Possum Stu wrote:
I've been a Mac user continuously since I bought a Mac 512ke in 1986.
I currently own a Mac Plus and want to bring it to work as a
decoration/conversation piece. Plus I think it'd be cool to have a
computer on my desk that is older than several of our employees.
But I don't just want it to just sit there; I'd like it to station it
unattended in the corner and have it DO something other than run the
"Pyro" screen saver. One limitation: it'd have to run off the boot up
floppy.
I'd appreciate any ideas. Thanks in advance.
The floppy limitation may end up being the biggest problem. Even a very
small HD can make a huge difference in modern usability of a Plus, and
would likely be required to get it booting with network drivers and
MacTCP for any internetting. A second floppy drive would be a huge help too.
From floppy, your main use for it would be vintage games. Dark Castle,
Captain Blood, PT109... there are tons of great games that were made for
compact Macs. Most/all of them will run fine on System 6 as well. Beyond
that, various world processors and other productivity apps would run
just fine. Since this would be at work it sounds like, games might be
out but you could get a suite of very early (or first) versions of Word,
Multiplan/Excel, etc going just to show how far we've come. Or not come,
as it were, since they're remarkably familiar ;)
The ultimate though would be to get a SCSI->Ethernet adapter and hook it
up to the network/internet. This would open up a lot of interesting
possibilities including Email, telnet, some chat clients, and some (very
limited) web browsing. There's a post-only twitter client if you're into
such things.
With a serial cable you could hook it up as a terminal to a UNIX/Linux
box as well, though that'd typically require some proximity to the thing.
If you do get it networked, you could run MacHTTP and run it as a web
server, throw some simple pages on it (though many corporate IT types
may not be too enthused with that ;) ). Maybe some team stats or
something if it's applicable to your workgroup.
Pretty much all of these, except some of the games, are assuming you
have a 4 meg Plus. If you have less, getting it up to 4 would help a lot
with the fancier applications.
Scott
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