Riccardo Mori over at System Folder had a neat idea: post Mac users’ classic setups using low-end hardware.
His first profile comes from Stories of Apple author Nicola D’Agostino, who uses two PowerBook G3s – one running OS 8.6 for scanning and the other sporting both OS 9 and OS X 10.4 for music.
It’s great to see recent-era classic Macs still in everyday use, and I look forward to see who else shares their classic setup with Mori.
Got a fun e-mail from Oklahoma:
Just came from your Newton Poetry site and saw your remarks about the Molar Mac. I have one that I would like to sell. I’m moving and as you mentioned this beautiful Mac weighs about 60 lbs. I LOVE this Mac. Mine is a 233 MGH and it has two SCB ports, so I was able to use a flash drive with it. Also has a working floppy drive and a non-working zip drive. Otherwise, it is in great condition and works great. I do not think it was ever used in a school. I got it from a graphic designer. It’s loaded with Photoshop, Illustrator and Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. Do you know anyone who would like to buy a great Molar Mac and who would be willing to pay the shipping cost to receive it???Thanks,
Marilyn in Tulsa
If anyone’s interested in owning a great piece of recent Mac history, drop me an e-mail and I’ll give you Marilyn’s contact info.
Here’s a call out to all my classic Mac using friends.
From what I’ve read here and here, it’s not looking good. All the updates Apple threw into OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and with the abandonment of PowerPC Macs, things like networking with OS 8 and 9 Macs and AppleTalk have been put out to pasture.
I was trying to network my PowerMac G3, running Mac OS 8.6, to my new Snow-Leopard-powered iMac over my Airport hub. No luck, despite some handy how-tos here and here.
After a half day spent trying to figure this out, and a bunch of forum list reading, I’ve just about given up. I thought it would be a fun rainy-day project for those with new and old Macs, especially for you, the people, who have OS 9/8 Macs still sitting around collecting dust.
Any suggestions, drop me an e-mail.
After the new iMacs, MacBooks, and Mac Minis were released yesterday, I couldn’t but notice Apple posted an evolutionary progression of the iMac models. The all-in-one, Apple says, was a “great idea.”
Except it was missing one: the poor iMac G3 line.
So here it is added. I also celebrated the iMac relaunch with a new iPhone wallpaper. Enjoy.
The news of Jeff Goldblum’s death were greatly exaggerated.
But the hoax did get me thinking about Goldblum’s Apple commercial run during the late ’90s and early ’00s. The iBook G3 clamshell, my favorite of the Mac portables, featured Goldblum in its initial commercial (above).
Couple of interesting things I found concerning the Newton eMate 300.
The first: a colored-eMate? From the picture above, it seems Apple (that’s former Apple CEO Gil Amelio and Frank Casanova there) had iMac-like color options slated for this particular Newton model.
Grant Hutchinson did some investigating on the multi-colored eMates, including asking Casanova where the prototypes came from, and turned up quite a few nuggets of good information.
An orange, red, or purple eMate would be a lot of fun to work with (much like my favorite Apple laptop, the clamshell iBook), but I’d love to get my hands on a clear-cased model.
The second concerns the rumored “bMate” – a business-model eMate for on-the-go writing pros. Says Pen Computing Magazine:
Journalists began snapping up eMates as the perfect portable writing tool. Even Steve Jobs liked the eMate. Apple reportedly began developing a “bMate” version for business people, featuring a better screen and a StrongARM processor. Anticipation was high for these new keyboard-equipped Newtons.
In hindsight, we can now see how the eMate’s design and ideal led to the creation of the original iBook. Salon.com quoted Apple as saying just that:
It’s also possible that Apple will release a version of the eMate based on the Macintosh operating system; the press release announcing the eMate’s demise promises that Apple “will be serving this market with Mac OS-based products beginning in 1999.”
And what do you know, the multi-colored “iMac to go” iBook G3 was released in 1999.
A while back, I asked, “How many Macs are too many?” I asked this after realizing that I have, at this time, three working Macs surrounding my Nerve Center here at home.
Newton Poetry reader Rand Careaga chimed in with his impressive suite of Macs, including the above beauty: an all-in-one G3 PowerMac, also known as the Molar Mac.
Like the eMac after it, the Molar Mac was designed for the education market, where the look-ma-no-mess-of-wires design was attractive. And hence the name: the thing looked like a giant tooth.
