
Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac - FactCore
https://www.howtogeek.com/682300/why-i-still-use-an-old-powerpc-mac-in-2020/
======
jandrese
> In fact, for reasons I’m yet to discern, my iBook’s internal AirPort Wi-Fi
> card can’t connect to modern Wi-Fi networks—they simply confound it.

WPA2 was standardized a year after his laptop was built. The ancient 802.11b
card in it wants to do WEP. Getting driver support for a modern USB WiFi on
that prehistoric version of OSX is no picnic either. It's a good thing he
doesn't want to get it working.

~~~
war1025
I went to a job interview a year and a half ago where part of the interview
was to give a walkthrough of my solution to short "homework" problem.

Got there and tried to connect my laptop to their wifi network. No dice. My
laptop (2014-15 era) doesn't do 5ghz and they had no 2.4ghz access points.
Ended up having to use a cellular wifi hotspot they had lying around to get
anything to work.

~~~
saagarjha
> Got there and tried to connect my laptop to their wifi network. No dice. My
> laptop (2014-15 era) doesn't do 5ghz

Wow, that’s surprising…most laptops from like 2010 onwards have done 5 GHz.
Did yours have a particularly old Wi-Fi card in it?

~~~
nwallin
I bought a new laptop a few months ago that does not do 5GHz. It's a Dell
Inspiron 3195, with a Qualcomm Atheros 9565 wireless card. The laptop is still
available for purchase. When I purchased it it was on sale for $200. (not sure
if the link is my exact model, but all the specs are the same, and this
particular model does say 2.4GHz with no mention of 5GHz)

[https://www.dell.com/en-
us/shop/2-in-1-laptops/inspiron-11-3...](https://www.dell.com/en-
us/shop/2-in-1-laptops/inspiron-11-3000-2-in-1-laptop-
grey/spd/inspiron-11-3195-2-in-1-laptop/nnjngeam2011s)

~~~
walrus01
Oh wow they're still selling 1366x768 screens in the year 2020.

~~~
john-aj
What's wrong with that? I happen to prefer a "lower" resolution on a laptop
(and by "lower" I mean the same pixel density as my IPS monitor, which is
1920x1200). Unless I use an operating system that has completely solved the
problem of GUI scaling, I don't see the benefit of higher pixel densities,
only constant issues with incompatible applications.

------
RalfWausE
Why not use old(er) Systems when they fulfill your needs? A computer is a
tool, such as a typewriter, printing press, paintbrush or hammer. Would anyone
argue about the age of a typewriter or hammer if its in good working
condition?

In fact, i am using an Atari 520ST as my main computer since my laptop died a
while ago. It started as an experiment, but now "it just works". I got network
connectivity, email and (limited) internet access through a "Netusbee"
adapter, and easy modern media access through a gotek floppy emulator.

Perhaps i am just crazy, but it simply works!

~~~
ricksharp
Nice - whatever maximizes your productivity is the right tool.

I went the opposite route: I basically built a gaming rig so I could get
really good auto-complete in vscode.

Couldn't be happier... and I have a 'free' light show. :-)

~~~
monkpit
VS code works great on my 2012 Mac mini. Maybe you just wanted a gaming pc ;)

~~~
ricksharp
I did enjoy building my own PC. I haven't built one since in 1997, so that was
fun.

But you should see how fast vscode reloads :-)

------
linguae
One of the things I miss about older laptops is the keyboards. I would love to
buy a laptop that is built like a PowerBook G4 or a ThinkPad X61 but with
modern displays and modern internals, and with extra bonus points if it has
user-replaceable batteries and user-serviceable storage and RAM. I've found
the Thinkpad X62
([https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/](https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/))
and X210
([https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/](https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/))
projects rather intriguing. Unfortunately I missed out on the 2017 ThinkPad
T25, which I would have purchased had I not been strapped for cash at the
time.

