[geeks] Mac OS X 10.2.8, well, just because...

[William Barnett-Lewis]

So, in a fit of insanity over the weekend, I began hunting through my 
piles of miscellaneous Mac stuff and pieced together a 7600 with an old 
Sonnet G3 266 mhz card (that I'd forgotten I had), 176 mb RAM, a 4 gig 
and a 1.2 gig for disk (an all SCSI machine and these are all the free 
50 pin drives I have right now), and played all kinds of games to get 
Mac OS 9.1 installed as my cd didn't want to boot and while the 1.2 was 
original to this machine, it didn't have as system folder on it.

I'll spare the blow by blow. After starting Saturday morning, I now have 
10.2.8 (with all updates applied), developer tools, Open Office w/ the 
Darwin Xfree X11 kit, and a small selection of classic stuff I really 
like having around (a couple of simple games (Doom, Flight Sim 4 for 
Mac, Eric's Solitaire), my old copy of Framemaker 5, Corel Draw 8, Lotus 
123,   Appleworks 5). Xpostfacto took care of the fact that this machine 
isn't on the list.

The amazing thing to me is actually how well it runs. I've heard all the 
horror stories about the glacial speed of the ATI graphics on these 
older machines and, while I won't say I've run faster, I can also 
remember far worse. I've got classic set to start at boot, which makes 
that take longer, but once up, it's really quite responsive. All my 
classic things seem to work well and it's seriously cool to type emacs 
at a shell prompt on a Mac...

The real problem is disk; only 5.2 gb is tight (he says as he remembers 
the 10 mb boat anchor in his first used XT...). I have classic on the 
small disk and trimmed it down to only about 450 mb and then put the 
developer docs on that drive (half the size of developer is the docs. 
Yikes!). This leaves me with about 300 mb free on the small drive and 
750 mb free on the X boot drive.

All I really need to find now is a copy of Appleworks 6 for cheap... :>

William
-- 
Live like you will never die, love like you've never been hurt, dance
like no-one is watching.
				Alex White