A surprise unwrapping a "new" 7600/120

[bunnspecial]

It's unfortunate as I think that era was a great time to be a Mac user. My first PowerPC system was a 6100/60 (first generation PPC) and then I quickly obtained an 8100/80 (first generation) which I used for quite some time. Mac OS was and, IMO, is the best OS I've ever used hands down...at least from a usability perspective. From a technical perspective it was nothing to write home about. Manual memory allocations, lack of protected memory, lack of PMT all made for a system which could easily be taken down. But surprisingly was reasonably stable. Enough so to make the Macintosh my primary system for many years as that "other" OS was very unstable.

I didn't become a "Mac guy" until 2012 when a cheap laptop nearly cost me a degree. I finished(and passed) the presentation I was giving on a borrowed aluminum MacBook, then bought my own 13" MBP the next day.

In any case, I think both OSs have had their ups and downs but on the whole both have evolved into(relatively) stable systems.

I can remember the days of Windows 95/98 and getting a BSOD every other day. With both OS X and Windows (for the rare occasion that I use it) you can pretty well count on it staying stable and only rarely giving you issues.

I'm just sorry that I never learned the classic OS in its "glory days." Even so, I'm often taken(pleasantly) by surprise at the way things "just work" in it. As an example, when I first started seeing disk images in Windows I had a hard time wrapping my head around them, and even at that didn't know what really to do with them. By contrast, I can boot up System 6 and mount a floppy image. By the time OS 9 came around, a .smi image would automatically mount by just double clicking on it. I would have never imagined doing that 15 years ago.

 

[ITguy2016]

I didn't become a "Mac guy" until 2012 when a cheap laptop nearly cost me a degree. I finished(and passed) the presentation I was giving on a borrowed aluminum MacBook, then bought my own 13" MBP the next day.

In any case, I think both OSs have had their ups and downs but on the whole both have evolved into(relatively) stable systems.

I can remember the days of Windows 95/98 and getting a BSOD every other day. With both OS X and Windows (for the rare occasion that I use it) you can pretty well count on it staying stable and only rarely giving you issues.

I'm just sorry that I never learned the classic OS in its "glory days." Even so, I'm often taken(pleasantly) by surprise at the way things "just work" in it. As an example, when I first started seeing disk images in Windows I had a hard time wrapping my head around them, and even at that didn't know what really to do with them. By contrast, I can boot up System 6 and mount a floppy image. By the time OS 9 came around, a .smi image would automatically mount by just double clicking on it. I would have never imagined doing that 15 years ago.

I've held this position for many, many years. IMO Windows and OS X are both mature platforms with neither having any benefit over the other. It really boils down to preference these days.

Having gone through the whole DOS / Max OS era I fully understand the compromises both companies had to make to their respective operating systems. As a primary Mac OS user at the time I thought the upcoming Windows 95 was going to end it for Apple. Thankfully the compromises Microsoft had to make to Windows 95 kept me on Mac OS (though I never really used Windows 95/98 as I was firmly on the NT track).

I keep an iBook around to run OS 9...it's fun to fire it up every now and then to recall the "glory days"

 

[blindpcguy]

lol i love the old macs. i haven't had the chance to play with pre os x yet thinking about getting an old powerbook that can boot os x and os 9 as i want to play with the older oses but dont have space for a second desktop ahope that this projejct keeps going well for ya

 

[bunnspecial]

I keep an iBook around to run OS 9...it's fun to fire it up every now and then to recall the "glory days"

I actually have a couple of "regular user" systems that run OS 9. One of them is my "gaming" Cube, which has an 800mhz/2mb Sonnet and a Geforce 3 connected to an ADC CRT. I've said many times before that I like using a CRT for older games(which really are the only ones I play) since the resolution scales a lot more elegantly than on an LCD. I keep both a Clamshell and a 1ghz TiBook for "gaming on the go" and my 9600/200MP sits on my desk right next to the Quicksilver.

I have a bunch of computer running 9.2.2, 8.6, 8.1, and earlier as their primary OS, although they aren't used as much.

 

[blindpcguy]

what do you use as a main mechine thease days are you one of the few holding onto ppc or have u also moved to intel.

 

[bunnspecial]

lol i love the old macs. i haven't had the chance to play with pre os x yet thinking about getting an old powerbook that can boot os x and os 9 as i want to play with the older oses but dont have space for a second desktop ahope that this projejct keeps going well for ya

If you have to choose one(and only one) I suggest a 1ghz TiBook. Max your ram at 1gb, and you'll have a system that can both(officially) run Leopard and runs OS 9 great. Finding the "special" install disks for OS 9 use to be a problem(it came out after 9.2.2, and there is stuff specific to the Ti on the OS 9 install), but is now on Macintosh Garden.

