Apple

I bought an old iMac G3, with only a 266mhz ppc, 96M ram, 6 G ide hard drive and it had os8.6 in it. Indigo blue color machine (same color as Onyx2 ) for $26.00 at a junk shop!!

I pushed it up to see what I could get it to do... I first flash the prom so I could get above 8.6.. then upgraded the os to 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, and then 9.22. I tried each level to see if I broke its back... well it has been happy, SO, I thought I'd try osX. The readme said minimum of 128M ram required.... well what the heck. So I fed it MacOS X 10.2 and let it install ALL NIGHT... next morning I got up. IT WORKS.

UPDATED 10.2.8 STILL WORKS!! ACTUALLY RUNS GREAT!!!

installed SAFARI and IT WORKS!!, ITUNES IT WORKS!! ie5.1 IT WORKS!!!

WOW!! I AM IMPRESSED and only with 96M RAM WOW IT WORKS!!!

even ran OS9 apps under OSX ... DOESNT DRAG...

EVEN transfered photos and video from my digital CAM AND IT WORKS!!


I LIKE IT, I LOVE IT... now think I'll save my money for the new iMAC cause based on my eperience with this ancient iMac IT WORKS!!! AND I WANT MORE OF IT


Just wanted to let all know, and to tout and pat myself on the back as well.

BEST $26.00 I have spent YET!!

I got my iMac DV (G3 600MHz, 512MB SDRAM, 20GB HDD) for USD70 and it makes a very decent AIO Internet machine. Had been running Tiger until it no longer boots and performance was pretty good for its age.

I have been browsing with it and works well.

I brought up a shell in it and see some unix familiar stuff!!

Again I am AMAZED that it is working this WELL with less than minimum RAM requirements.

I have had safari sieze once or twice with the rotating mouse pointer, but stll was able to force quit from the menu and then restarted the app.


TOO COOL !!!

I LOVE MY SGI's AND I AM STARTING TO LOVE THE MAC

pinball_0 wrote: I have been browsing with it and works well.

I brought up a shell in it and see some unix familiar stuff!!

Again I am AMAZED that it is working this WELL with less than minimum RAM requirements.

I have had safari sieze once or twice with the rotating mouse pointer, but stll was able to force quit from the menu and then restarted the app.


TOO COOL !!!

I LOVE MY SGI's AND I AM STARTING TO LOVE THE MAC

Yeah it's kind of amazing what a real-ish, modern-ish and tweaked to the hardware (ish) OS can *actually do* !!!!!!!!

Too often the market force insist the answer is simply faster hardware (willynilly - without specifics on how the hardware should be faster) - it doesn't take very long running software that's made to run on current (or even current-X generation hardware) to prove that's only *at best* half the solution

The Wintel world combined with sloppy programmers and programming models (or lack thereof) has held back performance as much as software (Windows XP - or any Windows running on multi CPU/core processors is a perfect example)

Also with traditional 'real'(ish) computers/OS's the minimum specs where the least you could expect every qualified feature or application to work. Now it seems to simply be a mere starting point where you can expect *some* of the software to work. Before minimum specs tended to be a 'safe' middle ground for the customer, now it's seems only to be the bare minimum - and what you get - is simply what you get. What's exceedingly shameless/lazy for the programmers is for software to be speced with hardware that both the developers and the users can't generally attain for the next few years - and this seems to be the 'status quo' for desktop/"personal computers"

Generally having the developer spending a little more time & paying for it in the (distributed) price is cheaper then having 'cheap' inefficent code wasting CPU cycles or doing stuff like copying buffers a zillion times because it's the first thing that popped into the programmers head - and he never gave a second look

BTW. Congrats on a good deal !!!!!!!!!!!!. I personally always favoured SUN because of the 'bang for the buck' comparing to used SUN's to used/worshiped MAC's. But I definitely appreciated the hardware platform and it seemed to zip along running PPC64 Linux - without ever a crash. However once they changed to Intel the magic was lost for me ..... !!!!(!!!) (!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

I think I read this online. But in general in the old days:
"People would pay twice as much for Mac's that performed twice as well"
"Now: People just pay twice as much"

Although I can't say I blame them (I mean they have to _seem_ like the worships their customers and pretend it's a style/class thing - but really their only be after the bottom line. However customer/fanbase loyalty affects said bottom line espc with Apple(TM)) - moving to Wintel/MacOSX with a 'Doze option in Intel must be making them far more money (in the short term _at least_ if they don't piss off too many of their 'fan base' which I think is more accurate hen 'customers' for most of the users, giving their customer *many* OS choices can't hurt either, and finally Intel is *starting* to live up to the promises (albeit their almost a decade late!) which have killed many'a'arch (MIPS, Alpha, PPC at least for desktop/servers that are 'mainstream' and I use that term losely) and slashing their R&D budget's for bring current products into their next generation (at least in desktop machines, and it seems also at a slower rate in servers)

WOW!!.. Just robbed memory from my Dell Inspiron laptop for this mac. Took out a 64M ram and put in a 256M one from the donor winblows laptop (PIII). IT WORKS!!

