I still have my 6100, tempted to try exploring this. Always felt like that era was the last of the "fun macs" when things weren't all busybody fussy unixy with hi-res gradients and hyperslickness and so forth. The new macs just took the "personal" out of personal computing, as I see it. Take that with a grain of salt, of course.
I greatly appreciate the Jobs-era Mac OS X, with its Unix and NeXT heritage; in fact I personally think the high water mark of the Mac from both a software and hardware perspective was the Mac OS X Snow Leopard era. Nowadays I use FreeBSD and Windows, but I would be glad to use a variant of Snow Leopard with HiDPI support, updated browsers, and security patches if such existed.
With that being said, there is something warm-feeling and even whimsical about the classic Mac OS and classic beige Macs. I truly think the Apple Human Interface Guidelines of the 1990s were well written and are timeless recommendations for making great, usable software. I believe designers of today's user-facing software tools should acquaint themselves with a classic Mac running contemporary programs like Microsoft Word 5.1 and the ClarisWorks suite to see great examples of well-designed software. I also like both the System 7 and Platinum themes, with a slight preference toward Platinum. I'm really curious about A/UX, which married the classic Mac OS and Unix, and I'm also curious about Rhapsody, a predecessor to Mac OS X that was based on NeXTSTEP but featured the Platinum theme from Mac OS 8.
To be honest, my switch to FreeBSD and Windows had more to do with hardware (notably the lack of upgradeability in many Macs since Tim Cook took over) and less to do with software. macOS is still a good OS; I use Monterey on my work-issued MacBook Pro. However, my biggest gripes are:
1. The increased iOS-ification of the user interface. I believe a desktop operating system should support desktop workflows and not import at wholesale UI elements that don't make sense outside of touchscreen environments; I have a similar complaint about modern Windows and GNOME.
2. The introduction of notarization.
3. Over the years I've noticed that macOS has gotten more annoying when it comes to notifications. Back in the Leopard era there was a classic commercial mocking Windows Vista's "Cancel or Allow" dialogs. Yet it seems I have to wade through many notifications whenever I'm using Macs these days.
In my opinion, it seems that the old guard from the days of the classic Mac, NeXTSTEP, and early Mac OS X with their deep knowledge of the UI guidelines of those eras has less and less influence at Apple these days, while younger software developers with little-to-no experience with these operating systems but who have extensive experience with the Web and newer operating systems are having more influence on the Mac's UI/UX. Unfortunately the Mac is becoming more like iOS and less like an operating system completely tailored to the desktop computing experience. Don't get me wrong, modern macOS is still a good OS, but I prefer the Snow Leopard era of Mac OS X.
>What’s also ironic was how, at that time, Apple gave Microsoft flack for having so many different versions of Windows, while Apple only had one version of OSX. Now it seems best that Apple makes a consumer and professional version of MacOS, the consumer version with all the pay services and toy stuff, and a minimal professional version that provides a commercially supported version of a UNIX system without all the cruft.
Couldn't agree more, modern macOS is just kind of... annoying. I also don't feel like it really does much if anything better than e.g. Snow Leopard, while simultaneously performing a lot of mostly invisible magic behind the scenes that I wish had some feedback and gave some control over - like all the photo analysis stuff.
It was at the heyday of the "personal" computer on both sides of the divide; a single upgrade could make your machine magically more capable in ways we don't really have now.
Adding a new processor could be a huge speed improvement, adding a new graphics card would greatly expand your screen capabilities, etc.
This site alone has a system with a 601 at 60MHz replaced with a G4 at 300 MHz, and RAM from 8MB to 264MB. That's like going from 8GB to 256GB today, just insane difference to how you use the system (and RAM was much faster than the disk back then, so RAM disks made sense, etc).
I remember our last DOS computer had enough RAM that it made sense to RAMdisk most of the most commonly used programs we had, even though it slowed boot up copying them into the RAM disk.
Yeah, performance advanced much faster then. That 601->G4 was a 5x clockspeed jump that was way more than 5x faster in certain areas, too!
