26 ms·
Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac
- yelling_cat 6y agoI used to have an old Windows 2000 laptop without onboard WiFi that I called "Deadline" and used for the same purpose. If you have work you can do without connectivity for extended stretches I recommend it.
- dylan604 6y agowhy not set a timer and disable wifi/network for the duration of the time you are setting aside to work without distraction. Or, maybe just close the tab/app with the distracting alerts? lots of way to achieve the same result without limiting yourself to such ancient hardware. Modern Macs have Do Not Disturb mode. I use this frequently
- grugagag 6y agoWhy not step back in time? That is an experience in itself, as the author points out the keyboard does make a difference. Why vehemently oppose that?
- dylan604 6y agoIf it were a '69 Camaro, 'vette, or Mustang, sure, the older hardware would be exciting. However, they would not be very good daily drivers. Their fuel efficiency is crap, their safety features are non-existent, but they do look cool. If all I did was boring text based code work, then maybe an old hunk-o-junk could suffice, yet it's fuel efficiency (battery life) would also suck. I do get the fact that they might be dirt cheap, but you better buy 2 of them because anyone with an old car that runs has a junk car to get parts from to keep the other one running.
- menybuvico 6y agoWhy would using older hardware be limiting yourself any more than you just described? It just happens to do it by it's nature of being old instead of you deliberately limiting modern equipment. As long as it works, why not use the hardware if you have it and it's still operational? Older desktop PC's have a certain power usage issue compared to modern ones, but laptops usually tend to keep power consumption down.
- dylan604 6y agoI run photoshop, after effects, premiere. Those tools are absolutely not going to run on older hardware. Anything media related would just a joke. Even tools like FFMPEG, ImageMagick would run like a turtle processing the media I'm processing on a daily basis. Just because I'm coding something doesn't mean that code isn't doing some heavy lifting that older hardware would be suffice.
- menybuvico 6y agoIf you need to do some heavy work then an older system obviously won't do. Editing files with Vim, on the other hand, works just fine with something like a Core 2 or Pentium M. Everyone's use case is different, but in many cases, older hardware simply isn't a limitation.
- yelling_cat 6y agoAbsolutely, I just used Deadline for writing and light diagramming. As a bonus I actually liked Win2k, it was stable and didn't get in my way. The only thing it was missing was font smoothing.
- tomjen3 6y agoI removed the wifi card in older thinkpad for the same reason. Turns out i rarely use it.
- major505 6y agoLas week I brougth an old G4 the poped up in the marked. A rare thing to occour here, since they where super expensive when new. I paid something like 20 bucks for it. It came with a busted ide hard drive, but no worries. I went online and brought an ide to sd card adapter, and will now install Tiger in it. I don't spect to take any serious workload, but It will problably be fine to run Starcraft and Diablo II in it. Will see.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoYou'd be better off with a CF to IDE adapter. SD really isn't well suited to be a main OS volume. Or just get a SATA to IDE adapter.
- Causality1 6y agoAside from being pin-compatible is there a reason CF is more suitable for an OS volume than SD?
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoYou're unlikely to get support for modern high speed SD cards in these sort of adapters. CF has a better shot of supporting UDMA and even if not PIO mode 4 will get you 16MB/s which will likely outperform a typical SD slot in these devices.
- rootsudo 6y agoThat's great to know, probably why my SSD to ipod hdd didn't work out as great, and CF is the way to go.
- KozmoNau7 6y agoCF cards do wear leveling, which makes them much better suited as hard drive replacements than SD cards or USB sticks. It's the solution for people who want to play around with old computers without having to rely on old and probably flaky hard drives.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoThere are some Linux distros that still support 32-bit PowerPC architecture. Many old Macs find second-life running Mate or Xfce desktop.
- scarface74 6y agoMkLinux? https://www.mklinux.org/ https://www.mklinux.org/
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoI seem to recall Ubuntu Mate being the OS of choice for PowerPC users back in the day, but I lost track of what they all switched to when Ubuntu dropped 32-bit architecture.
- petepete 6y agoI'd say that Yellow Dog Linux was the most influential of the PowerPC distros. I ran it for years on my first generation Mac Mini. YUM, the package manager used until recently on RedHat/Fedora, was based on Yellow Dog's YUP: [Y]ellow Dog [UP]dater -> [Y]ellow Dog [U]pdater, [M]odified https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux
- tengbretson 6y agoI'm not trying to be a downer, but there is absolutely no reason to do this. For $50 you can do so much better without really trying all that hard. Now I fully appreciate the draw of doing something like this as a hobby or something, but this article is talking about productivity. This is not an investment for productivity.
