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PowerPC Macs Interest Kids These Days?

Appleuser201 said:
Came across this YouTube channel of a girl about 11 or 12 years old doing instructional videos on PowerMacs, TenFourFox.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC93dXCZEQSY0RDtTWAsEncw/
I guess everyone has their thing? Just want all of your opinions. Most of these machines are older than her!
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My kids grew up on PowerPC. It's all I had.

My son was 5 when he got his iBook G3. It was a thing for us to go off to Starbucks later on where I'd hook his iBook up to my G4 via Ethernet cable so he could share the WiFi I was getting (his Airport antenna was bad). He went on to a 1Ghz TiBook and then a 15" AlBook.

My daughter had my old 400mhz TiBook for a while and then a 14" iBook G4 and finally a 12" PowerBook G4.

For reference, my son was born in 2003 and my daughter was born in 2008.
 
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That's amazing.

She is extremely knowledgeable for her age, most especially given how everyone else in that age group is busy with Fortnite and their smartphone apps...
 
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AL1630 said:
I first got into this when I was around 12, I got an iMac G3 just because I thought they looked cool and were cheap on craigslist.
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I was 13 when I replaced my perfectly functioning Dell XPS 15z with a 700mhz eMac, simply because I could. I then fell in love with a local iMac G4 shortly afterward, and it remained on my desk for a good while following that. :cool:

Prior to all of this, I did whatever I could with the little knowledge I had with a 1.42ghz eMac that was set up as our kitchen computer for educational and all-purpose purposes.

Going further back, I had a 400mhz iMac G3 that I pretty much did whatever the hell I wanted with as a <10-year-old.

So really, I've been immersed from the beginning. Of myself, at least. Or the start of the 21st century. Either or. ;)
 
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Good on her! I think a lot of us here got hooked on these machines as a kid many years after they were already old news to Apple. I got the bug in 2010 as a 13 year old and it ultimately ended up forging the way for my career, and PowerPC still remains a massive passion of mine to this day. Also agree with @z970mp that she seems incredibly well-spoken and knowledgable for her age.
 
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Kids seem to be interested in tech that predates them. Most noticeable in the kids that seem to know more about Windows betas than someone who worked at MS for 9 years... And I see a lot of kids with iPhone collections too.

To us old yens PowerPC Macs are just what we know and have used forever, but to these kids it's just a piece of collectable tech. If they really do have a use for these old machines, good on them
 
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timidpimpin said:
It's a very inexpensive purchase for the parents, and will also help the kid/teen appreciate well made hardware.
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And hopefully also encourage them to crack their knuckles and make their machines better, from the inside out. Same way I learned. ;)

More people should know how to repaste a heatsink, really. It's a travesty.
[doublepost=1555438543][/doublepost]Does anyone suppose somebody ought to invite her to these forums?

Aside from the semi-rare conflicts, this is the largest PowerPC knowledge base available, and a ton of threads here could really bring a lot of insight to one's PowerPC life, as I'm sure most all of us can personally attest.

Most likely, I'll bet she probably could have ended up fixing her iBook if she had been here, too.
 
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z970mp said:
Aside from the semi-rare social clashes, this is the largest PowerPC knowledge base available, and a ton of threads here could really bring a lot of insight to one's PowerPC life, as I'm sure most all of us can personally attest.

Most likely, I'll bet she probably could have ended up fixing her iBook if she had been here, too.
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Yep, this is probably the biggest PPC forum since the early 2000s, and compared to many other forums, people here get along pretty well. This is the best place to learn about old macs and what you can do with them.
 
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AL1630 said:
Yep, this is probably the biggest PPC forum since the early 2000s, and compared to many other forums, people here get along pretty well. This is the best place to learn about old macs and what you can do with them.
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I think that's a great idea, she also mentioned getting an original bondi blue iMac G3. Nice to see not all kids are playing Fortnite, Roblox ect. all the time.
 
Appleuser201 said:
I think that's a great idea
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I would wait until the weekend rolls in.

That way, everyone will have more free time to do whatever. She's probably busy with school, anyway.

Appleuser201 said:
Nice to see not all kids are playing Fortnite, Roblox ect. all the time.
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Welcome to Gen Z. Half of them are a horde of deranged, brainwashed, trendy lunatics. The other half are pretty reasonable people to converse with.

They outnumber the Millennials. :eek:
 
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My grandma had me started on computers before I can really even remember. She said she had me playing DOS games around 2. I had PCs up until I was 13 I think. Sometime around 2006 or 2007, I got my first Mac which was a Rev C grape iMac G3 at 333Mhz running 8.6. Shortly after that I was upgraded to a 500Mhz indigo slot loader with Mac OS X 10.3. About a year later I got a dual USB 500Mhz iBook G3 running 10.4. That was my first and only laptop for years. I was born in 1994 for reference.
The slot loader and iBook were what really got me interested in Macs, I fell in love with Mac OS X right off the bat, and couldn't believe how fun it was to use, even at 500Mhz compared to my PC which was a 1.8Ghz AMD Athlon XP (and Windows XP of course).
I still have the indigo iMac, and the iBook and both are functional.
 
