24 ms·

PowerMac 6100 Upgrade Guide (2000)

76 points by nickt 4y ago

lproven 4y ago
Interesting guide. I learned OS X on an old PCI PowerMac that a client gave to me in exchange for some unpaid bills. It's 20 years ago now, so I am not 100% sure but I think it was a 7600. Over the next few years, it got transformed, incrementally and with inexpensive 2nd-hand parts: CPU: 200Mz PowerPC 604 → 333MHz G3 RAM: 32MB → 768 MB HDD: 2GB SCSI → 40GB EIDE Graphics: onboard unaccelerated framebuffer → PCI ATI Radeon Ports: ADB + SCSI → USB 2 + FireWire All gradual, and it remained working and usable throughout. It started out with MacOS 7.6 or so, and ended up on 10.2 "Jaguar", while still able to run the same apps. An astonishingly upgradable computer, and the OS was made possible at all by XPostFacto.
jrnichols 4y ago
I loved my old 6100/66. had like 264 (2 x 128mb + 8mb onboard) RAM, that AV card, and a Sonnet G3/233 card. I absolutely loved that machine for as long as I could until the OS X era came around. the bottleneck became the SCSI drives and then networking, being limited to the 10mbit AAUI port. I too have happy memories of those days. Computers were a whole lot more fun.
kerblang 4y ago
I still have my 6100, tempted to try exploring this. Always felt like that era was the last of the "fun macs" when things weren't all busybody fussy unixy with hi-res gradients and hyperslickness and so forth. The new macs just took the "personal" out of personal computing, as I see it. Take that with a grain of salt, of course.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Nothing about that first generation of Power Mac reminds me of "fun". It reminds me more of "kernel panics right before CD-R is finalized" or "kernel panics whenever the network cable is unplugged" or sometimes "kernel panics whenever any network cable anywhere on campus is unplugged" and quite frequently "kernel panics if I try to scan a slide" oh and from time to time "installing MS Office from 60 floppies is a bit of a chore". Really cannot think of anything in my personal history of computing that was less fun than a mid-90s Mac.
  - sharikous 4y ago
    I am not even sure there was something that you could call a kernel in that time. Apple was failing in their quest to secure a modern successor to MacOS 7. It sure was a lot of fun looking at what they threw at it, and MacOS 9.2 was polished for sure. But without MacOS X, MacOS would have gone the way of BeOS and Amiga...
    - theodric 4y ago
      Still a pity it didn't literally go the way of BeOS by acquiring Be, like might have happened. I used both NeXTstep on 68k and BeOS on Intel, and much preferred the latter. NeXTstep was a crawling horror of abstractions, which might have made it more portable, but also made it clunky. Anyone else remember having a top-spec iMac G4 in 2002 that couldn't even scroll or resize a window smoothly? Pathetic, and painfully slow. I gave up on 10.1.x and just ran Yellow Dog for about a year until I managed to lay my hands on a copy of 10.2, which was marginally better, but still much slower than Linux at the time. The iLamp was a wonderful machine, but very much let down by its intended OS.
      - lproven 4y ago
        > Still a pity it didn't literally go the way of BeOS by acquiring Be I disagree. I loved BeOS. I still miss it. It was a great OS, and I preferred it to NeXTstep. But it wasn't just the OS. NeXT had 2 key things Be didn't: [1] state-of-the-art dev tools [2] Steve Jobs. Stealing from my own blog post on the subject... Apple's then CEO Gil Amelio was considering buying former Apple VP Jean-Louis Gassée's company Be, for BeOS, or Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' company NeXT Computer, for OpenStep, the successor to NeXTstep. They went with NeXT. BeOS was excellent - small, fast, efficient, modern, streamlined, and ran on Apple kit. The company was small, with some excellent engineers. The snag is, Gassée wanted a lot more for it than Apple was offering. Although this was bad - terminal - news for Be, it was probably all for the best for Apple. BeOS was a great OS, but if Apple had moved to it, its 3rd party developers probably would not have, for the most part, and it would have killed the company. Apple needed a follow-on for classic MacOS, it needed it urgently and it needed to be a blinder. BeOS did not have one crucial advantage that NeXTstep offered, and as such, it would not have had the same appeal, the devs probably would not have fallen in love with the new Apple OS, and Apple would have withered and died. What didn't BeOS have that NeXTstep had? Well... NeXT was going cost a packet anyway - it was doing better and had some big names on board. Some were working for it, including several people who worked on the Mac in the early days, including, of course, Jobs himself. It also had some serious clients, including CERN - where Tim Berners-Lee developed the WorldWideWeb on a NeXTstation, and corporate clients such as the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS). NeXT's OS was also beautiful, sophisticated & very hi-tech - but didn't run on Macs, nor even on the Mac's PowerPC processors. It offered 2 major advantages over Be, though: #1, getting Steve Jobs back, and #2, one of the great strengths of NeXTstep was its world-class, industry-leading development tools. Be had nothing to rival these. Amelio went with NeXT. If the Mac had to move to a new OS, then all Mac developers would have to learn to code for the new OS. Mac devs were pretty wedded to their platform, as were Mac users. And transitioning to a whole new OS, Apple really needed to get the devs on board. Classic MacOS's dev tools were nothing special and quite hard work. Be was moving its dev tools over to GCC but whereas this was good, it was nothing amazing. But NeXT's Objective-C and Interface Builder were in a whole different league. Getting the Mac 3rd party devs to move to NeXTstep would be vastly easier than to BeOS, as NeXT's dev tools were almost universally recognised as among the best in the industry. So that's what Amelio did, and history has proved him right.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It was at the heyday of the "personal" computer on both sides of the divide; a single upgrade could make your machine magically more capable in ways we don't really have now. Adding a new processor could be a huge speed improvement, adding a new graphics card would greatly expand your screen capabilities, etc. This site alone has a system with a 601 at 60MHz replaced with a G4 at 300 MHz, and RAM from 8MB to 264MB. That's like going from 8GB to 256GB today, just insane difference to how you use the system (and RAM was much faster than the disk back then, so RAM disks made sense, etc). I remember our last DOS computer had enough RAM that it made sense to RAMdisk most of the most commonly used programs we had, even though it slowed boot up copying them into the RAM disk.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    Yeah, performance advanced much faster then. That 601->G4 was a 5x clockspeed jump that was way more than 5x faster in certain areas, too! That's a computer that came out in 1994 upgraded with a processor from 1999. Even if you could put a 2022 chip in a 2017 Mac laptop, it wouldn't be the same sort of improvement. IMO this slowdown in the pace of single-component improvements is what has killed upgradability - buying a computer in the 90s, you knew that within a generation or two you'd probably be looking at at least a doubling in general-purpose or capacity, applicable-everywhere performance within the same socket/graphics card interface/hard drive/memory interfaces. So not having component upgradability, like, say, in some eMachines without an AGP port, was a big limiting factor for the usable lifespan, in a way it just isn't anymore.
- cmiles74 4y ago
  I had a 7200 and it never really performed very well. The "software" modem/telephony device was interesting, but the backing software was too crashy. Mostly I remember it seeming slower than the last generation of 68k Quadras; I had one of those on my desk at my day job. The first generation iMac, on the other hand, I did think was a lot of fun. All of the sudden the UI was responsive and the software was surprisingly reliable.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > The "software" modem/telephony device was interesting, but the backing software was too crashy. I had a Mac from that era that sipped with a software modem, and at some point I upgraded to a serial modem for exactly that reason.
- pcurve 4y ago
  Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Some people here get so touchy over post next jobs era macs. I do disagree with your timing though. I think the best of times was in the early to mid 90s. With radius graphics card. Daystar accelerators on Nubus slots. For some macs, separate math coprocessor. Asante network card. APS and LaCie external scsi hard drive and Daisy chaining them. Adb port devices. Nostalgia!!
  - kerblang 4y ago
    Actually I bought my 6100 somewhere around '93-'95. I know it was before 1996. But I'm not actually saying the 6100 was "the best of" anything; it was the bottom-of-the-line cheapest one you could get at the time. I'm really just talking about pre-OSX. The early Macs were and are fun too.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Over the weekend, some of us old timers were reminiscing about the bad old days of the early Avid NLEs. The damn chain of ADB dongles to enable the software and various plugins that to the uninitiated looked a lot like S-Video and would ultimately get plugged into the wrong port, bending pins ruining the dongle, then being told by support that a dongle could not be replaced. Striping 7 full height media drives in a SCSI enclosure just to get enough bandwidth to record the video, but not enough for audio that got saved to yet another drive. Also, SCSI chains requiring terminators (or not), and internal SCSI drives with the jumpers in the wrong pins. Original Wacom tablets built like tanks. 21" CRT monitors that weighed a bazillion pounds, had half-a-mile of bezels, and sitting 2 side by side caused EMI so the images were disturbed. ProTools requiring DSP boards that numbered more than slots in the computer. Expansion chasis to handle all of the extras. All now outpowered by your damn social media device, er, smart phone
    - azalemeth 4y ago
      Happy memories indeed. I always thought ADB was ahead of its time and although it really wasn't hot-pluggable it was, in fact, almost hot-pluggable. Much moreso than the AT PC keyboard connector at any rate. And it just made so much sense having one connector for all input peripherals, unlike DB-9 mice and DIN keyboards! I also fondly remember DIP switches being added onto SCSI external drives along with their block-like 50Ω resistor terminations. Woe betide you if you pushed the case back against the wall and flipped one of those mid-write...
- haroldp 4y ago
  I was thinking it was the end of the era of fun websites too. That is overstated, but...
- linguae 4y ago
  I greatly appreciate the Jobs-era Mac OS X, with its Unix and NeXT heritage; in fact I personally think the high water mark of the Mac from both a software and hardware perspective was the Mac OS X Snow Leopard era. Nowadays I use FreeBSD and Windows, but I would be glad to use a variant of Snow Leopard with HiDPI support, updated browsers, and security patches if such existed. With that being said, there is something warm-feeling and even whimsical about the classic Mac OS and classic beige Macs. I truly think the Apple Human Interface Guidelines of the 1990s were well written and are timeless recommendations for making great, usable software. I believe designers of today's user-facing software tools should acquaint themselves with a classic Mac running contemporary programs like Microsoft Word 5.1 and the ClarisWorks suite to see great examples of well-designed software. I also like both the System 7 and Platinum themes, with a slight preference toward Platinum. I'm really curious about A/UX, which married the classic Mac OS and Unix, and I'm also curious about Rhapsody, a predecessor to Mac OS X that was based on NeXTSTEP but featured the Platinum theme from Mac OS 8.
  - yodsanklai 4y ago
    In what sense recent MacOS are worse than snow leopard?
    - linguae 4y ago
      To be honest, my switch to FreeBSD and Windows had more to do with hardware (notably the lack of upgradeability in many Macs since Tim Cook took over) and less to do with software. macOS is still a good OS; I use Monterey on my work-issued MacBook Pro. However, my biggest gripes are: 1. The increased iOS-ification of the user interface. I believe a desktop operating system should support desktop workflows and not import at wholesale UI elements that don't make sense outside of touchscreen environments; I have a similar complaint about modern Windows and GNOME. 2. The introduction of notarization. 3. Over the years I've noticed that macOS has gotten more annoying when it comes to notifications. Back in the Leopard era there was a classic commercial mocking Windows Vista's "Cancel or Allow" dialogs. Yet it seems I have to wade through many notifications whenever I'm using Macs these days. In my opinion, it seems that the old guard from the days of the classic Mac, NeXTSTEP, and early Mac OS X with their deep knowledge of the UI guidelines of those eras has less and less influence at Apple these days, while younger software developers with little-to-no experience with these operating systems but who have extensive experience with the Web and newer operating systems are having more influence on the Mac's UI/UX. Unfortunately the Mac is becoming more like iOS and less like an operating system completely tailored to the desktop computing experience. Don't get me wrong, modern macOS is still a good OS, but I prefer the Snow Leopard era of Mac OS X.
- cesaref 4y ago
  Yeah, good memories of that era. I had a 7500, which was a very upgradeable machine, taking lots of memory and CPU (and cache cards - remember them?). Mine had an annoying beat, like two fans running at slightly different speeds. Apart from that, it was a great machine, and ran Logic really well which was it's main job.
haroldp 4y ago
Ouch, nostalgia poisoning. I had a 6100AV with a Maxpower G3 card, back in the day.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  Me too—I inherited a 6100 from my employer and used this site quite a bit. I bet it’s still in a box somewhere in the basement… (checks weekend calendar)
- sjm-lbm 4y ago
  I never had a 6100 (honestly never even had a Mac pre-OSX), but I'm getting a massive amount of nostalgia poisoning from just the website. For most of the 90s, probably into the 2000s for a bit, finding a "fan page" like this was like striking gold. I feel like the equivalent today is some mix of finding a well-written Wiki page and a well-moderated subreddit on some topic or product you are interested in, but the personal touch on pages like this is somehow cooler. It makes me feel somewhat good to read this page and realize how charming I still find it.
spicybeef 4y ago
I love this site. I just recently used it to pick out some RAM upgrades for my own PM 6100/60MHz upgraded with a MAXpowr G3 266MHz CPU upgrade. It also helped me confirm that a 7100 video card I had in my parts bin could be used on it as well!
ctime 4y ago
> p.s. Use Netscape, or be viciously mocked, taunted and ridiculed. This is how we used to talk to each other.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pcurve 4y ago
  In the 90s some of us derogatorily called it Nutscrape because l33t folks should be using Lynx. Good old days.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
johnklos 4y ago
There are no 256 meg 72 pin SIMMs. The page linked to from this site says that the author was mistaken, and they were 168 pin SIMMs. While 512 meg SIMMs are possible, they'd be custom. Otherwise, a 256 meg SIMM would be a single bank, which wouldn't make much sense.
jnwatson 4y ago
I paid $3k for a PowerMac 7100 in 1994. I remember paying $1600 for an extra 32 MiB RAM around 1996. I also bought L2 cache (an external module back in those days), and then a G3 upgrade. It lasted me a good 10 years.
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  >I remember paying $1600 for an extra 32 MiB RAM around 1996 I remember doing exactly this around the same time. Back then, RAM was almost considered a durable good, because RAM prices had remained stable for so long. I thought, "well, this is expensive, but I'll get most of my money back if I ever sell the computer," and this wasn't a completely insane idea at the time.
- telesilla 4y ago
  My Powermac 6100 AV, bought second hand for $1500 in 1996 came with RCA connectors, I got it to make music. That purchase kickstarted my career in all things digital. Came with 200MB drive I upgraded to a whopping 2GB. I travelled with it until I got an ibook, which was much more portable for gigs!
- bluedino 4y ago
  >> I remember paying $1600 for an extra 32 MiB RAM around 1996 That's odd - I remember memory prices being really low around those times, and my friends and I loaded up our Windows 95 machines with 16 or 32MB for $50-$150 when it was on sale 1996 Best Buy ad for reference: https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/enhanced/web03/2011/9/19/18/enhanced-buzz-1383-1316471212-32.jpg?downsize=800:*&output-format=auto&output-quality=auto https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/enhanced/web...
  - Cockbrand 4y ago
    While Macs did have the same specs and connectors for SIMMs as PCs, they were much more picky in terms of which modules they'd accept. You could do some research and find out which cheap modules were 100% compatible, or you could buy special Mac compatible modules for a quite notable markup from Crucial, Kingston and the like. This might explain the price difference.
PaulHoule 4y ago
OS 8 and 9 were unreliable at using the internet because unlike Windows or Linux it was not a 32 bit OS with real memory protection. I remember various releases that struggled with the problem, especially they added a whole bunch of locks to protect memory structures which slowed the machine down dramatically. Classic Mac OS was designed to handle events raining in from the keyboard and mouse and was able to run on the 128k classic Mac but Apple was in serious trouble in the 1990s until MacOS X which was competitive with the competition.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > OS 8 and 9 were unreliable at using the internet because unlike Windows or Linux it was not a 32 bit OS with real memory protection. This isn't my recollection at all, although the lack of protected memory on "Classic Mac OS" means that you would've personally experienced unreliable anything if you were also running poorly-written extensions or other software on your system. System 7 (1991) was the first 32-bit version of Classic Mac OS, and Internet Explorer for Macintosh was very advanced for its time. Classic Mac OS had a healthy browser ecosystem which also included Cyberdog, iCab, Netscape, Opera, and WannaBe (a text browser).
  - asveikau 4y ago
    Seems like they conflated 32-bit with lack of memory protection. (Tangent: IIRC there were Macs where the CPU had a 32 bit pointer width but you could only use 24 bits of address space. And sometimes software would work on this assumption and break with a full 32 bits. But that's neither here nor there.) But in addition to lack of memory protection, cooperative multi-tasking was also a big problem. It was a pretty common experience to see something do intense work rendering a progress bar and the rest of the system would slow down. IIRC this made having something like a web browser open sometimes painful.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Woz has an interesting section in his book "iWoz" regarding System 7 stability before/after Internet Explorer was installed. A fresh install of System 7 would operate just fine, but as soon as IE was installed, weird things would happen. It's definitely worth reading if you haven't already.
ginko 4y ago
From http://www.kan.org/6100/os.html#macosx http://www.kan.org/6100/os.html#macosx > Mac OS X is the next big thing for the Mac. A fusion of Apple and NeXT technology, OS X is fully native, fully pre-emptive, fully protected and full of the bells, whistles and buzzwords we've been promised since PowerPC first appeared. It supports symmetric multiprocessing, to go along with the multi-G4 machines shipping now and the multi-core CPU's currently under development. >Sadly, Mac OS X probably will not run on a 6100, no matter what you do to the hardware. Anyone know why that was? Looks like people got OS X to work on iMac G3's so you'd think that a PowerMac with upgraded G3 and memory should be able to run it. Some other HW/MB feature missing? edit: This[1] video about upgrading to OS X on an iMac G3 mentions the need to update the Mac's firmware so I guess there may not have been a FW upgrade for the 6100. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwTLvhHNnLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwTLvhHNnLU
- winocm 4y ago
  The 6100 does not use a conventional PCI bus.
  - jamesfmilne 4y ago
    Indeed these systems had NuBus, which was a holdover from the earlier 68k MacII and Quadra machines.
    - nier 4y ago
      > The basic requirement for Mac OS X to ever work on a machine is that it have a PowerPC processor, a PCI bus, and Open Firmware. So the earliest PowerPC computers from Apple (e.g. the 6100, 7100, and 8100) are not likely to ever work with Mac OS X. Source: https://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cfm?page=XPostFacto3.html https://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cf...
  - kergonath 4y ago
    IIRC a big problem was the CPU. PowerMacs with 603s or 604s were "supported" by XPostFacto, but not the 601, which is why the 7200 could not boot OS X despite not using NuBus. The NuBus Macs also did not use OpenFirmware, contrary to all PCI (and AGP) PowerMacs.
pmarreck 4y ago
I had a 6100/60. It was one of the most significant personal computer upgrades I’d ever done- the Rosetta that ran 680x0 code on PPC was impressive. This was also around the time I think Apple decided to start to stay processor-agnostic by starting the LLVM project when OS X/Rhapsody became a thing
- azinman2 4y ago
  LLVM was Chris Lattner’s graduate work. Apple didn’t start it. He finished his PhD and got hired by Apple in 2005, well past when Max OS X came out. For a longtime the toolchain for OS X (and iOS) was GCC.
  - hedgehog 4y ago
    I believe the first use of LLVM in MacOS was the OpenGL fallback shader compiler in 10.5 released in 2007.
- jonhohle 4y ago
  LLVM was started far after the 6100 and, afaik, didn't move to an Apple backed project until 2005[0]. Apple did have "fat" binaries during the classic Mac OS transition, and interestingly enough, so did NeXT. The implementations were very different, however, and OS X eventually got the NeXT implementation. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    ah thanks for the clarification
- scarface74 4y ago
  The first generation 68K emulator was far from impressive. It ran 68k code on my 6100/60 slower than my souped up LCII with a 68030/40Mhz card. Connectix’s Speed Doubler had a much better emulator.
ForOldHack 4y ago
Still has the same old problem: The built in video runs 68k faster than the HPV Card. The HPV cards are all interchangeable. I had a 4MB/8100 HPV, and put it in a 7100/66^80 and later moved it to a 6100/G4. IBM Later admitted that the 601 silicon was all the same, except for the 100/110. 6100s run at 80Mhz all day. macintoshgarden has all the software, and macintosh respositary and archive.org has mirrors.
jdkee 4y ago
The author's homepage was last updated slightly over a quarter century ago.