- Causality1 6y agoYeah. I understand the desire for a new fondle-slab. I've personally made a hobby of rebuilding a collection of every computer I've ever owned. There's no need to justify it. They feel good. They look good. Industrial design was a whole different ballgame back when losing a percentage of display area didn't get you whipped by your manager.
- barney54 6y agoWhat would you suggest as an alternative?
- tengbretson 6y agoThis one would have a nicer keyboard and support modern software. https://www.ebay.com/i/324223000220?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-117182-37290-0&mkcid=2&itemid=324223000220&targetid=930952841002&device=m&mktype=pla&googleloc=9051525&poi=&campaignid=10454995850&mkgroupid=101996180125&rlsatarget=aud-622524042878:pla-930952841002&abcId=2145998&merchantid=119041245 https://www.ebay.com/i/324223000220?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1...
- SyneRyder 6y agoThat one doesn't include a hard drive, has several missing keys and mouse buttons, and doesn't include a battery or power adapter. The PPC Mac looks like the better value.
- wenc 6y agoAlso, I'm like why a laptop? Why not an old desktop? I personally don't enjoy writing with a laptop-sized monitor for long periods of time (ergonomically speaking). It's much more comfortable writing on a 24" LCD.
- CPAhem 6y agoMaybe it's just me, but the user interface on that old PowerPC Mac looks gorgeous - way better than modern "flat" UIs
- api 6y agoI find flat more aesthetically pleasing but often harder to use, and I've seen data to back that up. Problem is that people tend to confuse the two and fool themselves into thinking pretty equals usable. Glossy vs matte screens are the classic example. Glossy looks pretty but has way more issues with glare.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago> I find flat more aesthetically pleasing but often harder to use, and I've seen data to back that up. I would very much like to see that data; I'd be interested to see if/how to objectively measure such a thing. (Also the results would be interesting)
- duskwuff 6y agoThe AppleWorks UI was kind of an incoherent mess, stuck halfway between the Platinum and Aqua UIs. You can actually see elements of this in the screenshot -- the ruler in the word processor window is a relic of Platinum, with gray controls and bitmapped text, whereas the window frame and menu bars are more of an Aqua thing. (Except for the AppleScript menu, which is a Platinum-era icon again.) Then there's the "Button Bar", which was an entirely idiosyncratic element added to the OS X version of AppleWorks... Much of this is due to the history of AppleWorks -- it was a Carbon conversion of ClarisWorks, which dated back to 1991. Parts of the UI -- like that ruler -- are essentially unchanged from version 1.0.
- wtallis 6y agoFor the most part, that looks like it's after the pinstripes were toned down, but before the brushed metal fad took hold. So there's plenty of use of color and enough depth to make it easy to distinguish between UI elements. But as noted by others, there are some legacy holdovers on display, too. It's probably one of the most "timeless" looks ever used by OS X.
- jeffbee 6y agoUh, if all you need is to write documents on an air-gapped machine, it seems like practically anything would do the job. Any Mac of any age whatsoever, a typewriter ...
- icedchai 6y agoMy uncle was using a 25+ year old PC running DOS and WordPerfect up until he passed away last year. I think he enjoyed the distraction free environment.
- jeffbee 6y agoIs there a word for such long-lived computers that aren't hobbies? "Retrocomputing" is people goofing around. A person who drives a 1995 Honda is probably not a "retromobility enthusiast". Maybe at some point in our future it won't seem weird to use a 25-year-old computer.
- SllX 6y agoI think we could be there already if not for a few niggling details. The first iPad mini has just been vintaged by Apple, and my laptop won't be supported by Big Sur. There's nothing technically wrong with the laptop either, it's got max RAM, as much as the CPU and logic board will support, the drive, battery and wireless card are all replaceable, you can take out the optical drive and replace it with either one that supports Blu-ray or replace add another SSD, no USB3 ports but it does have Thunderbolt, Gigabit Ethernet, IR for an Apple Remote and an SDXC slot. Apple's just up and decided they're done supporting this laptop from 2012. A few forum posts I saw indicate if you were to force Big Sur on, everything but the wireless card would work. The only major silicon difference between this computer and models that are still supported is the integrated graphics, but without working wireless it's a bit of a non-starter. I could buy a couple of replacement parts and easily keep this thing going for another 5 years or longer, which I still can if I'm willing to give up on Mac OS X entirely. What I'm probably going to do is keep it going another year or two and replace it once the dust has settled a bit on ARM Macs and Apple has proved they're not going to take their Mac line down a ridiculous direction in the next few years, then maybe replace the operating system and find another use for the machine. Unless you're pushing the bleeding edge of performance, machines like this are still plenty good, especially if your RAM floor is 16GB. It's not the fastest, another machine I use for work screams by comparison, but there's not really any good reason a 2012 machine couldn't still be ticking along in 2037 if you've parts to service it with. Serviceability is really the only limiting factor at this point. That said most Macs that came after mine lost a lot in serviceability, so that's the caveat.
- sneak 6y agoFor approximately 10x as much ($500 USD), you can get a pre-retina Air, which has a much improved keyboard, working wifi, flash storage, and a modern OS and browser. It also happens to be way lighter. To me that’s more than a 10x improvement over the setup the author describes. There’s relatively little you can’t do on such a $500 machine.
- foobiekr 6y agoExcept get security updates that are only ever packaged in newer OS releases, for one thing. I get where you're coming from, but this is the fundamental problem with network-connected devices. I'm an Apple fan, of sorts, and my whole family is part of the Apple ecosystem, but the company has a nasty habit of strategic obsolescence and doubly so around transitions.
- sneak 6y ago$500 will get you an Air that will run the latest macOS, with all current updates. You can get a ten year old Air (that will not) for $100-200. It will also run the current version of the Linux kernel.
- sigjuice 6y agoBoth Mojave and Catalina support MacBook Air models from 2012.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago2012 is only 8 years ago tho
- SyneRyder 6y agoI'm giving this an upvote, because I have a MacBook 1,1 from 2006 that runs Windows 10. That's 14 years of support & security updates from Microsoft, and they didn't even make the device.
- foobiekr 6y ago
- mmphosis 6y agonew web browser for PowerPC Mac: http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ new OS for PowerPC Mac: https://voidlinux-ppc.org/ https://voidlinux-ppc.org/ or, a new PowerPC computer: https://www.talospace.com/ https://www.talospace.com/
- cellularmitosis 6y agoTigerbrew is also worth mentioning https://github.com/mistydemeo/tigerbrew https://github.com/mistydemeo/tigerbrew
- saagarjha 6y agoAnd MacPorts should still support a bunch of things too.
- jarcane 6y agoI would actually recommend trying MacPorts first, because it can uninstall cleanly, whereas TigerBrew is a fork from before Homebrew got around to thinking that might be a thing people would want. Which means you won't be able to try MacPorts if TB doesn't have what you want, which is likely IME, as a lot of the builds are broken these days and it's barely supported anymore.
- timw4mail 6y agoMacports works more reliably in my experience
- Applejinx 6y agohttp://www.airwindows,com http://www.airwindows,com I continue to compile my Audio Unit plugins, to this day, on a 10.6.8 Snow Leopard machine specifically so I can release them as PPC/32/64 bit fat binaries. Far as I know that should continue to hold for everything I've done (not sure if it holds for the Mac VST plugins, though) So that constitutes new audio DSP plugins for PowerPC Macs. Though I don't use it day-to-day, I've got an old G3 (?) Mac laptop. It does indeed have a better keyboard than modern ones… and from an audio production standpoint, it may not be up to high sample rates but it's got digital optical in AND out, standard. Just plug an optical cable into the headphone or mic jacks.
- kitsunesoba 6y agoIt's nice to see old laptops get a new lease on life this way, but it's hard to deny the compromises that come with such an approach. As nice as the old 12-inch Powerbooks/iBooks, T60s, etc were, they leave a lot to be desired by modern standards. This brings me to wonder how difficult it would be to develop a notebook that is specifically designed to be a focused offline ultraportable, using the most power efficient and cost effective components available along with an extremely lightweight, nearly nonexistent OS (think classic Mac OS) with some modern affordances and high-end touches (USB-C charging, milled single piece enclosure, etc). The imagined result is a machine that costs less than a decent Chromebook while being more responsive, having dramatically better battery life, and being generally more pleasant to use.
- jeffbee 6y agoHow would such a computer meaningfully differ from either a Pixelbook Go or an iPad with a keyboard? They both have stupefying battery life and there's not many ways to extend it because at this point virtually all of the power goes into the screen.
- kitsunesoba 6y agoOne of the benefits touted by the linked article is the forced offline aspect. The other is the much more restricted scope of apps, which keeps the user focused. These are technically achievable with an iPad or Pixelbook, but require effort and discipline on the part of the user and on some level directly contradict the design and intended use of both products. I think there are still significant savings to be had in terms of power usage/battery life. Lower power hardware puts a hard cap on how much any one application can consume and incentivizes efficiency on the part of the developer. The device's screen panel can also be selected for efficiency over density, brightness, color gamut, etc since those aren't priorities.