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Project Alice said:
My grandma had me started on computers before I can really even remember. She said she had me playing DOS games around 2. I had PCs up until I was 13 I think. Sometime around 2006 or 2007, I got my first Mac which was a Rev C grape iMac G3 at 333Mhz running 8.6. Shortly after that I was upgraded to a 500Mhz indigo slot loader with Mac OS X 10.3. About a year later I got a dual USB 500Mhz iBook G3 running 10.4. That was my first and only laptop for years. I was born in 1994 for reference.
The slot loader and iBook were what really got me interested in Macs, I fell in love with Mac OS X right off the bat, and couldn't believe how fun it was to use, even at 500Mhz compared to my PC which was a 1.8Ghz AMD Athlon XP (and Windows XP of course).
I still have the indigo iMac, and the iBook and both are functional.
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As my grandma partly raised me, I must put this out there: you’ve got an amazing grandma.
 
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So far the only desktop computer that my kids have used at home has been my old Apple //e Platinum. I haven't let them touch either the early '05 Powerbook or the late '09 Mac Mini that I have since I still use those as daily drivers.
 
That's awesome, a great hobby for any kid

I grew up fiddling with scrap Pentium III era PC components at that age, didn't have access to anything Apple until much older
 
AdamBuker said:
So far the only desktop computer that my kids have used at home has been my old Apple //e Platinum. I haven't let them touch either the early '05 Powerbook or the late '09 Mac Mini that I have since I still use those as daily drivers.
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A 12" iBook G4 (1.2/1.33GHz) with SSD-upgrade, Office 2004, PDF-tools, Email, Webkit4Leopard (limited to e.g.Wikipedia) or TenFourFox-Boxes, graphic- and painting-apps, iPhoto, GarageBand, iMovie'06 and networking/screensharing-stuff is a great toolbox and a sturdy companion to learn and focus on how to get productive with a computer.
 
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tevion5 said:
I grew up fiddling with scrap Pentium III era PC components at that age, didn't have access to anything Apple until much older
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You'd be surprised what a high-end Pentium !!! can do under LXDE, and even what low-end Pentium !!!s can accomplish for the sake of being useful.

Sent from a Pentium 4. 512mb RAM.

(I'm still waiting for the 2gb to come in.)
[doublepost=1555522315][/doublepost]
AdamBuker said:
So far the only desktop computer that my kids have used at home has been my old Apple //e Platinum. I haven't let them touch either the early '05 Powerbook or the late '09 Mac Mini that I have since I still use those as daily drivers.
Click to expand...

I'm not one to comment, but touch is rather extreme.
 
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z970mp said:
You'd be surprised what a high-end Pentium !!! can do under LXDE, and even what low-end Pentium !!!s can accomplish for the sake of being useful.

Sent from a Pentium 4. 512mb RAM.

(I'm still waiting for the 2gb to come in.)
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Oh yeah. I have a Pentium 3 ThinkPad I used to use all the time. It was way faster than my iBook G3 at the time, albeit they both had a Rage 128 mobility. That P3 sore though at 800Mhz, and It had 512MB of ram, and ran actually ran Windows 7 later. Aside from the GPU (7 didn't have Rage 128 acceleration very well) it was quite cast fast with 7.
 
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pochopsp said:
A 2.93 GHz Pentium 4 is my main PC now XD
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It's really strange.

The PowerPC was always touted as being much faster than equivalent Pentiums.

But this Pentium 4 box I've got, is faster than my G5 in many areas. It's just smoother to use.

Come to think of it, I think I remember somebody saying in one of the threads here, that the Developer Transition Kit, which was a P4 in a G5 box, was faster than, or as fast as the G5 when running the same operating system and the same applications.

That's very interesting.
[doublepost=1555532139][/doublepost]Alright, I'm gonna say it.

I like NetBurst. The later versions are fast enough if you know how to treat them, and there's no Management Engine in sight. Plus, there's something nice about using some of the last systems that still relied on an IDE interface...
 
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z970mp said:
Alright, I'm gonna say it. I like NetBurst. It's fast enough,
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Have to admit I don't share that nostalgia, a recent attempt to use Windows 7 on a high spec at the time Pentium 4 Dell Dimension 8200 left me feeling like the G4 was a speed demon!
 
tevion5 said:
Have to admit I don't share that nostalgia, a recent attempt to use Windows 7 on a high spec at the time Pentium 4 Dell Dimension 8200 left me feeling like the G4 was a speed demon!
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I'm not talking from nostalgia, I've got next to no prior history with Pentium boxes.

But I wonder what would happen if that Dimension was shoved onto Tiger, or Linux Mint... ;)
 
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If we're talking about Netburst, AMD athlon 64's from that time at least deserve to be mentioned for how well they competed against any intel. I don't have a fond opinion of the P4 at all though.

@z970mp More out of curiosity what specs are your P4 box? Booting windows or linux?
 
@XaPHER 3 Ghz P4 w/ HT, 512mb DDR1 RAM, GeForce FX 5200, + 2 160gb ATA/100 HDs. This was actually that XP box I mentioned in the other thread. Newly acquired. :)

Dual-booting between Debian 10 w/ LXDE, and Windows 7. Windows XP would have gone in if it wasn't so unprotected, and available up-to-date software wasn't quickly dwindling. 7 on the other hand, is actually usable if Aero is off. Of course, the GPU isn't doing it too many favors, though I need to upgrade it when I get the chance.

In any case, RAM is more of a bottleneck at the moment than the GPU is, so Aero should be fine when the 2gb is in.

As for Debian, I'll put Cinnamon - perhaps accompanied by something else - in when it's got the 2gb.
 
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