I have always been involved with the Mac, starting with my first
128K unit that wowed me with
MacDraw and MacPaint and the 400k floppy disks.
I started my first ISP based around the Macintosh in 1993. There
was only one internet mail server for the Mac, Apple Internet Mail
Server written by Glenn Anderson. I had to use Unix for everything
else. I even used a Quadra 950
with the special board in it so I could run A/UX, Apple's version of
Unix. It ran great.
But I used Sun equipment for DNS and other vital services.
All management machines were Macs, including billing and
customer information. I wrote a HyperCard stack that allowed us to
create users and passwords, then set them up into a Livingston
Portmaster with a special modem rack system I developed because at
that time there were no racked modems that were cost effective.
Over time, since we were one of the first ISPs around, we had a
large number of customers and were getting more and more every single
day. It was crazy. We were adding sometimes 30 or 40 people a day to
the system. Everyone, of course, thought we ran everything with
Windows machines, but even then there was nothing really of use on
the PC side of things for doing ISP work.
Clients were led to believe that their email was running on a very
large Sun server. The reality was that over 2500 mail users were
being served from an SE/30 with
32 MB of memory, a large (for an SE/30) 2 GB hard drive, and a Dayna
internal ethernet interface.
I made nightly backups of the data files. It crashed really hard
once in the beginning, and I could not resurrect the data files and
user files, so I sat through an entire night recreating all the email
logins. What a nightmare. But I learned my lesson. I started doing
backups nightly without fail. I never had a problem after that.
Understand, that over the years I started getting larger and
larger clients, from Huffy Sports to Allen Bradley and many other
large corporate clients. From time to time some of the IS folks from
these companies would come by and want to see my set up or see the
server clusters, etc. They all thought that since I was so into
computers, I would have to have some kind of big powerful
machine.
It was obvious I couldn't use something less than a
mainframe with all the clients we had and networks we managed. After
all, I liked toys, and many of them knew that. I would get asked the
question all the time, "What machine serves your personal email?" I
would then point over to this giant refrigerator looking thing. In
fact, it was bigger than a refrigerator. It was a Sun MP690 solid
steel housing complete with blinking lights and whirring fans running
(really loud fans sounding like two F16s taking off). My
clients would just oooohhh and ahhhh over this thing and think it
must be doing some enormous calculation or some task beyond the
comprehension of mere mortals. Of course, I did not make them think
anything different, after all, thinking different was not the fad
back then.
The reality was that the Sun MP690 was an authentic Multi
Processor Sun box that at one time had housed a very large Sun
computer. It weighed some 400 to 500 pounds. However, I had since
removed the computer and all its components except
for the blinky lights and whirring fans. I left the fans in to cool
it down. I left a shelf in it and put my giant enormous computer in
there - a PowerBook 170.
This was not just any PowerBook 170. This poor little computer had
been through hell. The trackball no longer worked, the screen only
came up half way, you could not even move the curson to get to any
controls, and the modem port had been taken out by lightning. If you
put a battery in it, the thing would spark and shut down immediately.
I put an APC battery back up on the poor thing, turned it on, and
away it went! Then installed Timbuktu. That is how I got around the
mouse and screen problem.
Your probably wondering how I connected it to the network. I then
used a Farallon SCSI ethernet adapter. Keep in mind that Farallon
never made them compatible with Open Transport, so I had to install a
special version of the OS and AppleTalk Networking - and then use
MacTCP to set it up.
Timbuktu worked like a champ. If the 170 crashed, it was a simple
matter of unplugging it from the APC unit and hitting the power
button. It was back on in a minute. It had 8 MB of memory (the
maximum it could take) and a 500 MB hard drive.
I never once was questioned on what I was using. I had many many
clients actually using that machine that were personal friends and
not one knew that it was a PowerBook on its last leg. That machine
actually kept running night and day for over 4 years. It finally gave
up the ghost one day when a technician touched the ethernet adapter
and nailed it with a static charge. It popped the mother board. That
was it.
To this day I am still using that same copy of Apple Internet Mail
Server that was written so long ago. What is it running on today? I'd
like to say a G4 fully loaded, but that would be a lie, and it would
certainly not be using the Low End Mac to its fullest. I am
using a Quadra 700 and running
over 30 domains from it with over 140 email accounts.
I also have a large AS/400 steel cabinet, and that only has a fan
in it as well, but the cabinet is full of SE/30s. People think it's
an AS/400. I don't tell them otherwise. Why ruin the illusion?
How is that for touting the Low End Mac? Show me any Windows box
made the same year as the SE/30 (1989-90) or the Quadra 700 (1991-93)
running Internet apps for so long and so reliably.
In fact, I am guessing that you can't even find a Windows box that
could come close to the PowerBook 170, which is the newest of the
three machines.
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except
for the blinky lights and whirring fans. I left the fans in to cool
it down. I left a shelf in it and put my giant enormous computer in
there - a 