- edude03 6y agoArguably, these goals in terms of battery life / efficiency are already heavily incentivized for mobile developers - and by extension the iPad despite having "high end" processors. For mobile devices, generally, the strategy is hurry back to sleep, IE ramp up the CPU to do a job quickly then put the processor back in the lowest power state, and for many applications this works great. For the remaining applications, say mobile games, we might be limited more by the users desires (the best graphics, the lowest latency, the best colors, the most immersive sound) rather than this sort of hardware not being available. All this to say, I agree with you that such a device could still exist, I'm just saying we might be that far from it.
- glouwbug 6y agoI run a T43 for doing serious single threaded programming. Not that anyone would want to, but its surprisingly productive for pumping out clean work. I mean, its SO slow that firefox can't even open reddit or facebook without having a heart attack.
- jandrese 6y ago> In fact, for reasons I’m yet to discern, my iBook’s internal AirPort Wi-Fi card can’t connect to modern Wi-Fi networks—they simply confound it. WPA2 was standardized a year after his laptop was built. The ancient 802.11b card in it wants to do WEP. Getting driver support for a modern USB WiFi on that prehistoric version of OSX is no picnic either. It's a good thing he doesn't want to get it working.
- JohnTHaller 6y agoIt's got an ethernet jack, so there's always that.
- TimTheTinker 6y agoA more modern Mac with an Ethernet jack could share its internet connection from WiFi to Ethernet with a couple of clicks on System Preferences.
- adrianmonk 6y agoAnd you can also buy little ethernet to (client, not access point) wi-fi bridges. They're meant for connecting devices that don't have wi-fi, like printers or game consoles. From some quick research, one model is the IOGEAR GWU637. I've never used it, so that's not a recommendation or anything, just an example.
- 10bass 6y agoI can recommend the GWU637, with caveats. I spent 3 months in a hotel wrapping up a contract and starting a new job where the hotel wi-fi hated my Mac. Phone - fine. Tablet - fine. Mac? Might as well not have existed. It runs pretty hot and there's no 802.11ac support but often when you need this, that isn't an option anyway. There's an undocumented /menu.asp page that you're almost certainly going to need for anything other than a 192.168.1 network.
- jandrese 6y ago
- scarface74 6y agoOne of these days I’m going to dig up my PowerMac 6100/60 with the DOS Compatibility Card and my LCII with the //e card and 5-1/4 inch drive from my mom’s house. All of my disks are in a bedroom so they might still be usable. Any way I can get old Ambrosia games?
- duskwuff 6y ago> Any way I can get old Ambrosia games? https://macintoshgarden.org/ https://macintoshgarden.org/ has most of them. (Sadly, Ambrosia appears to have shut down entirely. End of an era...)
- linguae 6y agoOne of the things I miss about older laptops is the keyboards. I would love to buy a laptop that is built like a PowerBook G4 or a ThinkPad X61 but with modern displays and modern internals, and with extra bonus points if it has user-replaceable batteries and user-serviceable storage and RAM. I've found the Thinkpad X62 (https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/ https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/) and X210 (https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/ https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/) projects rather intriguing. Unfortunately I missed out on the 2017 ThinkPad T25, which I would have purchased had I not been strapped for cash at the time. One idea that I have is for a laptop manufacturer to develop a chassis that comes with a high-resolution display and a high-quality keyboard (like those of older ThinkPads), and where the user can supply an Intel Compute Stick or a similar device for computing power. This way the chassis can be used for a long time while the user upgrades compute sticks.
- mkeeter 6y agoHave you seen the MNT Reform? https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-personal-computer.html https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-p... It's not as powerful as most modern laptops (uses an iMX8 SOM, rather than an x86 CPU), but it's got a full keyboard, trackball (!), replaceable batteries, etc.
- aww_dang 6y agoThis deserves a discussion on the front page.
- lostgame 6y agoHey; me, too! I use my iMac G4 and PowerMac G5 (with 16GB RAM and 2x1TB SSDs) daily. Love ‘em. Thank God for TenFourFox!
- saagarjha 6y agoThat’s more storage and RAM than my current computer…
- awiesenhofer 6y agothat powermac sounds like a great machine - what are you using it and the imac for if i may ask? i have an old Imac g4 too, but apart from games i haven't gotten around to use it for anything productive...
- sys_64738 6y agoCrazy the battery still holds charge. Those were first to go for me.
