Good uses for old Macs

[#1 Rhapsody]

What can you do with old Performa 6360 macs? I have three to do something with. One has a G3 upgrade card inside. Another might not work, I need to test it. If I get enough RAM is it possible to install Mac OS 10.1 on the G3?

Thanks in advance

[nixgeek]

There's a lot of stuff that you can do with old Macs. I'm using my Quadra 650 (Moto 68040 CPU at 33 MHz) to host my family homepage. There are some other Macs that are even older than this hosting pages as well. Check the following link for more:

http://www.ld8.org/servers/

You'll also find more tips on retro Macs on the following sites:
http://www.lowendmac.com
http://www.68kmla.com
http://www.ppcmla.com/
http://www.applefritter.com/
http://jagshouse.com/
http://www.mac512.com/macwebpages/mac512.html

If I think of any others, I'll post them here.

[Giaguara]

It's a gorgeous piece of history.

9.1 is the maximum it can deal with though. Thousands of colors with 800 x 600 resolution... not for 10.1.

http://lowendmac.com/ppc/performa-6360.html

requires System 7.5.1 through 9.1
CPU: 160 MHz PPC 603e
RAM: 16 MB (8 MB on motherboard), expandable to 136 MB using two 8, 16, 32, or 64 MB 70ns or faster 168-pin DIMM
VRAM: 1 MB
Video: thousands of colors to 800 x 600, 256 colors to 1024 x 768

I would probably run one (if they work) with eiter 7.6.1 or 8.6.
And a second one with some flavor of Linux.. Lowendmac has good start pages
http://lowendmac.com/stotler/06/0726.html

[nixgeek]

Yes, the 6360 is the best of the Power Macs that used that form factor. It's basically a desktop-shaped 6400. All of the ones prior to the 6360 in the same form factor were horribly crippled by Apple (we owned a Performa 6220CD back in the mid-90s so I speak from experience ).

[fryke]

I loved my Performa 630 (68K), though. It was my first own desktop Mac. Before that, I only owned PowerBooks and used the Macs at school. 800x600 with thousands of colours was fine for OS X Public Beta on my iBook 300, though, Giaguara.

[#1 Rhapsody]

Two of the macs do work and I just heard I will get another tomorrow. From the one that doesn't work I will take out the RAM and the G3 card and try to make one really fast. Also what linux distros would you recommend The max RAM I'll probably get is 64MB and a G3 processor.

Thanks a lot

[nixgeek]

For the 6360? I recommend Debian. Ubuntu has too much overhead. Do a base installation and then install Xorg and <insert-favorite-DE-here>. I did that on a Compaq Presario that was comprised of an AMD K6-300, 64 MB RAM, 4 GB hard drive, and S3 Virge video. Did a basic installation of Debian Etch and then installed Xorg, XFCE, and some other apps. I was quite surprised at how usable this meager system was, although browsing "Web 2.0" sites did bring the machine to a bit of a crawl. But for general use it was quite usable.

Consider also that since this Mac is considered an "Old World" Mac, you'll need to have a small Mac OS partition somewhere and use BootX as the bootloader to Debian. You'll also need it during installation. It's not as trivial as installing it on a "New World" Mac, but it's definitely a fun process. Best place to check for installing Linux/ppc is the following site:

http://www.penguinppc.org

I installed Debian Sarge (the previous version of Debian, 3.x) on an old Motorola StarMax 4000 Macintosh clone and it ran wonderfully on it. I even installed Ubuntu 5.04 once on it but it was too much for the StarMax to handle compared to Sarge.

You could also try one of the BSDs. NetBSD runs on practically anything. There is also a FreeBSD for PowerPC, but I don't know that it supports "Old World" Macs.

[VirtualTracy]

Originally Posted by nixgeek

I'm using my Quadra 650 (Moto 68040 CPU at 33 MHz) to host my family homepage.

This is really neat! I'm listening to the music at the moment and it's good.

I'm amazed that all that is on what would be otherwise considered a redundant piece of hardware ... The Quadra 650 initially sold for $2,700US!