Remember the Power Mac 8600 and
its bigger, badder brother, the 9600?
You know, the beige titans based on the Kansas motherboard
architecture.
These were Apple's exclamation point to the end of the cloning
era and meant to outperform every Mac that had ever shipped - the
systems that, at their fastest, would challenge their successors
for months.
I bought a one of these beasts, a Power Mac 8600/300, in May '01
for use as a hobby system and found that, despite its age, the
system was far from a relic.
The Top End
The last of the second generation Power Macs, the Kansas systems
ruled Apple's high end for quite some time. Announced on August 5,
1997, this revision used a speed-bumped version of the PowerPC 604e, the
Mach V. This chip ran from 250 to 350 MHz in the Kansas
systems, and it eventually reached 400 MHz elsewhere.
The 9600 had 12 RAM slots, enough for 768 MB at that time. It
also housed a whopping six PCI slots. The 8600 was slightly less
expandable, with 8 RAM slots and three PCI slots. Needless to say,
these systems whipped Mac OS 7.6 around like a a tricycle tied to
the end of an F-22 Raptor.
As Mac OS 7.6 gave
way to Mac OS 8 and more of the operating system was rewritten for
PowerPC, these systems got even faster. The same held true when Mac
OS 9 was released.
These computers could also house double their original memory
capacities after newer RAM chips debuted.
These systems were so powerful and expandable, in fact, that
Apple actually reintroduced the 9600/350 to supplement the G3 high end due to its greater
expandability. Even after PCIe and PCI-X appeared, there was never
another Mac with six PCI slots.
8600 vs. G3 iBooks
My primary systems in 2001 were a 300 MHz clamshell
iBook and a 500 MHz Dual USB
iBook. The clamshell ran Mac OS 9.2, and the Dual USB ran Mac
OS X 10.0.
The 8600, running Mac OS 9.1, wailed on both of them. Of course,
a lot of this was due to the chip, as the Mach V was a high-end
workstation processor and the PowerPC 750 was a low-end chip. But
the difference was there, and it was startling. Only the PowerPC G4
truly eclipsed the PowerPC 604 and 604e in Apple's high end.
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Power Mac 8600
|
iBook rev. B
|
iBook (Dual USB)
|
|
Processor
|
300 MHz 604e
|
300 MHz 750
|
500 MHz 750CXe
|
|
L2 Cache
|
1 MB (2:1)
|
512k (2:1)
|
256k (1:1)
|
|
Bus Speed
|
50 MHz
|
66 MHz
|
66 MHz
|
|
Max RAM
|
1,024 MB
|
320 MB
|
640 MB
|
|
Figure 1. Power Mac
8600, iBook, and iBook (Dual USB) compared.
|
The first thing I did with the 8600 was upgrade the memory to
1 GB. After turning virtual memory off, this was the most
responsive Mac I had ever used. Turning my disk cache up to a
ludicrous 32 MB resulted in a Finder that never seemed to access
the hard drive.
For daily use, the 8600's performance easily surpassed either of
my iBooks, and even processor-intensive applications ran faster.
The only thing the iBooks had over the 8600 was OS X, which I
had just started to seriously evaluate.
Switching to OS X
I continued using the 8600 as my primary system while I adjusted
to Mac OS X on my Dual USB iBook. After upgrading to OS X
10.1, however, I completely switched to OS X. Musing over my
switch, I recalled that Apple had developed the operating system on
604-based Macs but later reneged on its plan to support those
systems. So I wondered if there were some way to install OS X
on the "G2" systems. Mac OS X officially supported only the G3
or newer, but the possibility of running Mac OS X on the 8600
was too great a temptation to abandon.
Ryan Rempel's XPostFacto,
then called Unsupported X Installer, allowed for just such
installations, and in no time at all I made the switch. In a
testament to Mac OS X's G2 heritage, it accurately reported my
processor and speed - and everything just worked.
I eventually updated to OS X 10.1.5 and was hard-pressed to tell
OS X wasn't running on a supported system. OS X loved the
gig of RAM, to say the least. And now, since I had overcome the one
drawback to using the 8600, it became my primary system again.
No Jaguar for You
A few months later, Apple debuted Jaguar (OS X 10.2). With the
new features and optimizations in the operating system, Mac users
upgraded as fast as they could - except for G2 owners. Not long
afterwards, the XPostFacto site had the news: Jaguar would not work
on PowerPC 603 and 604 systems, since Apple had dropped support for
the chips from Jaguar. If you wanted Jag on your G2, you had to buy
a G3 or G4 upgrade card. There was no other recourse, just a new
CPU or bust. Period. Finito. The end.
And so the line had been drawn for my 8600. If I wanted to move
forward with OS X, I had to shell out for a CPU upgrade that I
just didn't have the money for. Instead, I switched to my Dual USB
iBook full-time and made the 8600 a headless home server and
storage system. It served that purpose well, but a few months later
I mothballed it when I moved, and its hard drive died while in
storage. My iBook went on to run Panther (OS X 10.3) and Tiger
(10.4), and I eventually bought a Power
Mac G4 Digital Audio.
XPostFacto Comes Through
And then, just over a year ago, XPostFacto 3.1 arrived with
support for Jaguar on 603 and 604 chips. The XPostFacto forum-goers
seemed happy with stability on G2 systems, and OS X 10.2.8 was
quite a bit more capable than 10.1.5 had been.
I started looking for a new hard drive for my 8600 and fished
out my Jaguar CDs, which I hadn't touched since September '03,
eager to revive my sleeping giant.
What happened on my return to Kansas is a story for another time
and a future column. 
