As you may remember, I picked up a Macintosh PowerBook G3 about a year or so ago for $25. I don't know what model it is, but it's the black curvy thing. It doesn't have USB or FireWire but it has SCSI. It's probably the M4753 model gauging from this info at Apple. In System Profiler it says it doesn't have the external L2 cache installed. Wonder what that would cost and how it's done? It's got 160 MB of RAM and a 233 MHz G3 processor. Oh, and a whopping 2 GB hard drive. And, and you know doubt remember because of your photographic memories, the screen on this thing was pretty bad. The bulb is going out. It's bright at one edge and kind of dark at the other....and pretty splotchy in between.

But the other day a friend gave me an eMachines 15" LCD monitor. I figured "what the heck?" and I wondered if that PowerBook G3 had a port on it. It did and it works great. Not only is this new external LCD screen a vast improvement in visual quality, it has a native resolution of 1024 x 768 (at 75 Hz) which tops the built-in LCD screen's 800 x 600. It makes this thing more than usuable, especially since I took an old external ADB keyboard and plugged it into the back of the PowerBook G3. (There's only one ADB slot.) This wider keyboard makes typing much easier. I then plugged an old POS one-button Apple ADB mouse into the keyboard and I was good to go. If I could find a miniscsi-to-scsi convertor (HDI-30 I think is the port on the back), I could plug in the SCSI Zip drive I have and I could be totally back in the 80's! Or maybe the 90's.

This thing has built-in ethernet so I hooked it up to DSL no problem using the DHCP server and plugging in a couple numbers. And the only worthwhile browser you can find anymore is the Mozilla ones. I'm using 1.2.1. It's creaky but functional. It's one of the few that will view thalo.net okay. I've got it running OS 9.1. It's interesting that Software Update still works. It offers a newer Carbon Library for download and a couple AppleScript things. But I think there's no need to fudge with any newer system software.

This thing supposedly has a built-in mike but I can't get it to record any sounds. It appears that all the right extensions are installed. I think this model also has a built-in modem. That's about my speed. I really shouldn't be doing DSL on this thing. It doesn't suit the general vibe and character.

In installed Acrobrat Reader 5.1 so that I could browse a few of the G3 PowerBook manuals, which is about as high a version of Acrobat Reader that you want to go with OS 9.1 if I remember right. There may be newer versions but some of them became quite ponderous and kludgy.

The highest setting on the mouse speed in the Mouse control panel is too slow. Unfortunately USB Overdrive couldn't help me out with that because this is not a USB Mac. I'm not sure how to fix this. It's not too bad, but I like the mouse a little more responsive. I'd love to find out about the L2 cache for this thing and squeeze a bit more speed out of it. And since the battery is pretty much dead, that bay could be used for something else. A USB card? It also has one what I think is a PCMCIA Type III card slot. Probably that would provide the USB if that's possible. I'm not sure what could be put in the battery bay.

Oh, and all this is being posted via Mozilla 1.2.1 and the PowerBook. Seems to work fine.

Okay, I got the sound problem fixed. I merely had to set the internal mic as the sound input source in the Sound control panel. Most of the Macs I ever owned didn't come with a built-in mic. Now I can records burps for my alert sounds. Or worse. Yeah, I'm sure I'm the only person in the universe to ever do this.

I think what I have is what's called a WallStreet. Or, because of the lack of the L2 cache, a "MainStreet." Here are some memory options for the PowerBook, although I don't see any L2 cache memory. Couldn't find any L2 cache memory for it at Crucial.com. And in searching it looks like the longtime Mac site MacSolutions.com is out of business. I found that one of the easiest and most reliable places to get stuff through the years.

More memory options. It looks like you can get up to 512 MB in that second slot...and some reports are that this works. But I still see no L2 cache memory.

Got the LPR printer working from OS 9 to the networked G4. The problem is, it printed to the Epson Stylus Photo 925. I don't even have drivers installed for that on the PowerBook. But it printed on it. Tried setting up the LPR printer again, this time explicitly entering the name of the "printer queue." After several more tries and sacrificing a chicken, I got it to work.