- stanislavb 6y agoThere is a histerish cafe in Sofia, Bulgaria, that has one of those Macs in every room and allows customers to play/select music from it. I think they never updated those machines as they just work and make the vibe of the cafe even more interesting as time passes.
- mmglr 6y agoI enjoy the nostalgia of booting up and using old machines. After the first sentence this article came off as disingenuous. There are easier ways to stay productive without needing to break out a 17 year old Mac. It’s almost like the author is trying to convince himself this is a good idea. Turning off WiFi and using apps in full screen seems much easier. The author mentions Slack. I’ve been using Mattermost for about 2 years now. I’ve found that having a mandatory offline schedule is important. I’ve been vocal about that with my team. Usually I’m offline from Mattermost for about 2-3 hours a day. Which allows me to focus on my work.
- prvc 6y ago>Still Recently acquired, however.
- emersonrsantos 6y agoGeorge R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels, he saves his work on floppy disks. Of course, he has a second computer for email and web browsing.
- nordsieck 6y ago> George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2. * It was designed for elementary school children so it's decently rugged. * It runs a long time (months) on 2 AA batteries. * To get the text off the device, it impersonates a USB keyboard, making it compatible with basically every computer.
- mnl 6y agoHe likes WordStar 4.0. There are people who like WordPerfect for DOS, Word 5.1 for Mac or even XyWrite. It's fairly easy (not always cheap) to get almost any old computer you could think of in very good condition to run the programs you like without further hassles. This can make a lot of sense because sometimes there are hassles associated to virtualisation/emulation/modern hardware. Maybe you feel at home using WordStar 4.0 + VGA text mode in a CRT monitor. If that's the case, you can't beat the ease and responsiveness of a DOS computer. I have this conviction that there's nothing wrong with that.
- Jaruzel 6y agoI put together a 'RRMartin' setup on an old laptop - booting into DOS and then auto launching WordStar 4.0. I can see how appealing it would be for focused writing (I'm still trying to find my perfect set up for writing). I also toyed with releasing the setup as a USB boot image, but the copyright on WordStar is still very much active :(
- mhd 6y agoMaybe "much better" when it comes to distraction-less writing, although I don't think a DOS computer offers more than that, and the portability only enables going to places where there's more going on… But a predilection towards WordStar isn't just about not having fancy icons and weird ribbons, as author Robert Sawyer[1] pointed out. The "long page" metaphor and a short-cut friendly environment should be somewhat understandable for us programmer people. [1]: https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm
- toadi 6y agobecause I didn't have a lot of money I was working on a 486 when pentiums were the normal. I used a pentium when most where on pentium 3. thank god for linux to make my computers workable. Mail: mutt, Editor: vim, actually most like newsgroups, irc, .. all had cli clients. Only netscape was run in a very lightweight window manager like blackbox. good thing about that in my teens is that I learned a shit load about computers and now 25 years later having a nice carreer thanks to tinkering with that.
- ulzeraj 6y agoSame here. I was using a Pentium 3 Coppermine with a Voodoo 3 PCI GPU running Slackware while all my friends had fancy Athlon XPs and Geforces. The motherboard went bad (back then the capacitor plague was a thing) and after a few months without a computer I said fuck it and just soldered a new capacitor where the old one was bloated. I'm so bad at soldering and it was such an ugly job. But then it booted! I was so proud of myself. I was a poor kid and computers were expensive and I just had brought my machine back to life.
- SwiftyBug 6y agoOf course it's not the same accomplishment as yours, but when I was 15 I found a computer in the trash with all the parts still in it. I took off the RAM sticks and put them in my sister's computer. It got much faster, she was very pleased and I was very proud.
- FreeFull 6y agoFun fact: The latest Linux kernel will still run fine on a 486, and give you a somewhat useable experience. You just need to make sure to pick a distro that hasn't built its packages targetting newer instructions than what a 486 offers.
- DJHenk 6y agoMy personal anecdote about this is the time I was a student and a room mate and I were doing the same assignment that involved creating a program for some statistical simulation. I had a 486, he had just gotten a brand new blazing fast pentium of the first generation. Compiling and running the simulation took eight minutes on my computer, three seconds on his. And in the end we started and finished around the same time. Because while he was iterating quickly, continuously changing something and running it again, I just sat in front my monitor contemplating the problem and my solution. When I finally got the chance to update my program, I was able to make a big, significant change. Lesson learned: it is not the computer time that is important, but the thinking time. And thinking time is spent best in big blocks, not in tiny slivers.
- dddddaviddddd 6y agoTrying to get a new battery is one of the worst parts of trying to use an old notebook.
