The Partial Switch

So about a month back, my dad and I woke up early on a Saturday and headed to the far end of town for FSU's seasonal surplus auction. Up for bid were about 200+ older PCs (mid Pentium-III class) and various other electronics/office machines. Nothing really caught my eye except the laptops (all were really old, but probably workable) and a rack of Apple G3 PowerMacintosh towers (the blue and white ones, not the older beige ones). The way the auctioneer did the auctioning was odd, instead of going lot by lot he'd just point at a rack, and highest bid got first pick of the rack. Then he'd repeat the process and the new highest bidder gets top pick of what's left on the rack.

The whole reason I wanted a Mac to begin with is that I'm really, really interested in those Intel-based iBooks that Apple is set to put out in a little while (some say as early as January). I really wanted to get some time in with Mac OS X before I jumped in with a $1000 investment, so I figured running the OS on a $50 Mac would be a good trial.

Dad and I arrived around 9am and they were a good 200 items away from what I was interested in, so we decided to kill some time and went and got some breakfast. As we arrived back, they were in the middle of selling off the laptops. I decided before showing up I'd spend $50 max, ideally for a laptop and a G3. So when the auctioneer asked "Okay, who want's a $10 laptop?" I raised my number. Sold. I picked the one in the middle of the rack, not being able to fully see what it was - I figured for $10 it doesn't matter if it's a 486 or whatever, as long as I can get it online it'll serve some purpose. So they marked my laptop with my bidder number and then dad and I proceeded to wait a good half-hour for them to get to the Macs.

Before the auctioneer got there, me and a few other potential Mac owners decided we'd conspire with each other to keep prices down - a $50 max we said. So much for that - First G3 tower went for $90. The third one, one with a busted lower support, went up for bid and nobody jumped on it at $15 - so naturally I did. After one sorta-interested person's bidding bumped it to $20 I snagged it at $22. So for $32 I picked up a laptop and a G3 tower. Hot. It was only when they brought my laptop out to me did I realize that I was now the owner of not one but TWO Apple computers. The laptop was a Apple PowerBook 540c (circa 1994).

The G3 tower was easy to get running. It came completely wiped, so I had to install MacOS 9.0 on it. After using it for a while I decided that it was time to install OS X, which took some hacking (zapping the PRAM, running commands from the open console, etc) and was a pain in the ass (the install failed 6 times, and worked on the 7th) but in the end I had an old G3 running Tiger (OS 10.4) and I was a happy person. That was, until I started to use it. The problem? It was slow as hell. Apple says you need 256mb of RAM to run OS X, and this computer came with 128mb. That's what we call a problem. After suffering with this setup for about a week, I broke down and ordered 512mb (2x256mb) off the web for $45, bringing the net investment in this computer to $67. Now I've got a great, usable Mac and I've been using it as my primary desktop. The bevy of open source applications available for OS X made the switch an easier one as the software I needed was out there and free. Only problems with the Mac so far: the mouse that came with the computer sucked (the old puck-style one-button) so I replaced it with an old Microsoft USB optical/wireless mouse I had around, and it doesn't support drives larger than 137GB - as I found out when I tried to install a 200GB drive. Other than that, I've been having a good time with it. I like the flexability of a laptop (being able to type while sitting in my recliner beats my computer chair) but the purpose has been served - I do like OS X.

The PowerBook on the other hand was in bad shape. The batteries were both shot, no AC adapter was included, and the replacement battery that was included was for a different model of PowerBook. Crap. So first step was to order an AC adapter. 4 days, one eBay auction, and $12.99 plus shipping and handling later, boom, we have juice. After plugging in the PowerBook and firing it up I learned three things: that nobody wiped the old hard drive, it was previously in use at the FSU DNA Sequencing laboratory, and judging by the system date, it hadn't been turned on in over two years. There was some pretty good software loaded, including an ancient version of Microsft Office (Word/Excel/Powerpoint) and Netscape Navigator 1.12. Now I had a computer that turned on, but no internet. For that I would need a AAUI to RJ45 converter (to convert Apple's proprietary ethernet jack into wide-phone-jack-looking one that we all use nowadays) - that was another eBay auction and $10. Total investment at this point on the PowerBook was just shy of $40 - probably more than I should've spent, but whatever. This was a fun hack. After getting the adapter and struggling through getting the OS updated from 7.0 to 7.5.5, I got this damned thing online:


The dead lives! After screwing around for a while, I loaded up a browser that I last used back in probably 1994, NCSA Mosaic. Running Internet Explorer? Go to Help -> About Internet Explorer. See? "Based on NCSA Mosaic." Hot. Oh, and you want proof I got it online? Here's the bit from my blog's statcounter (click on the counter at the bottom and you'll see this page):
Of note, NCSA Mosaic 2.0.1 was released in October 1995. Can you imagine how much the web has changed in the last 10 years? A whole hell of a lot. Not much loads on this page. In fact, this very page won't really load all that well. The Camino/Safari browsers were used by me in OS X. (Oh, and ENTIRELY too many of you are still using the terrible Internet Explorer 6. Do you like popups? Do you love banner ads? Do you enjoy being a target of every web virus/spyware application out there? Switch to Firefox! Jeez! Go download it now!) I know it comes default in XP and it just works, but it's by far and away not the best choice out there. Oh, and speaking of operating systems:

See that "Unknown" section? That's me running MacOS 7.5.5 - I doubt that Statcounter.com is still keeping tabs of really old operating systems so it just lumps them all together. I like how all Linux is lumped together.

So that's the story of me and two Macs - one old and one ancient. I like them both and am really looking forward to being able to ditch my crappy Dell Inspiron 1100 running XP for something newer, faster, and more Apple flavored. Hot times.