Digital Fossils

The Old Mac Blues

- 2008.07.23 - Tip Jar

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If you look towards the top of this page, you'll note that the title of this column is "Digital Fossils". As those words would seem to indicate, I have a strong affinity for older Mac hardware and software.

I think my vintage Mac geek cred is strong. I mean, I spent my afternoon playing Lords of the Realm II, a 12-year-old game, on a Power Macintosh 7100, a 14-year-old computer. This column itself has been written on hardware ranging from a WallStreet PowerBook and a PowerBook 2400 to a Color Classic and a PowerBook Duo 280c.

But sometimes it gets hard to stay strong in my faith....

Take now, for example. I just didn't feel up to stringing AppleTalk cables or transferring files via sneakernet, the PCMCIA WiFi card was in the wrong old Mac, and swapping it out would have meant hooking up the AC charger to eject it and, well, it was just so much easier to fire up the iBook with its built-in AirPort and let the zeros and ones flow through the ether with no muss or fuss.

jellybean iMacs I look at the new Macs, and part of me sneers. How am I supposed to make the requisite snide comments about "Wintel" machines if I'm working on a Core Duo Mac? OS X, for all its good points, doesn't give me the same warm fuzzies I get from seeing the old Happy Mac at startup. And the styling has even slipped a little: Compared to the jellybean G3 iMacs or their iLamp successors, the new aluminum ones remind me a bit too much of a more slickly executed rendition of the old Monorail PCs from the late 1990s.

But then I look at what they can do....

Boy, those are some neat tricks. It would be awfully convenient to have a dedicated media server in the house. And I may scoff at new games as being mostly eye candy, but eye candy sure does have a certain appeal at times. An iPhone is tempting, and MobileMe looks really neat.

I can do a certain amount with what I have on hand, but no matter how I amp up my most "modern" Mac, the fact remains that the old G4 tower is just a bit too long in the . . . er, "Sawtooth" (get it?) to get the full use out of the Web. Furthermore, it looks to be a near certainty that the next iteration of OS X is going to leave it behind for good.

As for properly interfacing with new hardware, well, I'm already trying to sync an iPod nano through a USB 1.1 cable; I can only sacrifice so much for my loyalty to my old Macs.

So where do I go from here?

As a starving artist, the sensible thing to do would be to hope that the current and coming changes will drop the prices on used units. With a bit of scrimping and saving - and some good luck on eBay - I could probably upgrade my working laptop to a G4 TiBook and pick up a Mirror Drive Door Power Mac or G4 iMac for not too much more than it would cost to keep the Clamshell and the Sawtooth in the game. It would definitely be cheaper than trying to get out ahead of the power curve.

The danger for me there is that the changes in the coming all-Intel Snow Leopard era could be more revolutionary than I'm anticipating. I'd feel more than a little bit silly if I was left with a newer G4 tower that was, for all intents and purposes, as outmoded as the Sawtooth it replaced, other than being able to run Leopard.

I could hock a kidney and just buy a new Mac. That would solve everything - except for the part about me feeling like a traitor to my Digital Fossils ethos. Being able to play new games and zip about the Net without getting bogged by the almost-daily spinning beach ball of death would dull the pain somewhat, I imagine, but only somewhat.

One other alternative would be to cheat a little and pick up a used Mac mini to use as a 'net appliance. This would combine the virtues of low cost with it being small enough to hide someplace on my desktop so that I won't be constantly reminded that I bought an Intel Mac.

The fact remains, however, that with the coming changes in the Web, my existing hardware just isn't going to cut the mustard, at least not without a lot of work. In a year or two it would not surprise me to see my single G4 tower become as awkward a 'net interface as my early Power Macs are now, and that pains me.

Oh well, that is then, and this is now. I still have that saved game of Lords of Magic to get back to in the morning, and you know what? My Power Mac 7100 will be not one more iota obsolete tomorrow than it is today.

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Recent Digital Fossils Columns

Slot Loading iMacs: The SE/30 for a New Generation, 2009.02.02. They're relatively small, pretty quiet, reliable, can run Tiger, and are very affordable nowadays.
Macs: Better by design, 2008.07.11. From the beginning, Macs have stood apart from other computers with their attractive and intelligent design.
Master of Orion on the Mac, 2008.07.01. The DOS version of this vintage game broke with Pentium or Windows 95, but the Mac version still runs very nicely in the Classic Mac OS.
More in the Digital Fossils index.

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Mac of the Day: PowerBook 500 Series, introduced 1994.05.16. 'Blackbird' includes a 25 to 33 MHz 68040 along with smart batteries and grayscale or color displays.
May 16 in LEM history: 98: iMac reconsidered - 01: The exclusivist Mac - Cubed - Troubleshooting - 02: SE/30 catharsis - Microsoft free - 03: SCSI and OS X on a beige G3 - 05: Failures: Apple III and Lisa - Bigger, faster, more - 06: MacBook - PowerBook 3400 still useful - 07: 3 GB in a MacBook - 08: Mac Pro beats HP and Dell - Limited USB power in Santa Rosa Macs
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