macref, or Classic Macintosh Hardware and Peripherals: A Field Reference for Geeks, seeks to be a compendium of practical information regarding Apple Macintosh computers of the Old World variety. It is written in the hopes of enabling those who otherwise would not be capable to maintain old Macintoshes.
macref is licenced under the Creative Commons CC BY-ND-NC. This means that redistribution must be done with attribution to the author (Horst Burkhardt), that it is not permissible to create derivative works, and that any redistribution of macreftex may not be for profit (non-commercial). These licence terms are subject to change as it becomes clearer how to appropriately licence such a work as this.
An Old World Macintosh, strictly speaking, refers to any Macintosh with the Mac OS Toolbox stored in ROM. The last of these were the Wallstreet and PDQ (Wallstreet II) in the PowerBook line, and the Power Macintosh G3 (Desktop, Minitower, AIO) in the Power Macintosh line. These machines, and all machines introduced prior to them, are covered by this work.
The Macintosh line may well outlive me. Creating a perpetually up-to-date spec and tech guide would be, consequently, an impractical undertaking. It just so happens that all the Macintosh computers I'm most fond of are Old World; hence, I hope to document that which I love.
Covered better in the book, but off the top of my head I'd like to thank the users of the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army, Ian Page for creating Mactracker, and everyone else who did most of the groundwork in documenting the Macintosh series computers. "If I have seen farther, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants."