[SirCastor]

Last night I picked up an on Power Mac 8600.
"Why?" you ask, well, I bought an eMate and while trying to figure out the complexities of connecting it to my current machine, I saw a guy on Craigslist giving away this beast, so I figured "why the heck not?". Also I've got an old copy of Journeyman Project II that I could never play because my computer was too much for it.

Anyway, It's been a crazy 10 minutes already, trying to remember how to do certain things, where are things stored? What's going on here? It's strangely exciting, but weird. I clicked on the 'browse the internet' alias and it opened up Netscape 3!

I tried to post from that machine, but it wouldn't have it. Not with Netscape.
Anyone got a machine they still run something like 8 on ?

[CMYKid]

i used to post on MacNN with my PowerMac 9600/300. It worked fine on 8 then and I dont think the board has evolved much since then has it? ;-)

That was the first Mac I ever bought, or rather had my parents buy...as I recall I think it was around $3500 just for CPU and a few peripherals...

[Eriamjh]

I have some old 68030 machines that can only run 7.6 or lower. Needless to say, I don't use them much for anything.

[Eug Wanker]

Can you actually surf with Netscape 3?

IE 5 runs pretty well on OS 8.

[olePigeon]

I have an LC III with my Apple II Compatible Card and 5.25" drives for my Apple ][ games (emulators just don't cut it,) a Beige G3 266 Desktop with OS 9 for all my classic games, and my PowerBook G4 1.67 for everything else.

Netscape 7 is probably your best best on Classic. Might also want a copy of IE 5. I sometimes have to toggle between the two if I'm running OS 9.

[Kevin]

IE 5 and MacNN suck. I don't know if it's the ads or what.

[Gossamer]

Check out Opera, it works for me on the PowerBook 5300's and 1400's I've used (btw...I think my use of apostrophes was justified)

[Kevin]

Mozilla is good for OS9

[CharlesS]

Blast from the Past... hmm...

By "blast", do you mean explosion? As in:

[©öñFü$íóÑ]

I have 8.6 on a partition on my PM 6100 (though I usually boot under MacOS 9.1 these days instead), 8.1 on my PC using Basilisk, and 8.6 using SheepShaver 2.3 (also on my PC).

[Gamoe]

SirCastor, I have an 8600. I upgraded it with a Sonnet G3 upgrade card and I now run Mac OS X on it thanks to XPostFacto.

[SirCastor]

Funny thing about this one is, I don't want to upgrade it to anything. I specifically need old hardware and an old operating system to do a few things.

Fortunately, no system bombs yet.

[Gamoe]

Originally Posted by SirCastor

Fortunately, no system bombs yet.

Classic Mac OS wasn't/isn't nearly as unstable as some would have you believe.

[Kevin]

Yes it was. You had to be REALLY anal retentive as to what you had loaded.

Memory leaks sucked too.

I had to use an OS 9 system up till last year when we upgraded.

When you are using OS 9 at work, an OS X at home you can tell a big difference in stability.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by Gabriel Morales

Classic Mac OS wasn't/isn't nearly as unstable as some would have you believe.

Of course it was.

[The Godfather]

You can have Classic in your Intel Mac, if so you desire. I've seen a blog post talking about it recently.

<pimp mode>The Mac Robotics Blog: Old school tricks gone forever. Or not?</pimp mode>

[Gamoe]

Originally Posted by Kevin

When you are using OS 9 at work, an OS X at home you can tell a big difference in stability.

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

Of course it was.

Of course. Mac OS X is a much stabler and more modern OS. However I don't believe Classic Mac OS, for its time, was as bad as some here would have one believe. I mean, I used Classic Mac OS for many years and though there were occasional hang-ups, bombs and freezings, most of the time the system was rather stable.

Now if you had a hundred extensions loaded up, then yeah, I could understand the instability. But, I don't think that was the average case.

[Dakar²]

I want an old machine merely to have it play After Dark modules (especially Star Trek ones) all day long.

[Kevin]

I hated the fact you had to rebuild the desktop just to get new icons to show up.

And even running a slim system OS 9 still crashed a lot under heavy usage.

[Dakar²]

OS 9 crashed if I looked at it funny.

[Dork.]

I just bought (if you can call buying someone some Guinness in exchange for it "bought") a Quadra 610 that I want to try to get up and running. My problem, though, is that the only 50-pin SCSI drive I have is 8GB, and this Mac can't see partitions larger than 4 GB!

