Apple

The weird oddball of the Workgroup Server line, a 601 class Power Macintosh crammed into a Quadra 950/Apple Workgroup Server 95-type case. It has quite a strange history -- a prototype of it ran Apple's brief, sorrowful flirtation with NetWare, which went over like a lead balloon with testers and was repurposed to run MacOS instead.

There aren't many of them out there; this was a chance eBay find. It was incredibly grimy, but cleaned up nice, and boots into Mac OS 7.6. I'm thinking about slapping MkLinux on it for yuks.

http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ans/9150/

Tried MkLinux on it over the weekend. It's, uh, incredible that it runs at all, I suppose.

Screenshots added to the link above.

I have one as well. Remove the 1MB cache simm and install a Sonnet G3 upgrade (or a G4 if you can find one). They take the PDS upgrades made for the x100 NuBus PowerPC Macs. Find a JackHammer or ATTO NuBus SCSI card and a fast wide SCSI drive. A fast NuBus video card will also make that monster smile.

Here's what's on mine: PDS G3 OC'd@280MHz/512KB, NuBus JackHammer, MacPicasso 340, NuBus 10baseT, TEAC CD-RW. MacOS 9.1.

They are great machines, a bit on the noisy side tough. Sadly they won't take RAM modules larger than 32MB (the 6100 did).

No, I know all that; my SR-7100 is set up that way. This one I just wanted to see how the stock hardware performed.

Great read, thanks for posting it!

I'd love to know what goals Apple had in mind when developing/supporting MkLinux. A server OS more stable/compatible than classic Mac OS/Copland? Or just another random thing to spend money on without a clearly defined purpose?

During the Spindler/Amelio years? No doubt the latter. Everybody knew that Copland was doomed, but no one knew what could replace it, and this new thing called Linux seemed like it was worth a shot.