by mon

Old Macs. Also known as Old Macintoshes, Vintage Macintosh Computers, et cetera. Machines of which were made in simpler times, when Apple wasn’t as much of a shitshow of a company as they are today. Compact, distinctive from PCs of the time, maybe a tad yellowed – but that’s fine. Sometimes that’s what makes them beautiful.

Alright, here I am, at it again. I didn’t think I’d be able to make another one until after summer was over, but in surprising turn of events I got three new (old) machines up-and-running!

Power Mac G4 Sawtooth #1

Around early June I received another Sawtooth G4 from my pal Lucanis, dirty and untested as all hell. It had black smudges all over the casing and faintly smelled of cigarette smoke – and he wasn’t entirely sure that it worked.

I decided to crack this thing open before attempting to turn it on. It was a good thing that I did, because the tower’s heatsink was actually taken clean off the board! The heatsink and it’s connector clips were just left to rattle around inside the case.

Not only was the Sawtooth in not-so-great condition on the outside, it was also dusty and dirt-filled on the inside. Along with that, one of the RAM slots looked to be a quarter of the way torn off the board, which left me with just three slots to work with.

In the end the machine did work! I just had to pull out some ram from my other G4 and a hard drive from my 6400/180 to get things up-and-running. I gave it a good cleaning inside and out, though I have yet to scrub those white nicks in the plastic off.

Power Mac G4 Sawtooth #2

The Sawtooth I had received a few months ago really just needed to have it’s RAM re-seated to get up and running. It wouldn’t push out a video signal when I first got it. It’s a little less noisy than the other Sawtooth, so I prefer to use this one when I’m fiddling with old programs and whatnot.

I’d be using this G4 alongside my main computer if I could. I don’t have the space for an extra monitor and keyboard, though – maybe when I do I’ll set it up along with a few other old machine.

PowerBook G3 Wallstreet

And finally, we come to the last machine on the list, my Powerbook G3. This machine didn’t actually come to me in the worst condition aside from some sort of scratch on the rubber casing on the lid. Along with that it actually came with two batteries! Two batteries that actually held a charge!

I received this machine from my other friend Compgeke (along with a working hard drive to swap with the dead one in there, woops) a few months ago. It’s sorta been laying around since I had no way to slap an OS on it.

But then I came to the realization. There’s an IDE hard drive in here. And there’s only one other laptop I have on my hands that I know uses an IDE hard drive.

So I decided to do the impossible and open up my iBook G4 just to install OS 9 on the Powerbook G3’s hard drive. The whole process took me like two hours, but hey! In the end everything worked all fine and dandy. But I think I forgot to plug the trackpad on the iBook back in, because it no longer works. Whoops.

And there you have it. Three new working additions to the collection, all documented within this little blog post of mine. I’ll see you next time with a batch of new machines to show off, and I wish whoever’s reading this a good morning, afternoon or night~