On 2/27/2010 5:19 PM, Austin Leeds wrote:
Well, first off, a little about me: I'm a member of G-Books, G-Group, G4 'Books, iMac Group, LEM Swap, Mac mini Group, MacBook Group, PowerBooks, and Tiger Group. I operate a PowerBook G3 Pismo 500 MHz, an iBook G3 300 MHz (tangerine), a PowerBook Duo 230, an iMac G4 800 MHz, and a few 2009 Intel iMacs at college. So, I would say I've got a good handle on the Mac phenomenon, in general. However, I know next to nothing about these old Mac desktops (other than I liked the things I could do in MacPaint at 7 years old… I broke into a "childproofed" Win 3.1 desktop at the same age and messed it up, probably because it was so boring). Anyway, I was wondering what the potential of these old Macs are. Anybody know what's the coolest stuff these things can do?
Guess I can talk a bit about my experiences, given I'm using a vintage Mac now quite a lot. I have it set up next to my main computer to use while my mainbox is doing some fullscreen (video, game, etc)
I started out with a Mac 128k. My goal was to have a dedicated writing/lettermaking/etc machine that I could use without distraction at times. This worked quite well, but ultimately I found it a little too limiting.
So, I upgraded to a Mac Classic with a SCSI->Ethernet adapter. This was great, let me do some IRC chatting via telnet, some extremely light web browsing, etc.
In the end, I found I needed a better web browsing machine, because I kept running into situations where the Classic-compatible browsers just didn't cut it and I needed an ssh client. So, I pulled out my old Mac IIci with a 50mhz 68030 Diimo upgrade, got it running System 7.5.5 and A/UX, and have set about getting it working. I added a Radius video card that got video nice, and a AsanteFast 10/100 nubus ethernet adapter for networking. With iCab 2.9.9, and MacSSH, it's quite useful... but I'm still finding the web browser to be the limiting factor. It's unstable and has a lot of issues with most modern web sites. In addition, I'm finding it to be terribly unstable. It rarely lasts the night before freezing up hard or at least crashing an app or two. It does have some capacitor problems and no audio, though, so it might be a hardware problem. I've tried to clean the board thoroughly, but I do need to recap it someday.
So, I'm left to where even with a fairly modern/fast vintage Mac, it's still not really suiting my needs. I do have a Quadra 840AV already running Linux that I could get a modern version of X and Firefox running on, but I'm sure it'd be slow. And, it kind of defeats the purpose of using an old Mac. I have a G4 upgraded Beige G3 I could use, but then I don't get the fun classic Mac OS feel.
As far as cool stuff, I do think it's pretty neat that a computer from 1989 with several thousand dollars (original cost) of upgrades still suits 90% of my needs, but that last 10% is causing me a lot of trouble. \
For PPCs with OS 9 or so, there are a lot more browsing options such as Classilla and newer versions of iCab.
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