Even though I can partition it on my G4 in OS X, I'm having trouble booting from it, I get bus errors whenever I try to. I don't want to spend any more money on it, but local places that have old Apple SCSI drives want $20 minimum, and eBay auctions always ask for $12 shipping minimum. I also have SCSI SyQuest drives and Zip drives, though, so I might just sacrifice an old 200MB SCSI cartridge for my hard drive...

Also, like I posted here, I can't seem to get a usable ROM image off this Mac to use with Basilisk. I'm assuming that booting off an old floppy may be the proble,, and once I get 7.5.3 installed on the SyQuest I'll be able to get a clean ROM image....

[olePigeon]

System 7 was solid, though (not. 7.5)

[Eug]

Originally Posted by Gabriel Morales

Of course. Mac OS X is a much stabler and more modern OS. However I don't believe Classic Mac OS, for its time, was as bad as some here would have one believe. I mean, I used Classic Mac OS for many years and though there were occasional hang-ups, bombs and freezings, most of the time the system was rather stable.

Now if you had a hundred extensions loaded up, then yeah, I could understand the instability. But, I don't think that was the average case.

A stock OS 9 machine would crash at least once a day under moderate usage, and oftentimes more.

ie. It sucked @ss, even for its time.

And "for its time"? Remember, Windows 2000 was out in early 2000. I didn't like NT 4.0, but at least it was pretty stable, and it was out in 1996.

As far as I'm concerned, OS X wasn't really out of beta until 10.2, and that wasn't until 2002. And despite the fact that I considered 10.1.0 (which was out in 2001) an early beta, it was still a bazillion times more stable than OS 9.

Even in 2000, I shuddered when I had to use an OS 9 machine.

[Dork.]

OS9 was pretty solid for me, but I had to actively manage extensions and take special care of extensions that didn't play nice together. Conflict Catcher was a must-have.

[angelmb]

Get iCab to browse the net.

PowerMail is also cool.

[BlueSky]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

To this day, every time I see any variation of that (including your sig), a tiny part of the back of my brain throws its hands up in terror and emits a little girly-scream.

[Dakar²]

I used to love how it would lock on hitting restart.

[Gossamer]

Originally Posted by Dakar²

I used to love how it would lock on hitting restart.

Yeah, same with force quit...so irritating.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Gabriel Morales

Of course. Mac OS X is a much stabler and more modern OS. However I don't believe Classic Mac OS, for its time, was as bad as some here would have one believe. I mean, I used Classic Mac OS for many years and though there were occasional hang-ups, bombs and freezings, most of the time the system was rather stable.

Now if you had a hundred extensions loaded up, then yeah, I could understand the instability. But, I don't think that was the average case.

I find that it depends on what you were doing. The big problem with OS 9 is that it had no memory protection. If one program crashed, the odds were pretty decent that it would trash the rest of your system in the process. If the programs you ran were well-behaved and didn't crash much, OS 9 would be all right.

[osxpinot]

You should get your hands on a copy of Copland and run it on your "new" mac.

[TheoCryst]

So, someone wanna remind me why Apple hasn't released OS 8 (or 7.6, for that matter) for free yet? From what I can tell, 7.5 has been available on their page for a few years now.

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by TheoCryst

So, someone wanna remind me why Apple hasn't released OS 8 (or 7.6, for that matter) for free yet? From what I can tell, 7.5 has been available on their page for a few years now.

How come they don't have 7.1 up there, either? I think the reason is because a 7-foot Wookie shouldn't be living with 3-foot Ewoks. It doesn't make sense.

[finboy]

Originally Posted by Eug

A stock OS 9 machine would crash at least once a day under moderate usage, and oftentimes more.

not in my experience. I've had several machines running OS 9 for weeks at a time without crashing. Depends on what you're using them for.

[finboy]

Originally Posted by olePigeon

How come they don't have 7.1 up there, either? I think the reason is because a 7-foot Wookie shouldn't be living with 3-foot Ewoks. It doesn't make sense.

It was available as the update, I'm almost certain. I have it, and I know I didn't buy it. It was on the FTP site.

[Dakar²]

Originally Posted by finboy

not in my experience. I've had several machines running OS 9 for weeks at a time without crashing. Depends on what you're using them for.

Photoshop, Illustrator or Quark, and IE used to be enough.

[SirCastor]

Originally Posted by Dakar² 

Photoshop, Illustrator or Quark, and IE used to be enough.

I would gamble on that one being Quark... When I worked for HP it was notorious for crashing...

[Gamoe]

Well, I'm glad we got some feedback from other people who actually had stable set-ups. I definitely would agree that it depended on your setup, what apps you ran and what you did with them. Conflict catcher was indeed crucial, until Extensions Managers came about.