76 points by nickt 4y ago

Interesting guide. I learned OS X on an old PCI PowerMac that a client gave to me in exchange for some unpaid bills. It's 20 years ago now, so I am not 100% sure but I think it was a 7600. Over the next few years, it got transformed, incrementally and with inexpensive 2nd-hand parts: CPU: 200Mz PowerPC 604 → 333MHz G3 RAM: 32MB → 768 MB HDD: 2GB SCSI → 40GB EIDE Graphics: onboard unaccelerated framebuffer → PCI ATI Radeon Ports: ADB + SCSI → USB 2 + FireWire All gradual, and it remained working and usable throughout. It started out with MacOS 7.6 or so, and ended up on 10.2 "Jaguar", while still able to run the same apps. An astonishingly upgradable computer, and the OS was made possible at all by XPostFacto.

jrnichols 4y ago

I loved my old 6100/66. had like 264 (2 x 128mb + 8mb onboard) RAM, that AV card, and a Sonnet G3/233 card. I absolutely loved that machine for as long as I could until the OS X era came around. the bottleneck became the SCSI drives and then networking, being limited to the 10mbit AAUI port. I too have happy memories of those days. Computers were a whole lot more fun.

kerblang 4y ago

I still have my 6100, tempted to try exploring this. Always felt like that era was the last of the "fun macs" when things weren't all busybody fussy unixy with hi-res gradients and hyperslickness and so forth. The new macs just took the "personal" out of personal computing, as I see it. Take that with a grain of salt, of course.

jeffbee 4y ago
Nothing about that first generation of Power Mac reminds me of "fun". It reminds me more of "kernel panics right before CD-R is finalized" or "kernel panics whenever the network cable is unplugged" or sometimes "kernel panics whenever any network cable anywhere on campus is unplugged" and quite frequently "kernel panics if I try to scan a slide" oh and from time to time "installing MS Office from 60 floppies is a bit of a chore". Really cannot think of anything in my personal history of computing that was less fun than a mid-90s Mac.
- sharikous 4y ago
  I am not even sure there was something that you could call a kernel in that time. Apple was failing in their quest to secure a modern successor to MacOS 7. It sure was a lot of fun looking at what they threw at it, and MacOS 9.2 was polished for sure. But without MacOS X, MacOS would have gone the way of BeOS and Amiga...
  - theodric 4y ago
    Still a pity it didn't literally go the way of BeOS by acquiring Be, like might have happened. I used both NeXTstep on 68k and BeOS on Intel, and much preferred the latter. NeXTstep was a crawling horror of abstractions, which might have made it more portable, but also made it clunky. Anyone else remember having a top-spec iMac G4 in 2002 that couldn't even scroll or resize a window smoothly? Pathetic, and painfully slow. I gave up on 10.1.x and just ran Yellow Dog for about a year until I managed to lay my hands on a copy of 10.2, which was marginally better, but still much slower than Linux at the time. The iLamp was a wonderful machine, but very much let down by its intended OS.
    - lproven 4y ago
      > Still a pity it didn't literally go the way of BeOS by acquiring Be I disagree. I loved BeOS. I still miss it. It was a great OS, and I preferred it to NeXTstep. But it wasn't just the OS. NeXT had 2 key things Be didn't: [1] state-of-the-art dev tools [2] Steve Jobs. Stealing from my own blog post on the subject... Apple's then CEO Gil Amelio was considering buying former Apple VP Jean-Louis Gassée's company Be, for BeOS, or Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' company NeXT Computer, for OpenStep, the successor to NeXTstep. They went with NeXT. BeOS was excellent - small, fast, efficient, modern, streamlined, and ran on Apple kit. The company was small, with some excellent engineers. The snag is, Gassée wanted a lot more for it than Apple was offering. Although this was bad - terminal - news for Be, it was probably all for the best for Apple. BeOS was a great OS, but if Apple had moved to it, its 3rd party developers probably would not have, for the most part, and it would have killed the company. Apple needed a follow-on for classic MacOS, it needed it urgently and it needed to be a blinder. BeOS did not have one crucial advantage that NeXTstep offered, and as such, it would not have had the same appeal, the devs probably would not have fallen in love with the new Apple OS, and Apple would have withered and died. What didn't BeOS have that NeXTstep had? Well... NeXT was going cost a packet anyway - it was doing better and had some big names on board. Some were working for it, including several people who worked on the Mac in the early days, including, of course, Jobs himself. It also had some serious clients, including CERN - where Tim Berners-Lee developed the WorldWideWeb on a NeXTstation, and corporate clients such as the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS). NeXT's OS was also beautiful, sophisticated & very hi-tech - but didn't run on Macs, nor even on the Mac's PowerPC processors. It offered 2 major advantages over Be, though: #1, getting Steve Jobs back, and #2, one of the great strengths of NeXTstep was its world-class, industry-leading development tools. Be had nothing to rival these. Amelio went with NeXT. If the Mac had to move to a new OS, then all Mac developers would have to learn to code for the new OS. Mac devs were pretty wedded to their platform, as were Mac users. And transitioning to a whole new OS, Apple really needed to get the devs on board. Classic MacOS's dev tools were nothing special and quite hard work. Be was moving its dev tools over to GCC but whereas this was good, it was nothing amazing. But NeXT's Objective-C and Interface Builder were in a whole different league. Getting the Mac 3rd party devs to move to NeXTstep would be vastly easier than to BeOS, as NeXT's dev tools were almost universally recognised as among the best in the industry. So that's what Amelio did, and history has proved him right.
bombcar 4y ago
It was at the heyday of the "personal" computer on both sides of the divide; a single upgrade could make your machine magically more capable in ways we don't really have now. Adding a new processor could be a huge speed improvement, adding a new graphics card would greatly expand your screen capabilities, etc. This site alone has a system with a 601 at 60MHz replaced with a G4 at 300 MHz, and RAM from 8MB to 264MB. That's like going from 8GB to 256GB today, just insane difference to how you use the system (and RAM was much faster than the disk back then, so RAM disks made sense, etc). I remember our last DOS computer had enough RAM that it made sense to RAMdisk most of the most commonly used programs we had, even though it slowed boot up copying them into the RAM disk.
- majormajor 4y ago
  Yeah, performance advanced much faster then. That 601->G4 was a 5x clockspeed jump that was way more than 5x faster in certain areas, too! That's a computer that came out in 1994 upgraded with a processor from 1999. Even if you could put a 2022 chip in a 2017 Mac laptop, it wouldn't be the same sort of improvement. IMO this slowdown in the pace of single-component improvements is what has killed upgradability - buying a computer in the 90s, you knew that within a generation or two you'd probably be looking at at least a doubling in general-purpose or capacity, applicable-everywhere performance within the same socket/graphics card interface/hard drive/memory interfaces. So not having component upgradability, like, say, in some eMachines without an AGP port, was a big limiting factor for the usable lifespan, in a way it just isn't anymore.
cmiles74 4y ago