One idea that I have is for a laptop manufacturer to develop a chassis that
comes with a high-resolution display and a high-quality keyboard (like those
of older ThinkPads), and where the user can supply an Intel Compute Stick or a
similar device for computing power. This way the chassis can be used for a
long time while the user upgrades compute sticks.

~~~
mkeeter
Have you seen the MNT Reform?

[https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-
more-p...](https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-
personal-computer.html)

It's not as powerful as most modern laptops (uses an iMX8 SOM, rather than an
x86 CPU), but it's got a full keyboard, trackball (!), replaceable batteries,
etc.

~~~
aww_dang
This deserves a discussion on the front page.

~~~
dTal
Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23141667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23141667)

------
wink
> Predictably, I’ve found that having a dedicated, internet-free laptop has
> helped me become more productive.

> Old Mac Games Still Run, Too

Spot the error.

I still have a small-ish Centrino laptop from 2004 that's running Windows XP.
It's been airgapped for roughly 10 years (wifi broke and at some point there
were no updates for XP) but it's getting occasional use as a portable DVD
player. I don't get why you'd willingly buy an old machine to be constrained
but I hate throwing out old stuff that still works. And this does.

~~~
minerjoe
Innovation through limitation. It can work wonders as the author is
suggesting.

Working with old technology also gives you valuable insight into the worlds
current latency-poor bloated software. You might be able to run the latest but
with latency that is hidden on modern machines now painfully visible, you
might think otherwise. This leads to choosing software that is fast, minimal,
and effective.

------
verytrivial
Old games, old productivity software. If they were good when they were new,
I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes.

It's a weird marketing and social undermining of comfort and control. Sure
there is the 'security' argument, and an accretion of various quirks, but
people were often happy dealing with these quirks in the day, and as OP says,
making interoperability frictionful has an definite upside with _all_ the
media and IT giants trying to mine your attention span for money.

~~~
golergka
> I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes

Because your needs grow, and you want to able to do more stuff with it.

A great workstation from 00s won't render your 4k video project or compile
Chromium from source in reasonable time, or let you mix an entire virtual
orchestra with several dozens of Kompakt sample libraries at all. All of those
things are just something you couldn't do on the computer in those days with
such fidelity and quality, and now you can, and this is awesome.

~~~
verytrivial
_Slight_ straw man there. :-) I referred explicitly to games and productivity
software.

The problems you cite here, namely 4k video and Chromium are both arguments
_in favor_ of retro computing in my opinion -- Both are solutions looking for
a problem that succeed only in perpetuating the churn in hardware, no
intrinsic value added, like the 100th re-imagining FPS machine gun splatter
fest game. Yawn! :-)

~~~
dividedbyzero
To me it seems the big thing 4k improves on is video immersiveness. After all,
reality is 210 degrees field of view, not a comparatively tiny rectangle
metres away, and it's crisp and sharp, not somewhat blurry-ish like Full HD at
somewhat closer range. I like being able to have a considerably bigger
rectangle in my face while still getting acceptable quality; 4k at 60fps is a
joy, feels real in a way movies usually don't. Besides, on mobile devices and
tablets especially, it's really neat to be able to pinch-zoom into a video and
still get some quality. That's not possible with Full HD.

As for Chromium (and by extension all major modern browsers), it's played a
pretty important part in making the web a platform to reach pretty much
everyone with comparably little effort. A lot of the productivity applications
I use day-to-day are web apps, and I guess most wouldn't exist in their
anything like their current form if there had to be native Windows, Mac, iOS,
and Android apps that people would have to download and install and update and
secure (and certainly no Linux app – way too few users to even think about).

To my mind that adds a lot of intrinsic value, at the price of much higher
resource consumption, true, but I'd rather have that than the snail pace of
innovation and still usually questionable quality we had in the "old days"...

------
emersonrsantos
George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones
novels, he saves his work on floppy disks. Of course, he has a second computer
for email and web browsing.

~~~
nordsieck
> George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones
> novels

A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2.

* It was designed for elementary school children so it's decently rugged. * It runs a long time (months) on 2 AA batteries. * To get the text off the device, it impersonates a USB keyboard, making it compatible with basically every computer.

~~~
mnl
He likes WordStar 4.0. There are people who like WordPerfect for DOS, Word 5.1
for Mac or even XyWrite.

It's fairly easy (not always cheap) to get almost any old computer you could
think of in very good condition to run the programs you like without further
hassles. This can make a lot of sense because sometimes there are hassles
associated to virtualisation/emulation/modern hardware.

Maybe you feel at home using WordStar 4.0 + VGA text mode in a CRT monitor. If
that's the case, you can't beat the ease and responsiveness of a DOS computer.
I have this conviction that there's nothing wrong with that.

~~~
Jaruzel
I put together a 'RRMartin' setup on an old laptop - booting into DOS and then
auto launching WordStar 4.0. I can see how appealing it would be for focused
writing (I'm still trying to find my perfect set up for writing).

I also toyed with releasing the setup as a USB boot image, but the copyright
on WordStar is still very much active :(

------
jeffbee
Uh, if all you need is to write documents on an air-gapped machine, it seems
like practically anything would do the job. Any Mac of any age whatsoever, a
typewriter ...

~~~
jarcane
Teeeechnically yes.

But the barriers to file transfer get larger the farther back you go.

I have two old Macs that I use for writing: a 1985 Mac SE 2/40, and a
PowerBook G4 1.67ghz.

The SE is indeed pretty thoroughly cut off from the world, but this also means
that if you want to get your data _off_ the drive, you have very limited
options to do so. In my case it means using an SD card-based floppy emulator,
writing to virtual floppy, loading the SD onto my modern Mac with a dongle
because MBP2019, renaming the virtual floppy file so that Disk Utility will
still recognize it, and then finally hoping I remembered to save the file as
plain text because nothing is gonna read that shit other wise.

I have experimented with a Wifi232 dongle as well, but found that getting a
vintage version of Z/XMODEM to talk to a modern one is all but impossible in
2020 and I failed at almost everything I tried.

So: enter the PowerBook. At 1.67ghz it's actually beefy enough that with
TenFourFox you could technically get to some websites, but other than a
handful of Mac abandonware sites and the old version of Reddit, almost nothing
else will work thanks to JavaScript requirements. So distractions remain
minimal and the alt-tab addiction is kept at bay.

BUT, it _is_ still internet-capable enough to be able to connect to modern
WPA2 wifi (mostly, I had some compatibility issues with my old ISP router that
required working around with an old Airport Express), and that means I still
have ways to more directly share the fruits of my labors. Email works just as
well as any modern machine of course, USB is there (albeit slow 1.0 speeds),
and some of the older sites I post my work on even still work in TenFourFox.
More recently, thanks to Tigerbrew, I've got working git, so I can even backup
my stuff to Github.

The PowerPC line makes a very nice "bridge" generation. Just modern enough to
still by able to connect to the outside world, but old enough to be relatively
free of distraction, or at least to keep the Twitter habit out of the way
while I work.

~~~
projektfu
Try Kermit.

[http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ckbinaries.html](http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ckbinaries.html)

------
mmphosis
new web browser for PowerPC Mac:
[http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/](http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/)

new OS for PowerPC Mac: [https://voidlinux-ppc.org/](https://voidlinux-
ppc.org/)

or, a new PowerPC computer:
[https://www.talospace.com/](https://www.talospace.com/)

~~~
cellularmitosis
Tigerbrew is also worth mentioning
[https://github.com/mistydemeo/tigerbrew](https://github.com/mistydemeo/tigerbrew)

~~~
saagarjha
And MacPorts should still support a bunch of things too.

~~~
jarcane
I would actually recommend trying MacPorts first, because it can uninstall
cleanly, whereas TigerBrew is a fork from before Homebrew got around to
thinking that might be a thing people would want. Which means you won't be
able to try MacPorts if TB doesn't have what you want, which is likely IME, as
a lot of the builds are broken these days and it's barely supported anymore.

------
toadi
because I didn't have a lot of money I was working on a 486 when pentiums were
the normal. I used a pentium when most where on pentium 3.

thank god for linux to make my computers workable. Mail: mutt, Editor: vim,
actually most like newsgroups, irc, .. all had cli clients. Only netscape was
run in a very lightweight window manager like blackbox.

good thing about that in my teens is that I learned a shit load about
computers and now 25 years later having a nice carreer thanks to tinkering
with that.