A giant heavy tooth: they were almost 60 lbs. heavy, and that’s only with a 15″ CRT screen. As the Washington Apple Pi Journal puts it in their hilarious (and comprehensive) post:
While it is possible for a single large, stupid person to uncrate one (or even six) of these without assistance, Don’t Do This. The machines are heavy, and the boxes are deep. You can fall into a box and never be heard from again. You can rupture vital organs of a personal nature. Accept the fact that this is a two-person task.
The All-In-One G3 came before the iMac, meaning no USB ports. It did come with serial and ADB ports for peripherals, as well as a floppy disk drive.
Molar Macs came in two speeds, 233 MHz PowerPC and 266 Mhz, meaning they run at the same clockspeed as the original iMacs, and shipped with 32 MB of RAM. For their time, these were speedy machines. And speedy to set up, too, thanks to their all-in-one design.
Sadly, I’ve never seen one in person. Any Molar Mac owners out there that can speak to their uniqueness?
Last week, I added another Mac to my collection: a Power Macintosh G3 blue and white model, running at 350 Mhz with 128 MB of RAM and with OS 8.6 installed.
I knew someone who had a few extra G3 B&Ws sitting around, and they were kind enough to let me walk away with one. I’ve always admired the B&W case design, since it launched the venerable G4 aesthetic – but now that I have one, what do I do with it?
First, having never owned an OS 8 Mac, I wanted to poke around the system and see what came stock on it.
Here’s the “About This Mac” section – showing the basics. Mac OS 8.6, code-named “Veronica,” was the last version of OS 8 Apple released. This PowerMac has less RAM than my iMac G3, but a faster processor and a similar-sized hard drive (6 GB).
This G3 came pre-installed with the basic OS 8.6 software, meaning there’s not much in the way of applications. Sherlock is here, as is QuickTime and all the Apple basics.
A few weeks ago, I wondered what Mac users used to manage their music libraries and multimedia files. I got my answer on the PowerMac:
This is Apple’s own CD player app, pre-iTunes. Lovely, isn’t it?
Web surfing in OS 8 means Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.5 (above). Nice to know that Newton Poetry looks decent even on a 1997-era browser.
Just for fun, I also downloaded the last version of Netscape OS 8 could handle, and Mozilla’s original web browser. I find either of these browsers can handle basic web sites well.
Now, what to do with the bugger? My first thought is, it’s nice to have an OS 8 Mac around just to play with. Right now I have a Macs with every version of the Mac OS, from 8.6 up to 10.4.
I’ve also thought about using the B&W as a file server – just an extra place to keep backup files or something. I’ve read a lot about other Mac users doing this, but I’ll have to find a bigger hard drive. A measly 6 GB isn’t going to cut it. A RAM upgrade might be needed as well.
For now, though, the Power Macintosh G3 joins my PowerMac G4 in being a project machine. Any suggestions?
Dan Knight over at Low End Mac posted a great article on how to make a G3 iMac useful. It’s no surprise that I’ve used Dan’s site as a tool ever since I got my own second-hand Bondi Blue iMac, complete with original keyboard and puck mouse, at a recycling e-waste drive.
This happened right after I got my first Mac, my iBook G4, and it gave me a chance to play around with OS 9 and the original Mac interface. It also kick-started my love of classic Macs. The Bondi and I go way back.
Mostly, it’s just nice to look at. The sloping curves, the aqua-green shading, the gum-drop shape – sometimes it’s hard to resist waking it up out of sleep to log on and play around with the OS.
In fact, it’s the one classic Mac I use on a regular basis. At least once a week I fire it up to do several things, both for business and pleasure.
I love this post from John Hatchett over at Low End Mac:
I was in the middle of recording my vinyl Steely Dan albums to iTunes when it hit me: Why not turn the iMac into a digital jukebox? I could hook it up to my home stereo with a stereo mini-jack-to-RCA cable and have any song in my collection available to listen to. I could even use the iTunes database to customize song selection. And, of course, there is always shuffle.
How fantastic is that? I can imagine a visitor coming over: “Hey, what’s that iMac doing hooked up to your stereo?”
“Oh, that? That’s my jukebox.”
Totally geeky, and totally fitting with his theme of using old-school Macs in these weird times.