I had a 7200 and it never really performed very well. The "software" modem/telephony device was interesting, but the backing software was too crashy. Mostly I remember it seeming slower than the last generation of 68k Quadras; I had one of those on my desk at my day job. The first generation iMac, on the other hand, I did think was a lot of fun. All of the sudden the UI was responsive and the software was surprisingly reliable.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > The "software" modem/telephony device was interesting, but the backing software was too crashy. I had a Mac from that era that sipped with a software modem, and at some point I upgraded to a serial modem for exactly that reason.
pcurve 4y ago
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Some people here get so touchy over post next jobs era macs. I do disagree with your timing though. I think the best of times was in the early to mid 90s. With radius graphics card. Daystar accelerators on Nubus slots. For some macs, separate math coprocessor. Asante network card. APS and LaCie external scsi hard drive and Daisy chaining them. Adb port devices. Nostalgia!!
- kerblang 4y ago
  Actually I bought my 6100 somewhere around '93-'95. I know it was before 1996. But I'm not actually saying the 6100 was "the best of" anything; it was the bottom-of-the-line cheapest one you could get at the time. I'm really just talking about pre-OSX. The early Macs were and are fun too.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Over the weekend, some of us old timers were reminiscing about the bad old days of the early Avid NLEs. The damn chain of ADB dongles to enable the software and various plugins that to the uninitiated looked a lot like S-Video and would ultimately get plugged into the wrong port, bending pins ruining the dongle, then being told by support that a dongle could not be replaced. Striping 7 full height media drives in a SCSI enclosure just to get enough bandwidth to record the video, but not enough for audio that got saved to yet another drive. Also, SCSI chains requiring terminators (or not), and internal SCSI drives with the jumpers in the wrong pins. Original Wacom tablets built like tanks. 21" CRT monitors that weighed a bazillion pounds, had half-a-mile of bezels, and sitting 2 side by side caused EMI so the images were disturbed. ProTools requiring DSP boards that numbered more than slots in the computer. Expansion chasis to handle all of the extras. All now outpowered by your damn social media device, er, smart phone
  - azalemeth 4y ago
    Happy memories indeed. I always thought ADB was ahead of its time and although it really wasn't hot-pluggable it was, in fact, almost hot-pluggable. Much moreso than the AT PC keyboard connector at any rate. And it just made so much sense having one connector for all input peripherals, unlike DB-9 mice and DIN keyboards! I also fondly remember DIP switches being added onto SCSI external drives along with their block-like 50Ω resistor terminations. Woe betide you if you pushed the case back against the wall and flipped one of those mid-write...
haroldp 4y ago
I was thinking it was the end of the era of fun websites too. That is overstated, but...
linguae 4y ago
I greatly appreciate the Jobs-era Mac OS X, with its Unix and NeXT heritage; in fact I personally think the high water mark of the Mac from both a software and hardware perspective was the Mac OS X Snow Leopard era. Nowadays I use FreeBSD and Windows, but I would be glad to use a variant of Snow Leopard with HiDPI support, updated browsers, and security patches if such existed. With that being said, there is something warm-feeling and even whimsical about the classic Mac OS and classic beige Macs. I truly think the Apple Human Interface Guidelines of the 1990s were well written and are timeless recommendations for making great, usable software. I believe designers of today's user-facing software tools should acquaint themselves with a classic Mac running contemporary programs like Microsoft Word 5.1 and the ClarisWorks suite to see great examples of well-designed software. I also like both the System 7 and Platinum themes, with a slight preference toward Platinum. I'm really curious about A/UX, which married the classic Mac OS and Unix, and I'm also curious about Rhapsody, a predecessor to Mac OS X that was based on NeXTSTEP but featured the Platinum theme from Mac OS 8.
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  In what sense recent MacOS are worse than snow leopard?
  - linguae 4y ago
    To be honest, my switch to FreeBSD and Windows had more to do with hardware (notably the lack of upgradeability in many Macs since Tim Cook took over) and less to do with software. macOS is still a good OS; I use Monterey on my work-issued MacBook Pro. However, my biggest gripes are: 1. The increased iOS-ification of the user interface. I believe a desktop operating system should support desktop workflows and not import at wholesale UI elements that don't make sense outside of touchscreen environments; I have a similar complaint about modern Windows and GNOME. 2. The introduction of notarization. 3. Over the years I've noticed that macOS has gotten more annoying when it comes to notifications. Back in the Leopard era there was a classic commercial mocking Windows Vista's "Cancel or Allow" dialogs. Yet it seems I have to wade through many notifications whenever I'm using Macs these days. In my opinion, it seems that the old guard from the days of the classic Mac, NeXTSTEP, and early Mac OS X with their deep knowledge of the UI guidelines of those eras has less and less influence at Apple these days, while younger software developers with little-to-no experience with these operating systems but who have extensive experience with the Web and newer operating systems are having more influence on the Mac's UI/UX. Unfortunately the Mac is becoming more like iOS and less like an operating system completely tailored to the desktop computing experience. Don't get me wrong, modern macOS is still a good OS, but I prefer the Snow Leopard era of Mac OS X.
cesaref 4y ago
Yeah, good memories of that era. I had a 7500, which was a very upgradeable machine, taking lots of memory and CPU (and cache cards - remember them?). Mine had an annoying beat, like two fans running at slightly different speeds. Apart from that, it was a great machine, and ran Logic really well which was it's main job.

