Apple Squee

[howeird]

The other day my company gave me a Mac G3 blue & white just like the one I ran a Darwin video server on when I worked at Microsoft. It was part of a pre-moving give-away of old lab stuff. It was part of the QA lab, and QA was outsourced to India a while ago.

I was supposed to get it Friday, but the IT guy who was supposed to make sure the machines were handed out in an organized fashion went to lunch instead, and one of the development engineers grabbed it while we were out. It mysteriously re-appeared Monday, apparently it was either not the G5 he thought it was, or maybe it just didn't work.

The IT guy made up for the original mistake by finding me the right Blue & white keyboard and mouse for it.

Last night at home I plugged it in and fired it up. The internal speakers gave me a loud chord, the one which says POST passed, but nothing showed up on the display (It was plugged into my flat panel VGA connector). This is when I noticed there were two VGA connectors - one was a display-only card, the other looked like a video encoder/decoder card. So I tried the other connection. Still nothing. But there was a signal on both ports, because when I disconnected, the monitor's "no signal detected" message came on the screen. Connected I didn't get that.

So I popped open the box (it took me several nanoseconds to remember how to do that) and pulled out the fancy video card and left in the simple one.

Bingo!

The machine came up in OS 9.2 in about 30 seconds, maybe less.

So now I have a working Mac G3, sitting in the closet until I have time to figure out what to use it for.

Comments

[figmo.livejournal.com]

Two stores to check out:

1. We Fix Macs on El Camino in Palo Alto (near Fry's). They stock legacy hardware, software, and peripherals (Apple no longer supports OS9).
2. MacPros on Blossom Hill Road by Almaden Expwy (near 85 and Almaden Expwy) in San Jose. (They used to be on Bascom Avenue.) These folks also stock lots of OS9 software, as well as hardware you can use with your iMac.

You might also want to install OSX. The latest release would probably be a major hog on your system, but 10.2 or 10.3 would probably be okay.

You may also want to upgrade the G3 chip to a G4 using a ZIF. I did that on my beige minitower and it works great.

[howeird]

Thanks for the good ideas. At MS I ran a beta version of OS X when they still pronounced it "X" and not "10". Before they had a working Mac shell, and it was really 10 flavors of Unix running on an Apple kernel. It was very fast.

Apple's web site says 10.4 is okay on a G3, but the whole point of a free machine is to try to keep it that way. It'll be a while before I have time to put any work into it.