Cult of *old* Mac

By

cult_logo_featured_image_missing_default1920x1080

Simon Royal asks: Are G3 Macs still viable work machines?.

His answer is a resounding affirmative, but then you’d expect that of an article at Low End Mac. Simon’s a writer, too, so his requirements for a work machine are pretty minimal: just a word processor, most of the time.

My oldest Mac is a 600MHz Dual USB G3 iBook, which copes bravely with Tiger. It does nothing other than play music streamed from elsewhere, and does that job just fine. The only problem is that getting it started up and playing takes a while:

  • press on/off button
  • (make cup of tea while it boots, connects to network, launches iTunes)
  • tell iTunes to connect to shared music
  • (make another cup of tea)
  • select desired playlist
  • (look out of the window wistfully)
  • start playing music

Apart from that, it’s fine.

What’s the oldest Mac you’ve got that does a decent job of something or other?

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.

28 responses to “Cult of *old* Mac”

  1. cstar says:

    I use my TiBook 550 running tiger for my accounting. The accounting software I use sucks, is expensive and doesn’t run on Leopard. Yep masochism, but on a TiBook :)

  2. ford says:

    I have a Mac clone from 1996 that I use. It’s a Umax J700 with a 400 Mhz G3. It’s in the basement with the monitor in the wall of my kitchen. I use it for a music server, light web searching. It is running Tiger. It has 3 or 4 drive bays so it’s god for serving up lots of music via Airtunes to 4 locations in the house so there can be music everywhere…

  3. gilest says:

    wow, fordbailey, that’s impressive!

  4. bayonetbrant says:

    I’ve got a 1999 lime iMac G3 266 that I use to host iPhoto and iTunes to pull in thru my TiVo boxes with the home media pack. For those limited purposes, it’s fine. I also have the screen-saver pointed to the iPhoto library, so it doubles as a digital picture frame. In a pinch, I can use it for web-surfing or as a print server.

  5. Jerry Lawrence says:

    I just recently upgraded to a MacBook cause my G4 iBook finally ate it… or so I thought. I was able to get it to boot into firewire mode and pull the stuff off of it. I tried reinstalling the software and each time it would get just a little bit further and at about the 20th time it finally took. I was planning on using it as a music server but my mom’s windowz desktop went out on her so I gave her the iBook and I think we may just have a new convert now. She seems to love it (even though it’s running Panther). She loves how easy it is to get pictures off of her camera with just one click, as apposed to the 7 clicks it took to get them off of the camera on the pc. One time she even somehow deleted all the pictures from her machine… that was bad.

  6. macabron says:

    I got an Ibook last year (500Mhz) for an emergency internet machine. I then sold that machine to my brother. As a first Mac, he uses it for internet, messaging and to convert videos for his PSP. Now, my two younger sisters, wich live in Mexico want one for the exact same prposes. They just need something that is reliable and on wich they dont have to worry about viruses. They are not power users. The only bad thing is that youtube doesnt stream videos very well.

  7. David Marshall says:

    I rebuilt a Powerbook G3 — matching the one I sold years ago — as an OS 9 test environment. (Some of my web clients need Netscape 4 functionality) Getting it on wifi was tough, but the experiment worked. Answering the post directly: yes, my G3/OS 9 PowerBook is a viable work machine.

    Working applications include BBedit, Fetch, Quark XPress, Adobe (Photoshop + Illustrator + PageMaker), Macromedia FreeHand and Microsoft Office. This means I can post/edit/test web pages, build images, work on spreadsheets/presentations/word process, maintain calendars/contacts/events, browse the web, email and network.

    In other words, I can function like it’s 1999.

  8. stega says:

    I have a 520C running 7.6.1 with a slightly hacked version of QT. I’ve been using it since 1995 and It’s been a webcam since about 2000. I have a 540C stored away for parts should anything happen to the little guy. It can also still run Realms and CUSeeMe.

    (http://www.purgatory.org/main/….

    The name is because I chose the Farside’s Thor for the HD when I got it and I wanted to make fun of all my friends who called their machines after Norse or Greek gods. So it was just “god”. At one time the machine was once actually on a public network space and it’s IP did resolve to god.purgatory.org which was very amusing.

  9. imajoebob says:

    Is the one keeping Johnny (aka “Barbecue Nick”) from surfacing a legitimate use? To be honest an old Compaq portable is usually my choice for this application.

  10. whelkboy says:

    I have an ancient Mac IIvi that I still keep around because it has software on it that helps me build new sounds into my Korg synth (which has an ADB connector on it to plug straight in).

