Archaic Apple Adventures

[rfunk]

A couple weeks ago I discovered a hidden cache of Macintosh Powerbooks sitting unused at work, and managed to take possession of one of them. I figured these are good machines and it shouldn't be too hard to bring them up to date for use in our current environment (a mix of MacOS X, Linux, and Windows).
I was wrong.

Comments

OS X

[rfunk]

That tricky partitioning is only for 8GB+ disks, which is twice what I have.

Apple says:
Mac OS X 10.3 requires a Macintosh with a PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor, built-in USB, at least 128MB of physical RAM....

I strike out on USB and on RAM. The RAM may be fixable, but the USB isn't. It's also not listed as one of the supported machines. Maybe it works with an earlier version of OS X, but I wouldn't know how to get my hands on it.

Re: I think you can do it.

[rfunk]

Awesome. Thanks!

Ouch.

[kittenpants]

I followed all of that EXCEPT where you said you held down shift-fn-control-option-command-power. Not being familiar with that machine's keyboard, I imagined trying to do that on my laptop. I couldn't do it without also imagining double-jointed fingers and a prehensile tail.

Re: Ouch.

[rfunk]

Heh, luckily all those keys except Power are in the same (lower left) corner of the keyboard. Basically it's "mash the corner of the keyboard and hit Power with the other hand." Similarly, forcing a Mac program (at least on "classic" MacOS) to quit is "mash the corner of the keyboard and hit Escape with the other hand."

The key combination to get into OpenFirmware is more difficult, since it requires hitting at least two keys on each side of the keyboard. And my erroneous way of doing it probably would've required a tail if I had shorter fingers.

Macs claim to be easy, "what you see is what you get," but there are countless hidden tricks, especially key combinations, that require just as much memorization as a command line -- but without the similarity to language. Some of these are supposed to be done regularly, but there's nothing on screen mentioning them. (I always have to look up the "rebuild desktop" combo.)

Re: Ouch.

[nicosomething]

I'd be very curious to hear if you actually get that sucker to run anything but OS9 well enough to want to keep it. I think I had that model and its production run wasn't that long before the later models with built in USB, a single PCMCIA slot and other improvements hit the market.

On the bright side you can play a mean game of Escape Velocity on it.

Re: Ouch.

[saffronhare]

smiling and nodding
These are dark mysteries of which you speak. Like souffle, but not so finger-lickin' good.