~~~
ulzeraj
Same here. I was using a Pentium 3 Coppermine with a Voodoo 3 PCI GPU running
Slackware while all my friends had fancy Athlon XPs and Geforces. The
motherboard went bad (back then the capacitor plague was a thing) and after a
few months without a computer I said fuck it and just soldered a new capacitor
where the old one was bloated. I'm so bad at soldering and it was such an ugly
job.

But then it booted! I was so proud of myself. I was a poor kid and computers
were expensive and I just had brought my machine back to life.

~~~
SwiftyBug
Of course it's not the same accomplishment as yours, but when I was 15 I found
a computer in the trash with all the parts still in it. I took off the RAM
sticks and put them in my sister's computer. It got much faster, she was very
pleased and I was very proud.

------
CPAhem
Maybe it's just me, but the user interface on that old PowerPC Mac looks
gorgeous - way better than modern "flat" UIs

~~~
api
I find flat more aesthetically pleasing but often harder to use, and I've seen
data to back that up.

Problem is that people tend to confuse the two and fool themselves into
thinking pretty equals usable. Glossy vs matte screens are the classic
example. Glossy looks pretty but has way more issues with glare.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> I find flat more aesthetically pleasing but often harder to use, and I've
> seen data to back that up.

I would very much like to see that data; I'd be interested to see if/how to
objectively measure such a thing. (Also the results would be interesting)

------
kitsunesoba
It's nice to see old laptops get a new lease on life this way, but it's hard
to deny the compromises that come with such an approach. As nice as the old
12-inch Powerbooks/iBooks, T60s, etc were, they leave a lot to be desired by
modern standards.

This brings me to wonder how difficult it would be to develop a notebook that
is specifically designed to be a focused offline ultraportable, using the most
power efficient and cost effective components available along with an
extremely lightweight, nearly nonexistent OS (think classic Mac OS) with some
modern affordances and high-end touches (USB-C charging, milled single piece
enclosure, etc). The imagined result is a machine that costs less than a
decent Chromebook while being more responsive, having dramatically better
battery life, and being generally more pleasant to use.

~~~
jeffbee
How would such a computer meaningfully differ from either a Pixelbook Go or an
iPad with a keyboard? They both have stupefying battery life and there's not
many ways to extend it because at this point virtually all of the power goes
into the screen.

~~~
kitsunesoba
One of the benefits touted by the linked article is the forced offline aspect.
The other is the much more restricted scope of apps, which keeps the user
focused.

These are technically achievable with an iPad or Pixelbook, but require effort
and discipline on the part of the user and on some level directly contradict
the design and intended use of both products.

I think there are still significant savings to be had in terms of power
usage/battery life. Lower power hardware puts a hard cap on how much any one
application can consume and incentivizes efficiency on the part of the
developer. The device's screen panel can also be selected for efficiency over
density, brightness, color gamut, etc since those aren't priorities.

~~~
edude03
Arguably, these goals in terms of battery life / efficiency are already
heavily incentivized for mobile developers - and by extension the iPad despite
having "high end" processors.

For mobile devices, generally, the strategy is hurry back to sleep, IE ramp up
the CPU to do a job quickly then put the processor back in the lowest power
state, and for many applications this works great.

For the remaining applications, say mobile games, we might be limited more by
the users desires (the best graphics, the lowest latency, the best colors, the
most immersive sound) rather than this sort of hardware not being available.

All this to say, I agree with you that such a device could still exist, I'm
just saying we might be that far from it.

------
novaleaf
For those finding this route interesting, just spend 4x more ($200) and get a
modern-ish laptop, used, off craigslist or offerup.

I'm typing on a Lenovo X1 Carbon (gen2) I bought for $200 last week. Win10,
1440p touchscreen, ssd, bitlocker encrypted with fingerprint biometrics.

I've seen macbooks at the same pricerange, but I'm a windows guy.