haroldp 4y ago

Ouch, nostalgia poisoning. I had a 6100AV with a Maxpower G3 card, back in the day.

snowwrestler 4y ago
Me too—I inherited a 6100 from my employer and used this site quite a bit. I bet it’s still in a box somewhere in the basement… (checks weekend calendar)
sjm-lbm 4y ago
I never had a 6100 (honestly never even had a Mac pre-OSX), but I'm getting a massive amount of nostalgia poisoning from just the website. For most of the 90s, probably into the 2000s for a bit, finding a "fan page" like this was like striking gold. I feel like the equivalent today is some mix of finding a well-written Wiki page and a well-moderated subreddit on some topic or product you are interested in, but the personal touch on pages like this is somehow cooler. It makes me feel somewhat good to read this page and realize how charming I still find it.

spicybeef 4y ago

I love this site. I just recently used it to pick out some RAM upgrades for my own PM 6100/60MHz upgraded with a MAXpowr G3 266MHz CPU upgrade. It also helped me confirm that a 7100 video card I had in my parts bin could be used on it as well!

ctime 4y ago

> p.s. Use Netscape, or be viciously mocked, taunted and ridiculed. This is how we used to talk to each other.

deleted 4y ago
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pcurve 4y ago
In the 90s some of us derogatorily called it Nutscrape because l33t folks should be using Lynx. Good old days.
deleted 4y ago
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johnklos 4y ago

There are no 256 meg 72 pin SIMMs. The page linked to from this site says that the author was mistaken, and they were 168 pin SIMMs. While 512 meg SIMMs are possible, they'd be custom. Otherwise, a 256 meg SIMM would be a single bank, which wouldn't make much sense.

jnwatson 4y ago

I paid $3k for a PowerMac 7100 in 1994. I remember paying $1600 for an extra 32 MiB RAM around 1996. I also bought L2 cache (an external module back in those days), and then a G3 upgrade. It lasted me a good 10 years.

deltarholamda 4y ago
>I remember paying $1600 for an extra 32 MiB RAM around 1996 I remember doing exactly this around the same time. Back then, RAM was almost considered a durable good, because RAM prices had remained stable for so long. I thought, "well, this is expensive, but I'll get most of my money back if I ever sell the computer," and this wasn't a completely insane idea at the time.
telesilla 4y ago
My Powermac 6100 AV, bought second hand for $1500 in 1996 came with RCA connectors, I got it to make music. That purchase kickstarted my career in all things digital. Came with 200MB drive I upgraded to a whopping 2GB. I travelled with it until I got an ibook, which was much more portable for gigs!
bluedino 4y ago
>> I remember paying $1600 for an extra 32 MiB RAM around 1996 That's odd - I remember memory prices being really low around those times, and my friends and I loaded up our Windows 95 machines with 16 or 32MB for $50-$150 when it was on sale 1996 Best Buy ad for reference: https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/enhanced/web03/2011/9/19/18/enhanced-buzz-1383-1316471212-32.jpg?downsize=800:*&output-format=auto&output-quality=auto https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/enhanced/web...
- Cockbrand 4y ago
  While Macs did have the same specs and connectors for SIMMs as PCs, they were much more picky in terms of which modules they'd accept. You could do some research and find out which cheap modules were 100% compatible, or you could buy special Mac compatible modules for a quite notable markup from Crucial, Kingston and the like. This might explain the price difference.