Now have 288MB RAM and loaded up FIREFOX and IT WORKS!!

NOW I FINALLY HAVE A FAIRLY DECENT MACOS X BOX !!

even getting tunes from my qube3 (subsonic) IT WORKS!!

just thought I'd share the info... all worked well with only 96MB RAM... now I have some overhead.

PLUS tearing it apart was good idea... was dirty.. dirty... dust on fans and motherboard.

so NOW I can get a few years of use from this old iMAC

Congratulations - that's great!

With over 256 MB RAM in your iMac, you might want to upgrade to 10.3.x ( Panther ) or 10.4.x ( Tiger ) in order to get more current security updates and better third party software support. Aside from open source stuff, most of the current third party software seems to require at least Mac OS 10.3.9 or, more commonly, 10.4.x. Tiger is still getting frequent updates from Apple, while Panther hasn't gotten one since Nov 2007.

There's a little bit of debate about whether Panther is faster than Tiger on older machines or vice versa, but they both have enough performance gains over Jaguar (10.2) that either is worthwhile.

Don't even think about upgrading to 10.4 - it'll go slow as hell.
though, going 10.3 should be fine, from my experience it can be even faster than 10.2.

Tiger is faster when given sufficient memory, otherwise Panther is still a good choice but you'll have to put up with older third party software.

shyouko wrote: Tiger is faster when given sufficient memory, otherwise Panther is still a good choice but you'll have to put up with older third party software.

What is the problem with Apple software developers? Many Windows apps can still run on 2000, I'd say most Sun apps run back to Solaris 8, AIX is usually back to 5.3 or 5.1 - but Macintosh apps are almost invariably compiled for N-1 (or even current only), and Apple updates ~every 2 years.

toxygen wrote: Don't even think about upgrading to 10.4 - it'll go slow as hell.

Like I said, there's a little debate on the matter.

If you have access to the OSes, I'd give them all a try in order to see what is the best fit before doing too much customization. Heck, you might even have some fun trying Linux on that machine!

Having said all that, Panther is the last version officially supported on the 266 MHz iMac, and with the relatively small hard drive, there isn't a lot of overhead available, so toxygen's opinion is probably the right one.

For performance reasons, it's also probably worth dropping the display depth to "thousands of colors" rather than "millions of colors."

Check out http://lowendmac.com/imacs/rev-c-imac-g3-266-mhz.html for additional info, and, once again, congrats on getting the machine.

SAQ wrote: What is the problem with Apple software developers? Many Windows apps can still run on 2000, I'd say most Sun apps run back to Solaris 8, AIX is usually back to 5.3 or 5.1 - but Macintosh apps are almost invariably compiled for N-1 (or even current only), and Apple updates ~every 2 years.

Often it's just a matter of "official" support rather than whether or not the programs will actually work, but it is definitely an issue.

Thanks ALL !! I think I'll give 10.3 a try when I get some HD space back... gotta try using the usb external drive to move some old os9 apps...jaguar is doing nicely..

I been filling HD in no time... and so much to play with...

think I am hooked now.

SAQ wrote:

shyouko wrote: Tiger is faster when given sufficient memory, otherwise Panther is still a good choice but you'll have to put up with older third party software.

What is the problem with Apple software developers? Many Windows apps can still run on 2000, I'd say most Sun apps run back to Solaris 8, AIX is usually back to 5.3 or 5.1 - but Macintosh apps are almost invariably compiled for N-1 (or even current only), and Apple updates ~every 2 years.

Guess it's because Win32 has been there for a very long time and Microsoft is very committed to backward compatibility.

Meanwhile, Apple is still busy adding new frameworks and updating the Cocoa API. As it stabilises, Leopard is breaking much less old apps from Tiger already.

Stick a newer drive in it, seriously, those old 5400rpm drives are slugs.

josehill wrote:

SAQ wrote: What is the problem with Apple software developers? Many Windows apps can still run on 2000, I'd say most Sun apps run back to Solaris 8, AIX is usually back to 5.3 or 5.1 - but Macintosh apps are almost invariably compiled for N-1 (or even current only), and Apple updates ~every 2 years.

Often it's just a matter of "official" support rather than whether or not the programs will actually work, but it is definitely an issue.

It isn't just "official" support. In order to compile for 10.3.9 (minimum) on later (Tiger, Leopard) systems, the developers have to get hold of specific version of gcc and certain other libraries from Apple. This is free, but not everyone wants to do that (i.e. have 2 separate dev. environments).
Also, various APIs have changed between 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5. A lot of software on OS X is similar (although not as bad) to Linux software in supporting more recent libraries.
Mac users upgrade their OS willingly more frequently than Windows users, so the number of customers on older OS decreases relatively rapidly.