~~~
johnklos
An old Mac is infinitely more usable than a Windows machine for those of us
that can't warp our brains enough to try to understand Windows.

------
AdmiralAsshat
There are some Linux distros that still support 32-bit PowerPC architecture.
Many old Macs find second-life running Mate or Xfce desktop.

~~~
scarface74
MkLinux?

[https://www.mklinux.org/](https://www.mklinux.org/)

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
I seem to recall Ubuntu Mate being the OS of choice for PowerPC users back in
the day, but I lost track of what they all switched to when Ubuntu dropped
32-bit architecture.

~~~
petepete
I'd say that Yellow Dog Linux was the most influential of the PowerPC distros.
I ran it for years on my first generation Mac Mini.

YUM, the package manager used until recently on RedHat/Fedora, was based on
Yellow Dog's YUP:

[Y]ellow Dog [UP]dater -> [Y]ellow Dog [U]pdater, [M]odified

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux)

------
major505
Las week I brougth an old G4 the poped up in the marked. A rare thing to
occour here, since they where super expensive when new.

I paid something like 20 bucks for it. It came with a busted ide hard drive,
but no worries. I went online and brought an ide to sd card adapter, and will
now install Tiger in it.

I don't spect to take any serious workload, but It will problably be fine to
run Starcraft and Diablo II in it. Will see.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
You'd be better off with a CF to IDE adapter. SD really isn't well suited to
be a main OS volume. Or just get a SATA to IDE adapter.

~~~
Causality1
Aside from being pin-compatible is there a reason CF is more suitable for an
OS volume than SD?

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
You're unlikely to get support for modern high speed SD cards in these sort of
adapters. CF has a better shot of supporting UDMA and even if not PIO mode 4
will get you 16MB/s which will likely outperform a typical SD slot in these
devices.

~~~
rootsudo
That's great to know, probably why my SSD to ipod hdd didn't work out as
great, and CF is the way to go.

------
glouwbug
I run a T43 for doing serious single threaded programming. Not that anyone
would want to, but its surprisingly productive for pumping out clean work. I
mean, its SO slow that firefox can't even open reddit or facebook without
having a heart attack.

------
incanus77
I’ve recently revived a boxy, suitcase 386 and the biggest thing that jumped
out at me was the lack of distraction and the similarity to an old tool. I
blogged about it a bit recently:

[https://justinmiller.io/posts/2020/06/17/project-386-part-4/](https://justinmiller.io/posts/2020/06/17/project-386-part-4/)

I mean, yeah, it’s not _capable_ of a whole lot, but it’s a refreshing
perspective to look back at computing from then and to think about how much we
did that wasn’t sitting at the computer as a nerve center of our lives.

------
yelling_cat
I used to have an old Windows 2000 laptop without onboard WiFi that I called
"Deadline" and used for the same purpose. If you have work you can do without
connectivity for extended stretches I recommend it.

~~~
dylan604
why not set a timer and disable wifi/network for the duration of the time you
are setting aside to work without distraction. Or, maybe just close the
tab/app with the distracting alerts? lots of way to achieve the same result
without limiting yourself to such ancient hardware. Modern Macs have Do Not
Disturb mode. I use this frequently

~~~
menybuvico
Why would using older hardware be limiting yourself any more than you just
described? It just happens to do it by it's nature of being old instead of you
deliberately limiting modern equipment.

As long as it works, why not use the hardware if you have it and it's still
operational? Older desktop PC's have a certain power usage issue compared to
modern ones, but laptops usually tend to keep power consumption down.

~~~
dylan604
I run photoshop, after effects, premiere. Those tools are absolutely not going
to run on older hardware. Anything media related would just a joke. Even tools
like FFMPEG, ImageMagick would run like a turtle processing the media I'm
processing on a daily basis. Just because I'm coding something doesn't mean
that code isn't doing some heavy lifting that older hardware would be suffice.