PaulHoule 4y ago

OS 8 and 9 were unreliable at using the internet because unlike Windows or Linux it was not a 32 bit OS with real memory protection. I remember various releases that struggled with the problem, especially they added a whole bunch of locks to protect memory structures which slowed the machine down dramatically. Classic Mac OS was designed to handle events raining in from the keyboard and mouse and was able to run on the 128k classic Mac but Apple was in serious trouble in the 1990s until MacOS X which was competitive with the competition.

CharlesW 4y ago
> OS 8 and 9 were unreliable at using the internet because unlike Windows or Linux it was not a 32 bit OS with real memory protection. This isn't my recollection at all, although the lack of protected memory on "Classic Mac OS" means that you would've personally experienced unreliable anything if you were also running poorly-written extensions or other software on your system. System 7 (1991) was the first 32-bit version of Classic Mac OS, and Internet Explorer for Macintosh was very advanced for its time. Classic Mac OS had a healthy browser ecosystem which also included Cyberdog, iCab, Netscape, Opera, and WannaBe (a text browser).
- asveikau 4y ago
  Seems like they conflated 32-bit with lack of memory protection. (Tangent: IIRC there were Macs where the CPU had a 32 bit pointer width but you could only use 24 bits of address space. And sometimes software would work on this assumption and break with a full 32 bits. But that's neither here nor there.) But in addition to lack of memory protection, cooperative multi-tasking was also a big problem. It was a pretty common experience to see something do intense work rendering a progress bar and the rest of the system would slow down. IIRC this made having something like a web browser open sometimes painful.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Woz has an interesting section in his book "iWoz" regarding System 7 stability before/after Internet Explorer was installed. A fresh install of System 7 would operate just fine, but as soon as IE was installed, weird things would happen. It's definitely worth reading if you haven't already.

ginko 4y ago

From http://www.kan.org/6100/os.html#macosx http://www.kan.org/6100/os.html#macosx > Mac OS X is the next big thing for the Mac. A fusion of Apple and NeXT technology, OS X is fully native, fully pre-emptive, fully protected and full of the bells, whistles and buzzwords we've been promised since PowerPC first appeared. It supports symmetric multiprocessing, to go along with the multi-G4 machines shipping now and the multi-core CPU's currently under development. >Sadly, Mac OS X probably will not run on a 6100, no matter what you do to the hardware. Anyone know why that was? Looks like people got OS X to work on iMac G3's so you'd think that a PowerMac with upgraded G3 and memory should be able to run it. Some other HW/MB feature missing? edit: This[1] video about upgrading to OS X on an iMac G3 mentions the need to update the Mac's firmware so I guess there may not have been a FW upgrade for the 6100. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwTLvhHNnLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwTLvhHNnLU

winocm 4y ago
The 6100 does not use a conventional PCI bus.
- jamesfmilne 4y ago
  Indeed these systems had NuBus, which was a holdover from the earlier 68k MacII and Quadra machines.
  - nier 4y ago
    > The basic requirement for Mac OS X to ever work on a machine is that it have a PowerPC processor, a PCI bus, and Open Firmware. So the earliest PowerPC computers from Apple (e.g. the 6100, 7100, and 8100) are not likely to ever work with Mac OS X. Source: https://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cfm?page=XPostFacto3.html https://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cf...
- kergonath 4y ago
  IIRC a big problem was the CPU. PowerMacs with 603s or 604s were "supported" by XPostFacto, but not the 601, which is why the 7200 could not boot OS X despite not using NuBus. The NuBus Macs also did not use OpenFirmware, contrary to all PCI (and AGP) PowerMacs.

pmarreck 4y ago

I had a 6100/60. It was one of the most significant personal computer upgrades I’d ever done- the Rosetta that ran 680x0 code on PPC was impressive. This was also around the time I think Apple decided to start to stay processor-agnostic by starting the LLVM project when OS X/Rhapsody became a thing

azinman2 4y ago
LLVM was Chris Lattner’s graduate work. Apple didn’t start it. He finished his PhD and got hired by Apple in 2005, well past when Max OS X came out. For a longtime the toolchain for OS X (and iOS) was GCC.
- hedgehog 4y ago
  I believe the first use of LLVM in MacOS was the OpenGL fallback shader compiler in 10.5 released in 2007.
jonhohle 4y ago
LLVM was started far after the 6100 and, afaik, didn't move to an Apple backed project until 2005[0]. Apple did have "fat" binaries during the classic Mac OS transition, and interestingly enough, so did NeXT. The implementations were very different, however, and OS X eventually got the NeXT implementation. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM
- pmarreck 4y ago
  ah thanks for the clarification
scarface74 4y ago
The first generation 68K emulator was far from impressive. It ran 68k code on my 6100/60 slower than my souped up LCII with a 68030/40Mhz card. Connectix’s Speed Doubler had a much better emulator.

ForOldHack 4y ago

Still has the same old problem: The built in video runs 68k faster than the HPV Card. The HPV cards are all interchangeable. I had a 4MB/8100 HPV, and put it in a 7100/66^80 and later moved it to a 6100/G4. IBM Later admitted that the 601 silicon was all the same, except for the 100/110. 6100s run at 80Mhz all day. macintoshgarden has all the software, and macintosh respositary and archive.org has mirrors.

jdkee 4y ago

The author's homepage was last updated slightly over a quarter century ago.