Like a masochist, I installed Word 98. I need the spelling checker. Now if I can find a way to turn off the stupid sounds. Every time I make a save I get this little cheerful "pling!!!." But it’s more annoying than cheerful. Okay, I think I killed that. Yep. With the clarity of text on the screen, in many ways this old Main Street is a better word processing platform than OS X.


Now...should I go whole hog and try to file share with my G4 running OS X?

File sharing, no problem. Speeds were pretty good. I loaded up this machine with some of my standard software just for the hell of it.

The drawback of the higher resolution is that I get only 16 bit color. What I'm going to do now is find out what kind of Type II PCMCIA cards I can find that are useful. A SATA card? The would be a wild way to add more storage. Maybe a DVD burner so that it's also a movie machine? That could definitely be useful. All it has now is a 20X CD ROM drive.

But the enduring question still lingers: What would Rico do?

Haha you old dinosaur.

You can find which model you have from this Apple-History site.

Nice you bought a machine that in 1998 cost $2500 for $25 in 2008.

What would I do? Save your pennies to get this model.

But it is nice seeing one of those old units running. The best in that series was the Powerbook (Firewire) model codename Pismo. Released in 2000.

Speaking of Apple history, I guess this would be the 25th anniversy of the 1984 add and the introduction of the Macintosh. I haven't been watching very closely. Anybody making a big deal of this?

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Now if I can find a way to turn off the stupid sounds.

There's a preference for that in Word. In some of those older versions, it's tough to find, but it's there. It's maybe under General and it's something like "provide feedback with sound" or "provide feedback with animation."

When I read the part about your one-button ADB mouse, a tear ran down my eye like the old Indian chief in that litter commercial.

Old hardware is like protectionism. It's not that it can't work... you could take that hardware and write the great American novel on it, or your conservative opus bestseller... but you're cutting yourself off from the brotherhood of the Mac Faithful, and all developers. Not that that's always a bad thing, but many industries, like mine, need a current, up-to-date relationship with developers in order to compete. For example, right now I COULD design in Quark 4.1... it's just that I'm screwed if I have to send the files to a service bureau, unless they are dinosauric too.

I'm sure in your own business you have to weigh when to stick with the old, and when to upgrade, too. Sometimes stuff really does get obsolete.

But jeez, lookit brother Markle. He's the last true blue legacy person we all know. We may take a few nostalgic vacations, but he's living it.

I may mourn the legacy, but I haven't touched it in months... oh wait, scratch that, I actually did have to make a repeating wallpaper pattern in Classic recently, there was a legacy tool that still does it better and faster than anything now.

But I don't even use Quark at all anymore. If you had told me five years ago that would happen, I would have laughed in your face. Everything is InDesign. And it's actually better, based on the way the industry has gone. Nothing can really touch those adobe products. The opensource "equivalents" of any design, layout or graphic software look utterly bush league next to Adobe.

Here's my resurrected Mac. I call it my 25th Anniversary Mac.

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but you're cutting yourself off from the brotherhood of the Mac Faithful, and all developers. Not that that's always a bad thing

Ahh, that’s the wonderful thing. Somebody has to lead and somebody has to follow. A lot of Mac users got into the game for the love of computers themselves, not so that they could trickle saliva on Steve Jobs’ boots (blessed be his name, and I hope that new liver is working out well). In many ways, the Mac has become like Michael Jackson’s face – all hacked to death with contrived forms and artificial means. Where now we have Unix, once we had MacPaint, MacDraw, and simple icons that did their job.

Thalo.net was always about leading the fight, not kissing ass. If one must cut oneself off from the Mac faithful, well, maybe that’s like cutting yourself off from a bunch of dope-shooting friends. At some point in order to grow, you have to. My god, man, we can’t just Twitter our way to a meaningful life. One should do like Brother Yabor is doing and learn Latin or photograph the great outdoors. But Twitter, Facebook, bobbles, bells, whistles, and beads? This is what the Mac faithful have become and if I cut myself off from them, I know I’m heading in the right direction.