~~~
menybuvico
If you need to do some heavy work then an older system obviously won't do.
Editing files with Vim, on the other hand, works just fine with something like
a Core 2 or Pentium M.

Everyone's use case is different, but in many cases, older hardware simply
isn't a limitation.

~~~
yelling_cat
Absolutely, I just used Deadline for writing and light diagramming. As a bonus
I actually liked Win2k, it was stable and didn't get in my way. The only thing
it was missing was font smoothing.

------
lostgame
Hey; me, too! I use my iMac G4 and PowerMac G5 (with 16GB RAM and 2x1TB SSDs)
daily. Love ‘em. Thank God for TenFourFox!

~~~
saagarjha
That’s more storage and RAM than my current computer…

------
shortformblog
I literally spent the weekend setting up Debian on a Mac Mini. While I had
trouble getting anything more modern to install (certain dependencies are hard
to find), I was able to get Arctic Fox working, and found that it was fairly
snappy given the fact it’s running on a G4 processor.

------
dividedbyzero
I wish I had something like that, but I never got into PowerPC Macs, I bought
into the ecosystem with I think the second generation of plastic Intel
Macbooks (which, looking back, were quite terrible), and while there's still
an early 90s Schneider home computer somewhere in the basement, I fear it
won't work anymore and not be any joy to use anyway; that thing was incredibly
primitive. It took almost a whole afternoon for my dad to make it play a
really simple child's tune for little me. I don't think I appreciated it
properly at the time.

I wonder if a Pi 4 would have the horsepower to run a PowerPC emulator with OS
9 properly. If it did, the biggest difficulty might be finding a decent small-
ish external screen.

------
sentientforest
I have a lot of vintage Apple tech. Much of it still works...

I have a 2001 PowerPC G4 Quicksilver tower. Haven't booted it in a while, but
it worked fine last time I did. If you can find these local to you, you can
often get them very cheap. Shipping is expensive though, so buying them on a
place like eBay is kind of a non-starter. I recently found a sealed old copy
of Cubase VST available online for about $10. Bought an old M-Audio PCI card a
long time ago for this machine too. At some point I may set it up as a Digital
Audio Workstation.

I found a pair of old (2001) PowerPC iBooks on eBay a while back. They're good
for running kids games and software - useful if you want an inexpensive, air-
gapped machine for a young child you don't want on the open internet. Or
typing / writing. These can be had very cheaply, I think because many schools
bought them and eventually liquidated their inventory to replace with newer
equipment. I had no problem finding inexpensive new batteries for these on
eBay, and bought a couple extras.

More regularly, I use my old mid-2007 black macbook to run the original
Starcraft. I'm running it via the OS X Installer (it's originally a PowerPC OS
9 game). I'm not much of a gamer these days, but Starcraft can be fun once in
a while... like when PG&E in California shuts off the power for days and you
want to conserve your main laptop's battery for work... And it's cool to have
games that actually support local lan multiplayer, which Blizzard moved away
from over time.

For anyone looking to delve deeper into this topic, here's some
recommendations (off the top of my head) on what version of OS X to settle on
for a given machine:

For older Intel Machines, I recommend 10.6 Snow Leopard. This is the last OS
to support Rosetta, which allows you to run PowerPC OS X software. Note:
PowerPC OS X software, not PowerPC OS 9 / Classic software.

For older PPC machines, I recommend 10.4 Tiger. This is the last OS to support
running OS 9 applications via the Classic environment. Or of course, you can
just install OS 9 and forego OS X altogether.

------
jerzyt
I'm on a Dell Precision M6400 - it's 12 years old. When it came out it was a
$3,000 laptop. I bought mine for about half of that on a fire sale a year
later. Still love it, although I do have a 10 year younger ThinkPad, I prefer
the much older Dell.

------
squeezingswirls
> Does this mean we’ll see another PowerPC desktop computer or laptop in the
> future? Not likely.

This project [https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/](https://www.powerpc-
notebook.org/) is pretty advanced in that regard.

