I just bought a new old Mac. I saw an old Performa 6300 on Craig's List for $15. It had a combination of features I was looking for, it had USB and ethernet, and a floppy. I've looked for a USB floppy drive so I can load and archive some old floppies. But that would cost a lot more than $15. I can buy the whole computer for that price, and pull the data in and out of the Performa with a USB flash drive, or even hook it up on my home network and zap files between machines.
So I drove out in an ice-storm to pick up this old junker computer. Then it occurred to me, the City Sanitation Dept. will bill you more than $15 in disposal charges if you put this in the dump. I told the seller, I'm saving him more than $15 you'd have to pay to get rid of it, you should be paying me! He laughed and said there was a time when this computer was worth $2300 and he was firm on the $15. I said this is a Craig's List deal in cash, so I'd offer a firm $14, that way I could at least feel like I got a deal. We closed on $14.
I need another old Mac like I need a hole in my head, but I decided I needed an old OS 9 machine like the Performa, my Mac Quad G5 has lost the ability to run Classic, since the MacOS X 10.5 upgrade. Classic is dead. Some people have tried running emulators like Sheepshaver, but I just can't get it to work on my Quad. The HowTo files seem to focus on Mac Intel systems that could never run Classic. It seems odd for me to try to run an emulated OS 9 on my CPU that was running native PPC Classic just a few weeks ago.
So I guess it is time to put OS 9 in its grave. I need to migrate some old OS 9 media on SCSI drives. I have an old 80Mb Bernoulli Box, it's an odd cartridge drive, it was designed to work with the Mac Portable, which was notorious for its heavy lead-acid batteries. The Bernoulli drive has a lead acid battery too, but it's been sitting in a closet for about 10 years, I'm afraid to fire it up. But if it blows up when attached to an old $14 junk CPU, I wouldn't mind so much.
Then I have some other miscellaneous media, old 40Mb Syquest carts, 1Gb Jaz carts, I figure I could reduce a two full boxes of floppies and disks, and two boxes full of old hardware, down to maybe 3 or 4 DVDRs.
I need another Mac like I need a hole in my head. Let me see if I recall what old Macs I have, four of them: a IIcx, 8100/110, G3/400U, and a Dual-1Ghz "Wind Tunnel." But none of them had a floppy AND a communications port to move data to new Macs. So I guess I need one more Mac, in order to migrate and get rid of my old Mac junk. And soon I'll be paying the expensive disposal charges on this old crap.
So I drove out in an ice-storm to pick up this old junker computer. Then it occurred to me, the City Sanitation Dept. will bill you more than $15 in disposal charges if you put this in the dump. I told the seller, I'm saving him more than $15 you'd have to pay to get rid of it, you should be paying me! He laughed and said there was a time when this computer was worth $2300 and he was firm on the $15. I said this is a Craig's List deal in cash, so I'd offer a firm $14, that way I could at least feel like I got a deal. We closed on $14.
I need another old Mac like I need a hole in my head, but I decided I needed an old OS 9 machine like the Performa, my Mac Quad G5 has lost the ability to run Classic, since the MacOS X 10.5 upgrade. Classic is dead. Some people have tried running emulators like Sheepshaver, but I just can't get it to work on my Quad. The HowTo files seem to focus on Mac Intel systems that could never run Classic. It seems odd for me to try to run an emulated OS 9 on my CPU that was running native PPC Classic just a few weeks ago.
So I guess it is time to put OS 9 in its grave. I need to migrate some old OS 9 media on SCSI drives. I have an old 80Mb Bernoulli Box, it's an odd cartridge drive, it was designed to work with the Mac Portable, which was notorious for its heavy lead-acid batteries. The Bernoulli drive has a lead acid battery too, but it's been sitting in a closet for about 10 years, I'm afraid to fire it up. But if it blows up when attached to an old $14 junk CPU, I wouldn't mind so much.
Then I have some other miscellaneous media, old 40Mb Syquest carts, 1Gb Jaz carts, I figure I could reduce a two full boxes of floppies and disks, and two boxes full of old hardware, down to maybe 3 or 4 DVDRs.
I need another Mac like I need a hole in my head. Let me see if I recall what old Macs I have, four of them: a IIcx, 8100/110, G3/400U, and a Dual-1Ghz "Wind Tunnel." But none of them had a floppy AND a communications port to move data to new Macs. So I guess I need one more Mac, in order to migrate and get rid of my old Mac junk. And soon I'll be paying the expensive disposal charges on this old crap.
Leave a comment