And as olePigeon said, I don't think the last version of Classic (Mac OS 9) was exactly the pinnacle of stability for Classic itself. System 7-ish sounds about right for that.

Oh, and stability or no stability, you couldn't get me to have a Wintel back then even if Windoze was "more stable" or whatnot. I've always loved the Mac OS for its ease of use.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by Dork. 

I just bought (if you can call buying someone some Guinness in exchange for it "bought") a Quadra 610 that I want to try to get up and running. My problem, though, is that the only 50-pin SCSI drive I have is 8GB, and this Mac can't see partitions larger than 4 GB!

Even though I can partition it on my G4 in OS X, I'm having trouble booting from it, I get bus errors whenever I try to. I don't want to spend any more money on it, but local places that have old Apple SCSI drives want $20 minimum, and eBay auctions always ask for $12 shipping minimum. I also have SCSI SyQuest drives and Zip drives, though, so I might just sacrifice an old 200MB SCSI cartridge for my hard drive...

Partitioned or not, that Mac should be able to read a hard disk of any size. Then you use Drive Setup to partition it into manageable chunks if the version of Mac OS you have requires it. System 7.1 and earlier require 2GB HFS partitions, System 7.5 allows up to 4GB HFS partitions, and Mac OS 8.1 and higher allows up to 2TB (2000GB) HFS+ volumes, no partitioning required. (Mac OS 8.1 is the highest OS you can run on that machine.)

tooki

[Gamoe]

Oops... never mind.

[Dork.]

Originally Posted by tooki 

Partitioned or not, that Mac should be able to read a hard disk of any size. Then you use Drive Setup to partition it into manageable chunks if the version of Mac OS you have requires it. System 7.1 and earlier require 2GB HFS partitions, System 7.5 allows up to 4GB HFS partitions, and Mac OS 8.1 and higher allows up to 2TB (2000GB) HFS+ volumes, no partitioning required. (Mac OS 8.1 is the highest OS you can run on that machine.)

tooki

Apple's old HD Setup utility would only partition drives with the Apple firmware on it, and I didn't get far enough experimenting with that drive to go out and find the patched version.

But I think the drive I was using must have been a little dodgy, anyway. I obtained a 500 MB drive recently, which works like a charm. If I wasn't so busy watching baseball lately, I'd have tried to get a new ROM file off of it already.

[Eug Wanker]

I bought a small IBM SCSI drive for an old Power Mac 8500 back in 2001. HD Setup refused to recognize it.

Finally, I just threw out the machine. I found it to be a complete waste of time.

[starman]

There's a guy here with a PowerMac 7600 on his desk that he hasn't turned on in like 5 years. I want it BADLY. Maybe I'll just ask to take the damn thing.

Reasons for wanting it:

Marathon
After Dark
That stupid Barney screen saver

Uh, I can't think of anything else right now, but if it's free, why not?

[Dakar²]

Originally Posted by starman 

There's a guy here with a PowerMac 7600 on his desk that he hasn't turned on in like 5 years. I want it BADLY. Maybe I'll just ask to take the damn thing.

Reasons for wanting it:

Marathon
After Dark
That stupid Barney screen saver

Uh, I can't think of anything else right now, but if it's free, why not?

Originally Posted by Dakar² 

I want an old machine merely to have it play After Dark modules (especially Star Trek ones) all day long.

What's Marathon? (sound familiar)

[starman]

Originally Posted by Dakar² 

What's Marathon? (sound familiar)

I have now officially disowned you.

[Dakar²]

Originally Posted by starman 

I have now officially disowned you.

Dad, no!

(Hey I never got to actually have a computer till an iMac, so I was stuck at my school's mercy)

[starman]

Marathon was the precuror to Halo. In fact, the Marathon logo is inside the Halo logo (I'll dig it up and edit this post). I read an interview with Bungie in EGM which said that the soldier you play in Marathon is the same one you play in Halo.

Wiki page (I have that poster up in my room still)
Marathon (computer game series - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

The logo on Captain Keyes' uniform:
http://content.answers.com/main/cont...creenshot).jpg

The Halo logo. Notice the Marathon logo dead center.
http://nikon.bungie.org/images/halo_small.jpg

[Dakar²]

Wow, never heard of it.

What little game play I got on was either really old system 6 games, or later, EV: Override (I had a nice Star Trek mod going for that, too)

[Dork.]

Ahh, Marathon. Proof that Bungie, at one time, had a soul.

[starman]

The 7600 is now MINE! Buahahahahaha

[Dakar²]

Yay!