- jerzyt 6y agoI'm on a Dell Precision M6400 - it's 12 years old. When it came out it was a $3,000 laptop. I bought mine for about half of that on a fire sale a year later. Still love it, although I do have a 10 year younger ThinkPad, I prefer the much older Dell.
- AnonHP 6y ago> By 2006, Apple had transitioned away from IBM’s processor designs. Wasn’t the initial PowerPC architecture and designs done by Apple, IBM and Motorola, with Motorola and IBM also working the fabs for processors used by Apple during that time (before the switch to Intel)? When did Apple stop being involved in the design of specific processors used in its systems?
- timw4mail 6y agoI don't think Apple was really involved in the design side of PowerPC. As far as I know, Apple has only designed ARM processors.
- zelos 6y ago> Of course, it goes without saying that my ancient iBook can’t run Slack Out of interest, I wonder what the minimum spec to run an IRC client is?
- bfuclusion 6y agoA 386 w/5mb of ram. Or at least it was when I was doing so in 1995. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC
- einr 6y agoI see your 386 and raise you an 8088 at 4.77 MHz and 256K of RAM (or less, I'm not sure what the actual requirements of ircjr is if you want to push it): http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/IRCjr.html http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/IRCjr.html Really, it's just text, it doesn't matter. Literally any general purpose computer will run IRC if it can do TCP/IP and someone bothers to write a client.
- anthk 6y agoAdd Gopher to that stack too, with Gopherus.
- bfuclusion 6y agoNice. I have an old Cordata 8088 around somewhere at my parents house. I'll have to boot it up and see if I can get a network card for it.
- einr 6y agoIf you do want to pursue that, a couple of tips: Most ISA network cards are for the 16-bit bus, XT class machines only have 8-bit slots. This doesn't necessarily mean that the cards will not function, but you also need a packet driver and they very often use 186/286 instructions and will not run at all on an 8088. The Intel EtherExpress 8∕16 will work, so will the 3Com 3C501. You may also have some luck with generic NE1000/NE2000 clones.
- squeezingswirls 6y ago> Does this mean we’ll see another PowerPC desktop computer or laptop in the future? Not likely. This project https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/ https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/ is pretty advanced in that regard.
- aaccount 6y agobecause you are broke
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wink 6y ago> Predictably, I’ve found that having a dedicated, internet-free laptop has helped me become more productive. > Old Mac Games Still Run, Too Spot the error. I still have a small-ish Centrino laptop from 2004 that's running Windows XP. It's been airgapped for roughly 10 years (wifi broke and at some point there were no updates for XP) but it's getting occasional use as a portable DVD player. I don't get why you'd willingly buy an old machine to be constrained but I hate throwing out old stuff that still works. And this does.
- minerjoe 6y agoInnovation through limitation. It can work wonders as the author is suggesting. Working with old technology also gives you valuable insight into the worlds current latency-poor bloated software. You might be able to run the latest but with latency that is hidden on modern machines now painfully visible, you might think otherwise. This leads to choosing software that is fast, minimal, and effective.
- nix23 6y ago>I still have a small-ish Centrino laptop from 2004 that's running Windows XP Upgrade it to Vista, have fun ;)
- RalfWausE 6y agoWhy not use old(er) Systems when they fulfill your needs? A computer is a tool, such as a typewriter, printing press, paintbrush or hammer. Would anyone argue about the age of a typewriter or hammer if its in good working condition? In fact, i am using an Atari 520ST as my main computer since my laptop died a while ago. It started as an experiment, but now "it just works". I got network connectivity, email and (limited) internet access through a "Netusbee" adapter, and easy modern media access through a gotek floppy emulator. Perhaps i am just crazy, but it simply works!
- dschooh 6y agoThis sounds interesting. Would you mind to elaborate on your workflow and what you do with it specifically? I'd love to see some screen shots.
- RalfWausE 6y agoI work (apart from my sysop dayjob) as a it-trainer, so i need to design handouts for my students for which i use "Singum!", an old, but really nice DTP software. Normally i print the handout on my Epson LQ-500 dot-matrix printer (which produces really nice prints for an dot matrix printer) and photocopy them in the institute i teach in. I need to maintain attendance-stats, lists of exam-results and other spreadsheets, for which i use "VIP-Professional", it is Lotus 1-2-3 compatible and i have a small tool that converts its spreadsheets into *.csv if i need to send the files to someone with a more modern system. For the normal letter writing etc. i use "Papyrus". I was thinking to put this whole "using an ancient computer in modern times" thing into an article for a while now, it seems i will have to stop procrastinating on this matter and start writing in the next few days ;-)
- VLM 6y agoWRT ancient see http://www.retrochallenge.org/ http://www.retrochallenge.org/ Last years entrants had more homemade computer designs than usual. Historically there seem to be "a lot" of pdp-8 and IBM mainframe type entrants.
