though; that’s gonna be a little tougher.

68000 intros the Dash 30fx workstation – Sixty Eight Thousand Inc – product announcement

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. — Sixty Eight Thousand Inc. has introduced the Dash 30fx workstation, the latest in the company’s family of accelerated Macintosh workstations.

Based on the same mother-board used in Apple Computer’s Macintosh IIfx, the new machine features Motorola 68030 microprocessor and 68882 math coprocessor, both running at 50MHz. A proprietary highbandwidth memory scheme called Express Memory supports the processors, allowing the Dash 30fx to achieve 30 per cent to 90 per cent greater throughput than other MHz machines.

Like previous models of the Dash 30 line, the Dash 30fx runs all Mac-compatible software, and is packaged in a tower case with room for up to 10 GB of disk storage. In its base configuration, the machine comes with eight MB of sub 70 nanosecond Express Memory (expandable to 128 MB), 209 MB of disk storage, a 1.4 MB SuperFloppy drive, six NuBus slots (expandable to 15 slots), a 250-watt power supply and Apple’s latest Macintosh operating system.

Combined with modern high-end Macintosh software, the new machine is in demand in the prepress market and also with engineering and CAD users.

Room for “up to 10GB of disk storage.” That’s good. I get worried when I have only 10GB available on my laptop hard drive.

I’m going to try that tactic… have one or two .99 cent listings.

I remember a couple years ago, a friend who isn’t one now but thats another story anyway I was just getting into the idea of TA and building up my FB back then.

Anyway, he had this really old apple Dash 30FX super computer with keyboard. A friend of mine who is an excellent inspiration to my TA business watched the whole listing the entire time I had it listed she thought I was crazy.

Whats interesting is it went from .99 to $130 almost; I’ll never forget that transaction I wished I had more like that. It was indeed an not so common item and what even made it more interesting was shipping cross country from coast to coast on UPS Ground. All the people at the store thought I was even crazier lol… I shoulda went in the paper then!

Next time that happens I will! LOL

I’ve sent a message to that guy, and will post more info as I get it.

This must’ve been a memorable item for zoramason, as I just bumped into another reference from him.

July 23, 2005

last summer I sold an old antique Apple Dash 30FX super computer with a keyboard, completely useless BIG and BULKY and HEAVY.

Well ya know, I didn’t think it had any value (it was from the 1980s) and the computer used to be used in a printing company so I was like who cares if it didn’t sell it wouldn’t hurt me to show it off.

I listed it for .99 and got $130.00, I was happy, cuz I was selling it for someone and got half the sale price. And it went to a private museum all the way to the east coast on UPS Ground….. took them awhile to get it there too.

I sent a note to zoramason, and he took the time to write back. A decent chap by the name of Shannon Mason, from somewhere in Oregon.

Overview

Take Apple’s “wicked fast” 40 MHz Macintosh IIfx, overclock it to 50 MHz, put it in a massive metal case, and you have the Dash 30fx. In addition to a chipped IIfx motherboard, the Dash 30fx has accessible 5.25″ drive bays, which makes it possible to add an internal SyQuest drive, CD-ROM, etc. as well as internal full-height 5.25″ bays.

According to Giles Littlefield (see article on Applefritter) the back of the computer has a removable dust filter and “neglecting to clean this out causes the PSU to overheat and blow!”

According to an article by Marc Schrier, the only drawback of overclocking the IIfx motherboard was that the Processor Direct Slot didn’t work. (Or maybe it did, but with no 50 MHz cards, nothing could work in it.)

David Thornton, who provided the above photo, comments that the Dash 30fx weighed nearly 70 pounds and thinks it may have cost $40,000 when new. All of the ports are beneath the top panel for easy access. We have a separate page showing the top, front, and insides of the Dash 30fx.

More information as we acquire it….

Details
• requires System 6.0.5 to 7.6.1
• CPU: 50 MHz 68030
• FPU: 68882 FPU
• bus: 50 MHz
• performance: est. 8.5, relative to SE
• ROM: 512 KB
• RAM: 4 MB, expandable to 128 MB using both 4-SIMM banks of 80ns* 64-pin memory; can use 1 MB, 4 MB, 8 MB, and 16 MB SIMMs (the IIfx was the only Mac to use 64-pin SIMMs)
* This is the IIfx specification. Due to overclocking, it’s possible that the Dash 30fx needs faster memory. If anyone can verify this one way or the other, please let us know.
• video: requires video card — see our NuBus Video Card Guide for more information.
• L2 cache: 32 KB
• ADB ports for keyboard and mouse
• DIN-8 serial ports on back of computer
• DB-25 SCSI connector on back of computer
• six NuBus slots; 1 PDS slot (inline with a NuBus slot, not usable)
• size (HxWxD): 5.5″ x 18.7″ x 14.5″
• weight: about 70 lb.
• PRAM battery: 3.6V lithium
• Gestalt ID: 13
• addressing: 24-bit or 32-bit
• upgrade path: none

The other product line being sold out of Nashua, the ImagiTex monochrome scanner business, was purchased in August by Sixty Eight Thousand Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif. Now going by the name Arrisystems, the company hired longtime industry executive Gary Moore (formerly of Information International Inc. and Scitex) to run ImagiTex, which will remain in Nashua.

I’ll have to see what I can find relating to ImagiTex.