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I'm sure in your own business you have to weigh when to stick with the old, and when to upgrade, too. Sometimes stuff really does get obsolete.

Nope. Dinosaur all the way, although I do make extensive use of outside suppliers. They put up the capital. I’m the customer user interface. I’m an ass online but a pretty good guy to work with in real life. But certainly one thing that’s struck me about my 25th Anniversary Macinstosh is, like you said, how I could write the next big conservative tome on this machine, or even something older, and I’d be no worse for it, and perhaps the better for it. I mean, can you imagine me having as good of thoughts writing with Docks and bobbles in the background instead of Bruegel and Dogcow?

Besides, I never could afford one of those fancy Wallstreet PowerBooks when they came out, but I really liked the look. Now I can enjoy it. I mean, the new MacBooks leave me cold. The industrial design is too industrial. The keyboards (like I maintain) are awful.

Rico, this thing has an infrared port. Did that really ever catch on? What’s the most common use for it? It looks like probably for networking, but the manual says networking is good only within 3 feet. Three feet? That hardly seems practical. From looking at the manuals, some of these PowerBooks had an external TV out port to them. But not mine. But I’m itchin’ to find a Type II PCMCIA card that I can experiment with. Maybe wireless networking or one that has built-in storage…or maybe USB.

I’m giving the 3.0.5 version of iCab a try. I don’t think I’ve tried this version before. It’s not exactly new, but it may be newer than anything I’ve tried before. I like that it has a Google search field. It works on thalo.net but is butt slow. It won’t show the home page properly though even though Mozilla 1.2.1 will.

The neighbor down the hall has a 256 stick of memory that might work with the MeanStreet (as it is now known). It doesn’t look too hard to get into the innards. You can easily swap in a bigger hard drive. Contrast that with what it takes to swap in another hard drive in the clamshell iBooks. Don’t even Google for the instructions. It will make your stomach turn. It would be easier to build a nuclear bomb.

Possible good news for Mac OS 8.6 and Mac OS 9 web browsing http://discussions.apple.com/t...dID=2038088&tstart=0
Kinda hard to believe but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

BN, Fucking hell, it just works. :-) That's a nice machine. I will keep my old ibook to do something like this when i have time, too.
OS 9, yeah! The CRISPYNESS! It's so CRISP! <mental disorder starts>

I hadn’t heard of that WamCom browser before. I’ll have to give it a try. Oh, wait. I just downloaded it and that looks exactly like the Mozilla 1.3.1 that I already have. And as I remember, 1.2.1 seems to work a little better. But I’ll still mess with it when I have a chance and see how it goes. I suppose it can’t be too much worse. 1.2.1 has a habit if crashing. Reminds me of the old Netscape days.

It will be very cool if Classilla becomes a reality. July 1 is just around the corner. Let’s see what they come up with if anything. Thanks for the heads-up on this, Napier. Are you related to Charles Napier?

Okay, I just crashed again so I restarted and am trying WamCom 1.3.1 and it’s definitely a littler snappier.

Who's that guy with the skeleton? He's very crisp too.

One of the nice attributes of this MeanStreet is how quiet it is. Just over there, about 10 feet or so, I can hear my G4 MDD blazing like a siren. I can see why people would prefer laptops as their main machine.

The PowerBook G3 also has SCSI disk mode which allows you to turn the computer into an external hard drive. But I’ve got to find a SCSI cable that connects to this thing. I doubt that Best Buy will have it. Where would Rico go?

But the goals is to add a Zip Drive (SCSI or USB), if only to make thalo’s eyes roll. Wireless would be cool, but the DSL antenna is way the hell down the hall, so that’s not practical for where the MeanStreet is located. I’ll up the ram if I can. Only $30.00 plus shipping for a 256 MB stick.

