It was actually sort of the other way around. Apple used a different
battery box for Macs (can't really say it was proprietary since it was just a clip for a battery), while the Starmax used the standard battery used by many PCs pretty much from the time they got built-in clocks through many 386s and 486s. Though there was a period there in the 386/486 era where some were *permanently soldered to the motherboard*, though most of those also had pins for the box battery. By the Pentium era most motherboards moved to the button battery in a clip type.<<<
I have a Siemens-Nixdorf 486 built in 1991 with a soldered battery/real clock/ROM combo. I discovered it this year when I fired up the machine after a few years in storage and could keep the time or detect the HD, whose data (head, cylinders...) had to be intrduced manually on the BIOS and then saved. Arquitecture its pretty complex when compared with similarly aged Macs.... I will have to desolder the battery package and put a new one without knowing for sure it would work as some had a bit of the BIOS info stored in the said package. pretty lame and surely not designed to last. And I have been unable to track the manual or info for this particular machine on the net.... I guess this was a cheapo machine (everything is soldered and the original processor is a FPU-less i486SX, although it did have an expansion socket which a few years later received an i487 overdrive) and thus built as cheaply as possible.
My 1994 Performa 631 in comparision is a lovely machine. And the contemporary Mac Classic appears to be nice to work with in comparision!
Gorka
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