Poking around an iMac G3

[Algus]

I have picked up a Bondi Blue iMac G3 some months ago and am finally getting around to tinkering with it. The seller clean installed Mac OS 9.2.1 before shipping to me so there was no software installed by default. I've loaded StuffIt Expander and Corel WordPerfect already so I can use it for word processing. Not to sure what else I'll do with it besides old games (hello Caesar II!), CD player maybe.

Looks like I've got the Rev. B unit with 6 MB ATI Graphics. Somewhere along the way it has also picked up 96 MB RAM and a 6 GB HDD.

Is it worthwhile to roll the OS back to an earlier version (so it will run faster) ? Mac OS 9 is probably the system I know the least about. We had some OS 8 computers in school but by the time I got to college it was all OS X. My main interest right now is Word Processing (Corel WordPerfect) and retrogaming.

As a side note, this hockey puck mouse has got to go. Who thought this was a good idea?! Fortunately I've got a couple Mac Pro mice around here somewhere...

 

[eyoungren]

Steve Jobs thought the hockey puck was great and promoted it despite the public. When the later G4s came out without it, it was proof he was wrong.

I'd stick with iOS 9. You can run at least iTunes 2.x on it. That's right, iTunes was OS9 before it was OS X.

With that ability you can use it like a lot of us do - a jukebox.

 

[128keaton]

Congrats! I need to fire mine up, I just don't have a large iTunes library. I just got two more, two Blueberries.

 

[MacCubed]

If I were to get a G3 iMac, I would dual boot it with Tiger and OS 9 so I could Spotify on Tiger and have the speed on OS 9

 

[bunnspecial]

The Hockey Puck was bad enough that Apple didn't even stick with it through all of the iMac G3 production run-later G3s had the black "Pro" mouse(combined with the larger Pro keyboard).

Despite their design faults, though, I have matching hockey pucks(and dinky mini keyboards) for all my iMacs that would have originally come with one.