I really by rights should have a nice set of external speakers connected to this and then find a way for iTunes to connect to and play all my music files. (They won’t possibly fit on the tiny 2 GIG internal hard drive.) If I had an iPod (which I don’t), I’d need to upgrade the system software to 9.2 (I’ve read). But I’m not sure if this computer will take that without an enabler hack. Some say 9.2.2 runs faster. I don’t know. Any opinions?

I'm not related to Charles Napier, but I was an art student of his when I was in seventh grade at John F. Kennedy Junior High in Clearwater, FL 1965-66, a year or two before that Star Trek episode "The Way to Eden" aired

Not only is he a great character actor he's a very talented painter, sculptor and one of the best art teachers I ever had.

Out of that seventh grade class their is probably five or six people working as professional artists today. He was one of those teachers that really made a difference in my life.

That’s pretty awesome that you knew Charles Napier, Napier, and were a student of his. He’s certainly a multi-talented guy, everything from hippie 60’s to the redneck in "Blues Brothers." He wrote those songs from "The Way to Eden." My brothel and I listen to them all the time. I think Chuck should make an album.

iTunes for OS 9 doesn’t have a "sharing" capability. So what I did was simply mount one of the remote volumes via AppleShare and imported them into the PowerBook G3 version of iTunes. It went T.U. the first time around complaining of the program not having enough memory. So I upped the memory about 15 MB and it worked fines. So, would it remember those links to the remote volume when I unmounted the volume, restarted the computer, and restarted iTunes on the MeanStreet?

I’m used to WinAmp on the PC never remembering those links even if the volume is mounted. But so far iTunes seems to remember. Now all I need to do is find a used set of speakers somewhere. I think buying new would be the wrong vibe…unless the speakers are just really part of a killer sale.

Surprisingly, the sound straight out of the MeanStreet isn't all that bad. It reminds me of the cheap transistor radio that me and my older brother used to listen to when we listened to all those hits in the days of the 60's and early 70's.

I gave MeanStreet a bit of a physical. I found a bootable copy of DiskWarrior with PlusOptimizer on it as well. I stuck the CD in. I wasn’t sure if it would boot from the CD with the "c" key pressed on the external ADB keyboard, but it did. Another bonus about this keyboard besides being bigger than the PowerBook’s keyboard is that the power-up button works on it as well. You never know about these things sometimes.

So I repaired/optimized the directory of the 2 GIG internal hard drive and then optimized it. It needed it but it’s always difficult to measure whatever speed gains you get from something like that.

This little eMachines LCD POS monitor is really not such a POS. It’s fairly clears and seems to have pretty good contrast and color. But I don’t imagine for a moment that this was a particularly expensive LCD monitor. And from what I can see, I don’t see any dead pixels.

The Mozilla 1.3.1 browser seems to be doing pretty well although I really don’t ask much from it.

btw, that infra-red port. some cellphones had them too, so you could go online via your cellphone. my old nokia 6100 offered IR.
granddaddy of bluetooth in a way.

Here is a Firewire Cardbus that OWC still offers for these machines.

Get your hands off me you damn, dirty clown.

Oh, sorry. Right now I'm watching "The Greatest Show on Earth." Emmett Kelly's in it.

I went to Best Buy tonight and the only useless (but potentially fun) things I could find that would work with the MeanStreet was a FireWire PCMCIA card ($50) and a 1 terabyte FireWire external drive ($130.00). They had one USB PCMCIA card, but it worked only with Mac 10.1 or better.

And that $19.00 card you found, Rico, is a much better deal. That might be the way to go. And here's a USB card that says it works with OS 9. WWRD? I think the USB one would be more useful. But the problem is, you'd only be getting USB 1.0 speeds.

I've got a D-Line 10/100 Mbps fast Ethernet card that I know works with a PC. I wonder if it will work with the Mac. I suppose it couldn't hurt to try.