    640 x 480 screen resolution and a processor so slow, you can see the windows redraw! How we used to live, eh?

  11. Dan says:

    I’ve got two – a 400 Mhz iMac DVSE, and a 400 Mhz “Sawtooth” G4, both circa 2000.

    The iMac is currently running 9.2.2 and 10.3.9. Both run very well. Of course, since it’s currently at my parent’s house in a different city, it kinda makes it hard to use. Still, when I’m around, I use it frequently for playing OS 9 games (Sim City, Marathon, and Starcraft FTW!), as well as occasional web searching and MS Office if my other computers are shut down, and it makes a great “secondary DVD Drive” over Ethernet. It boots very quickly. The biggest problem is the lack of new software for Panther – what I have works well, but there aren’t updates for them anymore. I’ve also upgraded it – it has a 30 GB hard drive, 384 MB of Ram, and an airport card that has gone dead… I have a 500 Mhz “flower power” too, with the same amount of RAM, a 60 GB drive, and the same OS/software – but twice the video RAM. It’s even faster.

    The G4 is my Secondary Mac – I use it when I don’t want to get out my MBP. I’ve upgraded it extensively – a DVD-R/W drive is in there, a floppy drive, an airport card, USB 2 card, 1.5 GB of Ram, and two 80 GB hard drives. If I had the money to put into it, I’d buy a better video card and CPU… It’s running Tiger and 9.2.2. It’s a bit slow under Tiger, but it’s not particularly noticeable when doing things like web surfing (except for flash-heavy sites), file serving, printer serving, word processing, and iTunes. Unfortunately, either the new Quicktime or iTunes updates have screwed iTunes over… In any case, I use it both for plenty of OS 9 apps (it screams under OS 9), recording via iMovie 06, the standard word processing/web/email, and even a couple of OS X games. With all the ram, it’s a very functional Tiger machine.

    I do have a Powerbook 5300cs, but it’s far overloaded with stuff, with too little RAM, has extension issues, and without the OS 8 floppy, I can’t do a clean OS install. Foo. Also, the floppy drive and power plug are being extremely flakey…

  12. jezzag says:

    I have a Powerbook G3 Wallstreet running Jaguar that still gets regularly pulled out as a network admin machine (my ancient router only accepts interrogation via internet explorer). It suffers from loose hinges but apart from that runs very nicely with a third party wireless card. I’ve also got a working mac classis that I intend to use for word processing as soon as I get a bigger desk space.

  13. ckilner says:

    My primary computer at home is a PowerMac G4 Cube c. 2000 (now running 10.5.4, with 1.5GB RAM, an 800MHz processor, a 320GB 7200RPM HDD, a GeForce 6200 and an external FW DVD-RW). The original 802.11b AirPort card is a little slow (I may replace it with an AirPort Express connected to ethernet), but it still does everything I need it to do (Web, email, iTunes, Office apps, iLife). It’s not suited to games or HD video, but performs surprisingly well for Web 2.0 stuff.

    We have a dozen or so Macs in the house, with 6 in daily use… the newest/fastest is a 1GHz eMac from 2003… the oldest/slowest is an 8MHz Classic from 1990 (the oldest in daily use Mac is my daughter’s 300MHz Tangerine iBook from 1999).

    My collection includes machines capable of booting into System 6.0.8, 7, 7.1, 7.5, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2.2, 10.3.9, 10.4.11, and 10.5.5 (and I have 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2 discs if needed) – last year I used a few machines to recover some old ClarisWorks and MacWrite files off of 400K and 800K diskettes for a neighbor.

    The latest project involves setting up a PowerBook 3400c c.1997 in my son’s bedroom for (i) playing StarCraft and (ii) running a VNC client to access his 867 MHz Quicksilver in the basement.

  14. Bjarne D Mathiesen says:

    I’ve got an PowerBook 520c from 1995 that runs my email server – Stalker SMTP Server 1.8b8. The machine itself has been pretty souped up. Originally, it came with 4MB RAM and 240MB SCSI HD (yes – M not G). The HD was upgraded to first 2GB PATA with a converter board, the 6GB and finally 18GB. The original RAM was supplemented with first 4MB, later with 32MB. The orignal 32 MHz 68020 CPU was replaced with a new processor board with a 183MHz PPC 603e and 24MB RAM in January 2002. I found it on eBay and was one of only a few made by newertech that went broke just before starting production. The OS is now Mac OS 8.1 – originally it was 7.x