- 6y ago
- verytrivial 6y agoOld games, old productivity software. If they were good when they were new, I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes. It's a weird marketing and social undermining of comfort and control. Sure there is the 'security' argument, and an accretion of various quirks, but people were often happy dealing with these quirks in the day, and as OP says, making interoperability frictionful has an definite upside with all the media and IT giants trying to mine your attention span for money.
- JD557 6y agoI'm not going to argue about old productivity software, but some games do indeed "age badly". Obviously the game stays the same, but game designed has advanced and, if you are used to play modern games, some problems that are mostly fixed on all games from the last decade become annoyingly obvious. For me, the main one is controls: * Once you are used to WASD+mouse for FPS, going back to ctrl+arrow-keys (with some awkward keys to strafe and look up/down) is awful. If you are able to patch the controls to WASD+mouse, some games then become much easier than intended (since they were not designed with circle strafing in mind). * Controlling the camera in old 3D platforming games is also a pain. It's amazing how long it took to move the camera controls from the bumpers to right the analog stick. The limited ability to control the camera is also partially responsible for it to get stuck in corners a lot. There are also some level design choices that are arguably bad, but were required at the time, such as loading tunnels or abusing backtracking/repeated assets (e.g. fight all bosses again) to make the game longer.
- anthk 6y agoEh, this is PowerMacs. Games used WASD + mouse from long ago.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoNot to mention that a lot of that "old" productivity software is so much faster than its "modern" replacement that running it in a Electron-based VM is still faster.
- the_af 6y ago
- napolux 6y agoYou can just setup a raspberry pi with no wifi and write in a dos like env like DOSBOX o FreeDOS. I have a raspberry pi 2 I can use for that, probably. Ok, I've found my weekend project :P
- cat199 6y agoriscos might be a good bet for this kind of thing
- vaxman 6y agoI used to run YellowDogLinux (now famous for “yum”) on my last (17”) PowerBook G3 and had triple boot with ClassicMac emulation along with MacOS X Lompoc. F’ing mainboards blew several times on all of my non-plastic PowerBooks and MacBookPros, except for the latest, which just had its keyboard and screen replaced (and its second keyboard is going out again). Some of the machines had broken DVD injectors, memory sockets that would come short (the real reason they solder it now), lots of them have had power supply issues. They always want us to buy the next one which is supposed to fix the thermal or mechanical or whatever.. My favorite was the MBP+LG UltraFine 5K that would reboot when a shortwave operator keyed up the mic. The guy from HP who specializes in Chinese supply chains and runs Apple now is an iPad Pro power user and it shows. Just buy iPad Pro —if you develop for them, then switch to Flutter and add an Xcode-server to your network.
- shortformblog 6y agoI literally spent the weekend setting up Debian on a Mac Mini. While I had trouble getting anything more modern to install (certain dependencies are hard to find), I was able to get Arctic Fox working, and found that it was fairly snappy given the fact it’s running on a G4 processor.
- dilandau 6y agoAh yes, the "computer as glorified typewriter" blog post. Needless to say, I think these appeal to people because: Encourage consumption (of old/novelty hardware) Promise of "productivity" (the holy grail for hn commenters) A pip on your shoulder for being different/special Deflect from the hard problems internet addiction and procrastination, to "hey do this instead"
- qubex 6y agoHe calls it an iBook but I’m pretty sure it’s a PowerBook 12”. I got one of those when they were released and it soon earned the pet-name of ‘sparky’ because when charging it wasn’t very well grounded and would regularly give me shocks.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Wandfarbe 6y ago"I have a completly outdated system with internet connectivity because i'm not using what an average user is doing at all and now i'm writing an article about it" I have upgraded from a X220 to a X390 for a single reason: YouTube Videos, which i like to watch on my laptop, started to put the x220 under high load. I'm just not writing an Article about it. Ah and one generic reason for not having something with is 20 years old: You do wanna have security updates.
- anthk 6y ago> started to put the x220 under high load. invidio.us, mpv + youtube-dl, smplayer...
- Wandfarbe 6y agoSry i'm a software engineer, i like hardware and i don't have any issue upgrading my laptop to be able to just watch a youtube video on my browser without any manual hardware optimized workaround. ...
