Oldest running Mac?

512K Macintosh
And my younger siblings still use a 233mhz Bondi Blue iMac daily as an email/chat/web surfing machine.
It's running Panther
And for anyone that doesn't know, the Bondi Blue was released in summer of '97. Go Apple

~Earendil

I have an original clamshell iBook running Panther and an original iMac that works but I don't use regularly.

Not that old, but...

2x Rev D iMac (333MHz, no FW): Strawberry (OS 9) & Blueberry (Linux).

They're not that old (summer '99) and still work great

Oldest Mac in my collection is a Macintosh IIcx (released March 1989) and has System 7.0.1 on it as I recall.

Oldest Mac I use semi-regularly is a Quadra 700 (released October 1991) and it has A/UX 3.0.1 on it.

Oldest Mac that gets regular use (weekly) is my Quadra 950 (released April 1992). It has been upgraded quite a bit (132 MB of RAM, a PowerPC 601 at 66 MHz and 1 MB of L2 cache and a 9 GB hard drive) and is currently running Mac OS 8.1.

Oldest Mac that gets used daily is my Power Macintosh 7500 (released August 1995), it is currently running Rhapsody 5.6 (aka Mac OS X Server 1.2 v3).

a.) Apple IIe b.) the first iMac... Jeff Goldblum style

RacerX said:

Oldest Mac I use semi-regularly is a Quadra 700 (released October 1991) and it has A/UX 3.0.1 on it.

Click to expand...

Dude you rule! I wish I had a machine running A/UX.

What nobody still using AIX on their Mac?

Mac Classic. Don't use it regularly. Still runs, boots up really fast, too.

1) ColorClassic
2) PowerMac G3 B&W

I gotta Mac Plus still running with an imagewriter 2(I think)!!

My LcII with 4mb of ram, and a 40mb harddrive, think it came out around 92, has OS 7, still works like new, though I hardly use it anymore since about 98.

Dave

a) 512ke running 6.0.8 off of an external 32MB hard drive.
b) I have my mom using my old PM 5400/120 running 8.1, but it now has a 300Mhz G3 in it . Oh well.

-mcg

i used a 1999 era clamshell ibook, 300 mhz g3 processor, 160 mb ram, 4 mb ati video card, 3 gb hard drive, running os 9 until late last year so i almost got five full years of daily use out of the computer

but when the dual 500 mhz g4 power mac came here, as a loan late last year, it became the daily computer

when i boot up the old ibook, it just seems so outdated so i don't use it anymore

i also have an old 040 mac (performa 600) in the garage running os 7 but i don't think i will ever use that machine again for anything...in its time it was amazing with color, an inkjet printer, and a 33k modem for the internet

of course, the next machine i will buy will be a g5 based machine, or even an intel based mac and since i don't need computers for heavy duty, processor heavy functions, i can get a good three or four years out of it

i guess if i was a serious gamer or a digital video professional, i would use a computer no more than two years

Sun Baked said:

What nobody still using AIX on their Mac?

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The only Apple systems that ran AIX were the Workgroup Server 500 and 700. AIX wasn't compatible with normal Apple hardware and the Workgroup Servers weren't compatible with any version of the Mac OS.

AdamR01 said:

Dude you rule! I wish I had a machine running A/UX.

Click to expand...

It is nice... though it is basically like running System 7.0.1. I run a lot of my older apps on that system.

Anyways, here is a screenshot of it. It isn't a recent one (it isn't like the system changes all that much). In the shot I'm using Aaron to give it a Mac OS 8 look, Greg's Browser, Theorist and the command line shell.

I feel so insignificant. The oldest Mac I still use is a 2003 iBook G4 800.

Of course, there are a few old 1990s Macs lying around but I never really use them.

Oldest Mac!

The oldest Mac I acutally use is a 2004 eMac 1.25GHz Combo; but the oldest Mac I own is a Bondi Blue iMac 233MHz. A great little machine! Wish Apple would bring back the colors. They were the best!

Last year I sold my trusty iBook 466 SE, and got myself a 1.8 DP powerMac.
And I just bought an iMac G5 rev A. at 1.8.
The friend I sold the iBook came to me for some software troubles he was having, and it seemed so quaint! booting took over a minute compared to the 35 seconds on both my G5's!! Any how, he still uses it everyday and doesnt seem to mind it is not the latest or greatest.

stridey said:

Nice filebrowser interface. Can somebody explain to me the AIX history? I was but a wee lad at the time...

Click to expand...

The pics were from A/UX ...

AIX is the IBM's Unix, which were basically place on modified 9600s that turned the machine a huge dedicated server box, and didn't last too long. The OS on the Mac have made it though one dot revision... can't remember.

Oldest I use is a G3 800 iBook. Got shiny new Tiger on it, but the games run like crap, so I boot into OS9 to play

stridey said:

Nice filebrowser interface. Can somebody explain to me the AIX history? I was but a wee lad at the time...

Click to expand...

Well, I guess we can cover both AIX (with regards to Apple using it) and A/UX.

Apple started A/UX back around the same time as System 4. The idea was to use an underlying UNIX (System V) operating system with a Mac GUI on top on Mac hardware (specifically the Macintosh II series systems that were out at that time).

A/UX 2.x was released around the time of System 6 and used it as it's Mac application environment.

While A/UX 1.x was available in the form of floppies (55 of them as I recall), both A/UX 1.x and 2.x were generally sold as pre-installed 80 MB hard drives that you would swap out with your original drive.

A/UX 3.x (the one I'm most familiar with) is mainly based on System V Release 2.2 (Release 4 was the most current at the time) because it was lease expensive for Apple to license. But Apple did make modifications by adding parts from Release 3 and Release 4 (which effectively updated the functionality to being the same as System V Release 4), and they also used parts from 4.3BSD for the networking and file system.

This one was also sold as a hard drive, but was generally sold as a floppy/CD combination.

The thing about A/UX is that it is designed to only run on Motorola's 680x0 series processors.

So when Apple made the move over to IBM's PowerPC processors, they were faced with either having to port A/UX or come up with something completely new.

They chose neither.

IBM already had a UNIX operating system that was designed to run on POWER and PowerPC processors called AIX. Apple bought logic boards from IBM with PowerPC 604 or 604e processors on them that would work with AIX (4.x) and sold them as Apple Workgroup Servers.

Apple did experiment for a while with other options, but once AppleShare IP had reached a level of ability that Apple (and their clients) could deal with, they dropped AIX altogether.

RacerX said:

The only Apple systems that ran AIX were the Workgroup Server 500 and 700. AIX wasn't compatible with normal Apple hardware and the Workgroup Servers weren't compatible with any version of the Mac OS.

It is nice... though it is basically like running System 7.0.1. I run a lot of my older apps on that system.

Anyways, here is a screenshot of it. It isn't a recent one (it isn't like the system changes all that much). In the shot I'm using Aaron to give it a Mac OS 8 look, Greg's Browser, Theorist and the command line shell.

Click to expand...

I've always wanted to try A/UX but im relatively new to the Mac scene.
iBook G3 800MHz and a PowerMac G3 266@292 (i got the PowerMac for free after I had the iBook)

I'd have to buy an older machine I don't really need and put it in space I don't really have.