I have very fond memories of the Mac. From my first one back in 1992
up through the $1,700 iBook I bought for college, I've always loved
Macs.
Lately, however, I have been stuck on PCs. Most engineering programs
are written mainly for PCs, and most big firms use them
exclusively.
While reminiscing with some of my high school friends, I remembered
some games that I used to play on our Performa 5200s at school. I found some
online, but I could not get them to run on my iBook, even in Mac OS
9.2.2. I decided I needed to find an older Mac.
Low End Mac really has a ton of great info when it comes time to
choose an old Mac, and I decided on a Performa 6400. I've always wanted a Mac
with the Performa name on it for some reason, and the 6400 was the best
Performa ever.
The even have a site devoted to them, www.zone6400.com. On that site, I found
someone who was looking for a new owner for his Performa 6400 and would
part with it for the shipping costs. $45 later, and this magic box
showed up at my apartment.
I downloaded a few versions of iCab, Netscape, and Eudora, burned
them to a disk, and loaded them on the Performa. After telling the
TCP/IP control panel to use ethernet, my "new to me" Mac was online
with high speed Internet! It took almost an hour of fiddling to do the
same thing with the wife's PC laptop running Vista. The Mac was up and
running in less than five minutes!
Of course, the old games (Maelstrom and
Battle Tanks 2.1.2) are just as much fun now as I remember, and the
old Mac OS is still better than anything from Microsoft.
Hard to believe that I replaced a dual Xeon workstation with a
Performa 6400, but that's what happened.
Long Live Macs!
Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.