- novaleaf 6y agoFor those finding this route interesting, just spend 4x more ($200) and get a modern-ish laptop, used, off craigslist or offerup. I'm typing on a Lenovo X1 Carbon (gen2) I bought for $200 last week. Win10, 1440p touchscreen, ssd, bitlocker encrypted with fingerprint biometrics. I've seen macbooks at the same pricerange, but I'm a windows guy.
- johnklos 6y agoAn old Mac is infinitely more usable than a Windows machine for those of us that can't warp our brains enough to try to understand Windows.
- tantalor 6y ago> it goes without saying that my ancient iBook can’t run Slack What? That's a very surprising statement! Of course Slack has a web client. Does it not support any browser that runs on the old hardware?
- stu2b50 6y agoWell, yeah? I'd be shocked if any supported browser can run a modern SPA. That's not even necessarily because of resource limitations, it's just very, very different from the techniques of the era.
- nonamenoslogan 6y agoI still regularly use an iBook G4 to write HTML and play games. Love the simplicity of the oldies but goodies.
- incanus77 6y agoI’ve recently revived a boxy, suitcase 386 and the biggest thing that jumped out at me was the lack of distraction and the similarity to an old tool. I blogged about it a bit recently: https://justinmiller.io/posts/2020/06/17/project-386-part-4/ https://justinmiller.io/posts/2020/06/17/project-386-part-4/ I mean, yeah, it’s not _capable_ of a whole lot, but it’s a refreshing perspective to look back at computing from then and to think about how much we did that wasn’t sitting at the computer as a nerve center of our lives.
- sentientforest 6y agoI have a lot of vintage Apple tech. Much of it still works... I have a 2001 PowerPC G4 Quicksilver tower. Haven't booted it in a while, but it worked fine last time I did. If you can find these local to you, you can often get them very cheap. Shipping is expensive though, so buying them on a place like eBay is kind of a non-starter. I recently found a sealed old copy of Cubase VST available online for about $10. Bought an old M-Audio PCI card a long time ago for this machine too. At some point I may set it up as a Digital Audio Workstation. I found a pair of old (2001) PowerPC iBooks on eBay a while back. They're good for running kids games and software - useful if you want an inexpensive, air-gapped machine for a young child you don't want on the open internet. Or typing / writing. These can be had very cheaply, I think because many schools bought them and eventually liquidated their inventory to replace with newer equipment. I had no problem finding inexpensive new batteries for these on eBay, and bought a couple extras. More regularly, I use my old mid-2007 black macbook to run the original Starcraft. I'm running it via the OS X Installer (it's originally a PowerPC OS 9 game). I'm not much of a gamer these days, but Starcraft can be fun once in a while... like when PG&E in California shuts off the power for days and you want to conserve your main laptop's battery for work... And it's cool to have games that actually support local lan multiplayer, which Blizzard moved away from over time. For anyone looking to delve deeper into this topic, here's some recommendations (off the top of my head) on what version of OS X to settle on for a given machine: For older Intel Machines, I recommend 10.6 Snow Leopard. This is the last OS to support Rosetta, which allows you to run PowerPC OS X software. Note: PowerPC OS X software, not PowerPC OS 9 / Classic software. For older PPC machines, I recommend 10.4 Tiger. This is the last OS to support running OS 9 applications via the Classic environment. Or of course, you can just install OS 9 and forego OS X altogether.
- 1MachineElf 6y agoAh nostalgia. Thinking about grabbing a used iBook for playing Bugdom.
- letusknow123 6y agoPowerPCs were great I really miss OS X Tiger.
- dividedbyzero 6y agoI wish I had something like that, but I never got into PowerPC Macs, I bought into the ecosystem with I think the second generation of plastic Intel Macbooks (which, looking back, were quite terrible), and while there's still an early 90s Schneider home computer somewhere in the basement, I fear it won't work anymore and not be any joy to use anyway; that thing was incredibly primitive. It took almost a whole afternoon for my dad to make it play a really simple child's tune for little me. I don't think I appreciated it properly at the time. I wonder if a Pi 4 would have the horsepower to run a PowerPC emulator with OS 9 properly. If it did, the biggest difficulty might be finding a decent small-ish external screen.
- mcdramamean 6y agoFor me the the issue with upgrading is that when you buy a piece of hardware, specifically DJ gear (Serato), mixers/interfaces, etc; the latest and greatest often doesn't support it. Then you are hoping and wishing for the company to create drivers to support your expensive hardware on the latest Catalina OS upgrade. That's why when you see interviews with many musicians that have home studios, the computers aren't the newest. Once you have a stable situation that works, why change all the time?