Powermac 9500/120

[mcnelson]

Yeah, don't laugh!

10 Years ago at college and then university I used to use macs all the time - they seemed the defacto in academic institutes. Anyway, about a week ago I got all nostalgic and yearned for those times, and thought about 'dicking around' with an old school mac. A quick eBay purchase later and I'm the proud owner of a (very very cheap but usable) powermac 9500/120. It's running OS 9.1 which is apparently all it will run upto, and has two 2GB drives. It also has office 2001 and Photoshop 6 installed.

Ok, now apart from finding the space around my workstation to set it up, what can I use it for? Apparently it won't see networked PC's but should connect to the internet via ethernet, which is handy as my other desktops all go through a router/network switch.

Any ideas anyone?

[isus]

you can use it just to be old-school.

or run benchmarks on it... haha... i don't know what all ps6 can do, but you should see how it compares to a 2ghz g5 :-P

[mcnelson]

It needs no help being old school; I don't know why, but Mac keyboards just feel 'nicer' than PC ones! I've got a logitech one on my main PC, but my Mac one just feels nicer!

Anyway, I've installed MacPerl on it so I can use it as my development machine (I'm learning Perl). And Microsoft Entourage is weird. Love those clicky hard drives...

[kairon]

You could install NetBSD on it and learn about unix.Just like OS X.

[amoeba]

The Mac can see PC networked drives just fine. I'm not entirely sure what the software is called (there are numerous packages). All I can say is that it is done with little pain.

Your specific Mac can make a fine simple web-serving machine. You'd need an X-able computer to be fast enough to run things like SSS langs or SQL. HTML is just cake on PPC601-604 chip ;)

How about you play the best game I have ever played (one of the)? Escape Velociy (not Override or Nova -- which are great but not as good). http://www.ambrosiasw.com/news/

Mac's are superb!

[mcnelson]

I can't find that networking software - if anyone knows of it do let me know - and thank you all for your suggestions! However, I won't be delving into any other OS'es at the moment as I'm still getting used to using Linux, so with OS9.1 as well I have enough on my plate.

Using the Mac certainly makes me appreciate how nice my PC is though!