 

[ITguy2016]

I actually have a couple of "regular user" systems that run OS 9. One of them is my "gaming" Cube, which has an 800mhz/2mb Sonnet and a Geforce 3 connected to an ADC CRT. I've said many times before that I like using a CRT for older games(which really are the only ones I play) since the resolution scales a lot more elegantly than on an LCD. I keep both a Clamshell and a 1ghz TiBook for "gaming on the go" and my 9600/200MP sits on my desk right next to the Quicksilver.

I have a bunch of computer running 9.2.2, 8.6, 8.1, and earlier as their primary OS, although they aren't used as much.

I'm trying my hardest to avoid picking up a bunch of older Macs. While I love these old systems I know that after initially playing around with them they would sit unused. I have the space for them but the pragmatic side of me says that, even at the small asking prices for them, that it would be a waste of money.

 

[bunnspecial]

what do you use as a main mechine thease days are you one of the few holding onto ppc or have u also moved to intel.

I'm afraid that I'm one of the ones who has made the transition and uses Intel mostly. Actually, I should say that I started with Intel(late 2011 13" MBP) and then got into the PPC game afterwards. My main computer is a mid-2012 15" MBP(9,1). It's the machine I WANTED(or I guess it would have been the late 2011 version) when I bought my first computer, but it was way out of my budget. I have the HR-AG screen, which was my primary consideration on the secondary market when I was shopping. I also have a 1TB Samsung Evo and 16gb of RAM.

My main work desktop is a Mac Pro 1,1. It has an upgraded GPU(from MacVidCards) and can handle everything up to(and including) El Capitan. I upgraded it to dual quad core processors from the original dual duals, put in an SSD, and have 16gb of RAM. It's starting to show its age, but still overall works very gracefully.

I wrote a good portion of my master's thesis on the Quicksilver I mentioned above, and also use it for scanning(I still shoot a decent amount of film). One of the reasons it has survived in that role is due to SCSI support that I need to drive one of my film scanners. I also have various other miscellaneous tasks assigned to it.

I have a G5 Quad in my office that actually was my main computer for a while, but got displaced by the MP. The Quad still gets used for some software for which I can't afford the Intel equivalent.

 

[ziggy29]

Update -- just found a reasonably priced 1 GHz Sonnet Crescendo G4 card for the PCI slot -- more or less the "Holy Grail" of this project. I should be able to play with it within a few days. When I can confirm it works fine, I'll probably install Leopard on this thing; I have an unused partition reserved for it. I'll have more to report then. I almost feel like a kid waiting for Santa.

 

[LightBulbFun]

I think i saw the Sonnet you bid on i was not bidding but i sure was watching the auction its a real nice find you got there AFAIK the 1Ghz PowerSurge CPUs from Sonnet where a sort of limited addition thing so where quite rare even when new. the machine should run leopard nicely! btw when installing the New CPU if you can, remove the motherboard L2 cache as it can sometimes cause issues with G3/G4 CPU upgrades. (when the new CPU does arrive make sure to post plenty of pics and screen shots of it )

 

[ziggy29]

I think i saw the Sonnet you bid on i was not bidding but i sure was watching the auction its a real nice find you got there AFAIK the 1Ghz PowerSurge CPUs from Sonnet where a sort of limited addition thing so where quite rare even when new. the machine should run leopard nicely! btw when installing the New CPU if you can, remove the motherboard L2 cache as it can sometimes cause issues with G3/G4 CPU upgrades. (when the new CPU does arrive make sure to post plenty of pics and screen shots of it )

Got it, and started playing with it a little. (Scrren shots and specs and performance reports to come.) I didn't have any external L2 installed on the motherboard. Apparently this card has 256K of L2 on chip and 2 MB of L3. Very nice.

I did pay a little more than I planned, but I know these 1 GHz units are considerably scarcer than the 700/800 MHz versions (and I saw a few of those sell for $100+ more than I paid, so I'm cool with it for collector value) and preliminary impressions are, it's working great and running Tiger really well. I ran XBench 2.0 on it and the overall scores are around 60% higher than the G4/400 with CPU-intensive subscores doing much better. I plan to hit it with Geekbench 2 next time I get it out and also see about getting Leopard installed.

At this point the only other thing to do to really "upgrade" is to get a working 9600 carcass to get more PCI slots and expansion options. Haven't ruled that out at some point down the road.

Hope to have a more full report within the next week or two. I have noticed some issues with this CPU not playing nice with FireWire -- it occasionally causes a freezeup when FW drives are attached whereas the G4/400 never did. I do have another FW/USB card in another Mac so I can try to see if it's a specific conflict with this USB/FW card or if it's something deeper than that.