------
mcdramamean
For me the the issue with upgrading is that when you buy a piece of hardware,
specifically DJ gear (Serato), mixers/interfaces, etc; the latest and greatest
often doesn't support it. Then you are hoping and wishing for the company to
create drivers to support your expensive hardware on the latest Catalina OS
upgrade. That's why when you see interviews with many musicians that have home
studios, the computers aren't the newest. Once you have a stable situation
that works, why change all the time?

------
mmglr
I enjoy the nostalgia of booting up and using old machines. After the first
sentence this article came off as disingenuous. There are easier ways to stay
productive without needing to break out a 17 year old Mac. It’s almost like
the author is trying to convince himself this is a good idea. Turning off WiFi
and using apps in full screen seems much easier.

The author mentions Slack. I’ve been using Mattermost for about 2 years now.
I’ve found that having a mandatory offline schedule is important. I’ve been
vocal about that with my team. Usually I’m offline from Mattermost for about
2-3 hours a day. Which allows me to focus on my work.

------
zelos
> Of course, it goes without saying that my ancient iBook can’t run Slack

Out of interest, I wonder what the minimum spec to run an IRC client is?

~~~
MrZammler
Depends on the platform, but I used to run AmIRC on an Amiga with a modest
68030 @ 50 Mhz :-) I think it did run ok also on a stock A1200 with a 14(!)Mhz
68020 processor and a couple of MB's of RAM.

~~~
spiritplumber
Can confirm that you could do IRC just fine on a stock A1200.

You can browse wikipedia on one of those, too.

------
AnonHP
> By 2006, Apple had transitioned away from IBM’s processor designs.

Wasn’t the initial PowerPC architecture and designs done by Apple, IBM and
Motorola, with Motorola and IBM also working the fabs for processors used by
Apple during that time (before the switch to Intel)? When did Apple stop being
involved in the design of specific processors used in its systems?

~~~
timw4mail
I don't think Apple was really involved in the design side of PowerPC. As far
as I know, Apple has only designed ARM processors.

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stanislavb
There is a histerish cafe in Sofia, Bulgaria, that has one of those Macs in
every room and allows customers to play/select music from it. I think they
never updated those machines as they just work and make the vibe of the cafe
even more interesting as time passes.

------
vaxman
I used to run YellowDogLinux (now famous for “yum”) on my last (17”) PowerBook
G3 and had triple boot with ClassicMac emulation along with MacOS X Lompoc.
F’ing mainboards blew several times on all of my non-plastic PowerBooks and
MacBookPros, except for the latest, which just had its keyboard and screen
replaced (and its second keyboard is going out again). Some of the machines
had broken DVD injectors, memory sockets that would come short (the real
reason they solder it now), lots of them have had power supply issues. They
always want us to buy the next one which is supposed to fix the thermal or
mechanical or whatever.. My favorite was the MBP+LG UltraFine 5K that would
reboot when a shortwave operator keyed up the mic. The guy from HP who
specializes in Chinese supply chains and runs Apple now is an iPad Pro power
user and it shows. Just buy iPad Pro —if you develop for them, then switch to
Flutter and add an Xcode-server to your network.

------
scarface74
One of these days I’m going to dig up my PowerMac 6100/60 with the DOS
Compatibility Card and my LCII with the //e card and 5-1/4 inch drive from my
mom’s house. All of my disks are in a bedroom so they might still be usable.

Any way I can get old Ambrosia games?

~~~
duskwuff
> Any way I can get old Ambrosia games?

[https://macintoshgarden.org/](https://macintoshgarden.org/) has most of them.
(Sadly, Ambrosia appears to have shut down entirely. End of an era...)

------
qubex
He calls it an iBook but I’m pretty sure it’s a PowerBook 12”. I got one of
those when they were released and it soon earned the pet-name of ‘sparky’
because when charging it wasn’t very well grounded and would regularly give me
shocks.

------
dddddaviddddd
Trying to get a new battery is one of the worst parts of trying to use an old
notebook.

