The Saga of the Power Mac
About two weeks ago, Jamie from I-T-Works generously gifted me a somewhat geriatric and smelly PowerMac 8500/120. I'm not kidding about the smell either. I guess the original owner used lots of incense because the case emanated a curiously strong, if somewhat mystical, aroma. In any case, when this particular model debuted in 1996, it retailed for about $4k and had some real huevos. Even now it doesn't feel nearly a decade old: it has about 76MB RAM, a 1.2GB SCSI-2 hard drive, 10baseT network port, even good screen resolution (1024x768 @ 24 bytes). Last century, sure, but several eons in computer time before the end of the century? Wow.
My apartment has a few modern computers in it, but with the overwhelming numbers of decrepit and old computers that lurk in every corner, it's more of a computer retirement center than a sleek and shining monument to technology. My roommate and I have a tendency to take in old computers, and using open-source operating systems, give them a few extra years of life before committing them to that eternal bit bucket in the sky.
There are several different operating systems that can be installed on older Macintosh computers; I settled on installing one of my top 5 favorites, Debian. I have a lot of experience with PC architecture, and I even have a smurfy PowerMac G3 running OSX, but this would be my first old-world Mac. Little did I realize the challenges ahead.
In 1996, booting from the CDROM drive was a new and novel idea. 3.25" floppies and hard-drives were the norm for boot-up, while shipped software was moving in the CD direction, most was still available on floppy-disks, and operating systems that came on CDROMs still needed a boot floppy to install. At the time, Mac was toying with allowing clones of their hardware, but even on a real Mac, the Crem de la Crem of personal hardware, there was still no option to boot from a CDROM. While certainly not insurmountable, this was the first challenge -- making boot floppies.
This break is starting to get to long, I'd better get back to work. Next time maybe I'll post about how I couldn't get the boot floppies to work and what I did to work around the problem.
My apartment has a few modern computers in it, but with the overwhelming numbers of decrepit and old computers that lurk in every corner, it's more of a computer retirement center than a sleek and shining monument to technology. My roommate and I have a tendency to take in old computers, and using open-source operating systems, give them a few extra years of life before committing them to that eternal bit bucket in the sky.
There are several different operating systems that can be installed on older Macintosh computers; I settled on installing one of my top 5 favorites, Debian. I have a lot of experience with PC architecture, and I even have a smurfy PowerMac G3 running OSX, but this would be my first old-world Mac. Little did I realize the challenges ahead.
In 1996, booting from the CDROM drive was a new and novel idea. 3.25" floppies and hard-drives were the norm for boot-up, while shipped software was moving in the CD direction, most was still available on floppy-disks, and operating systems that came on CDROMs still needed a boot floppy to install. At the time, Mac was toying with allowing clones of their hardware, but even on a real Mac, the Crem de la Crem of personal hardware, there was still no option to boot from a CDROM. While certainly not insurmountable, this was the first challenge -- making boot floppies.
This break is starting to get to long, I'd better get back to work. Next time maybe I'll post about how I couldn't get the boot floppies to work and what I did to work around the problem.