------
tantalor
> it goes without saying that my ancient iBook can’t run Slack

What? That's a very surprising statement! Of course Slack has a web client.
Does it not support any browser that runs on the old hardware?

~~~
stu2b50
Well, yeah? I'd be shocked if any supported browser can run a modern SPA.
That's not even necessarily because of resource limitations, it's just very,
very different from the techniques of the era.

------
sys_64738
Crazy the battery still holds charge. Those were first to go for me.

------
napolux
You can just setup a raspberry pi with no wifi and write in a dos like env
like DOSBOX o FreeDOS.

I have a raspberry pi 2 I can use for that, probably.

Ok, I've found my weekend project :P

~~~
cat199
riscos might be a good bet for this kind of thing

------
nonamenoslogan
I still regularly use an iBook G4 to write HTML and play games. Love the
simplicity of the oldies but goodies.

------
1MachineElf
Ah nostalgia. Thinking about grabbing a used iBook for playing Bugdom.

------
prvc
>Still

Recently acquired, however.

------
dilandau
Ah yes, the "computer as glorified typewriter" blog post. Needless to say, I
think these appeal to people because:

Encourage consumption (of old/novelty hardware)

Promise of "productivity" (the holy grail for hn commenters)

A pip on your shoulder for being different/special

Deflect from the hard problems internet addiction and procrastination, to "hey
do this instead"

------
Wandfarbe
"I have a completly outdated system with internet connectivity because i'm not
using what an average user is doing at all and now i'm writing an article
about it"

I have upgraded from a X220 to a X390 for a single reason: YouTube Videos,
which i like to watch on my laptop, started to put the x220 under high load.

I'm just not writing an Article about it.

Ah and one generic reason for not having something with is 20 years old: You
do wanna have security updates.

~~~
anthk
> started to put the x220 under high load.

invidio.us, mpv + youtube-dl, smplayer...

~~~
Wandfarbe
Sry i'm a software engineer, i like hardware and i don't have any issue
upgrading my laptop to be able to just watch a youtube video on my browser
without any manual hardware optimized workaround.

...

------
tengbretson
I'm not trying to be a downer, but there is absolutely no reason to do this.
For $50 you can do so much better without really trying all that hard.

Now I fully appreciate the draw of doing something like this as a hobby or
something, but this article is talking about productivity. This is not an
investment for productivity.

~~~
barney54
What would you suggest as an alternative?

~~~
tengbretson
This one would have a nicer keyboard and support modern software.

[https://www.ebay.com/i/324223000220?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1...](https://www.ebay.com/i/324223000220?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-117182-37290-0&mkcid=2&itemid=324223000220&targetid=930952841002&device=m&mktype=pla&googleloc=9051525&poi=&campaignid=10454995850&mkgroupid=101996180125&rlsatarget=aud-622524042878:pla-930952841002&abcId=2145998&merchantid=119041245)

~~~
SyneRyder
That one doesn't include a hard drive, has several missing keys and mouse
buttons, and doesn't include a battery or power adapter. The PPC Mac looks
like the better value.

------
sneak
For approximately 10x as much ($500 USD), you can get a pre-retina Air, which
has a much improved keyboard, working wifi, flash storage, and a modern OS and
browser. It also happens to be _way_ lighter.

To me that’s more than a 10x improvement over the setup the author describes.
There’s relatively little you can’t do on such a $500 machine.

~~~
foobiekr
Except get security updates that are only ever packaged in newer OS releases,
for one thing.

I get where you're coming from, but this is the fundamental problem with
network-connected devices. I'm an Apple fan, of sorts, and my whole family is
part of the Apple ecosystem, but the company has a nasty habit of strategic
obsolescence and doubly so around transitions.

~~~
sigjuice
Both Mojave and Catalina support MacBook Air models from 2012.

~~~
IggleSniggle
2012 is only 8 years ago tho

~~~
SyneRyder
I'm giving this an upvote, because I have a MacBook 1,1 from 2006 that runs
Windows 10. That's 14 years of support & security updates from Microsoft, and
they didn't even make the device.