That's a computer that came out in 1994 upgraded with a processor from 1999.
Even if you could put a 2022 chip in a 2017 Mac laptop, it wouldn't be the same sort of improvement.
IMO this slowdown in the pace of single-component improvements is what has killed upgradability - buying a computer in the 90s, you knew that within a generation or two you'd probably be looking at at least a doubling in general-purpose or capacity, applicable-everywhere performance within the same socket/graphics card interface/hard drive/memory interfaces. So not having component upgradability, like, say, in some eMachines without an AGP port, was a big limiting factor for the usable lifespan, in a way it just isn't anymore.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Some people here get so touchy over post next jobs era macs.
I do disagree with your timing though. I think the best of times was in the early to mid 90s. With radius graphics card. Daystar accelerators on Nubus slots. For some macs, separate math coprocessor. Asante network card. APS and LaCie external scsi hard drive and Daisy chaining them. Adb port devices. Nostalgia!!
Over the weekend, some of us old timers were reminiscing about the bad old days of the early Avid NLEs. The damn chain of ADB dongles to enable the software and various plugins that to the uninitiated looked a lot like S-Video and would ultimately get plugged into the wrong port, bending pins ruining the dongle, then being told by support that a dongle could not be replaced. Striping 7 full height media drives in a SCSI enclosure just to get enough bandwidth to record the video, but not enough for audio that got saved to yet another drive.
Also, SCSI chains requiring terminators (or not), and internal SCSI drives with the jumpers in the wrong pins. Original Wacom tablets built like tanks. 21" CRT monitors that weighed a bazillion pounds, had half-a-mile of bezels, and sitting 2 side by side caused EMI so the images were disturbed. ProTools requiring DSP boards that numbered more than slots in the computer. Expansion chasis to handle all of the extras. All now outpowered by your damn social media device, er, smart phone
Happy memories indeed. I always thought ADB was ahead of its time and although it really wasn't hot-pluggable it was, in fact, almost hot-pluggable. Much moreso than the AT PC keyboard connector at any rate. And it just made so much sense having one connector for all input peripherals, unlike DB-9 mice and DIN keyboards!
I also fondly remember DIP switches being added onto SCSI external drives along with their block-like 50Ω resistor terminations. Woe betide you if you pushed the case back against the wall and flipped one of those mid-write...
Actually I bought my 6100 somewhere around '93-'95. I know it was before 1996.
But I'm not actually saying the 6100 was "the best of" anything; it was the bottom-of-the-line cheapest one you could get at the time. I'm really just talking about pre-OSX. The early Macs were and are fun too.
Nothing about that first generation of Power Mac reminds me of "fun". It reminds me more of "kernel panics right before CD-R is finalized" or "kernel panics whenever the network cable is unplugged" or sometimes "kernel panics whenever any network cable anywhere on campus is unplugged" and quite frequently "kernel panics if I try to scan a slide" oh and from time to time "installing MS Office from 60 floppies is a bit of a chore". Really cannot think of anything in my personal history of computing that was less fun than a mid-90s Mac.
I am not even sure there was something that you could call a kernel in that time.
Apple was failing in their quest to secure a modern successor to MacOS 7.
It sure was a lot of fun looking at what they threw at it, and MacOS 9.2 was polished for sure. But without MacOS X, MacOS would have gone the way of BeOS and Amiga...
Still a pity it didn't literally go the way of BeOS by acquiring Be, like might have happened. I used both NeXTstep on 68k and BeOS on Intel, and much preferred the latter. NeXTstep was a crawling horror of abstractions, which might have made it more portable, but also made it clunky.
Anyone else remember having a top-spec iMac G4 in 2002 that couldn't even scroll or resize a window smoothly? Pathetic, and painfully slow. I gave up on 10.1.x and just ran Yellow Dog for about a year until I managed to lay my hands on a copy of 10.2, which was marginally better, but still much slower than Linux at the time. The iLamp was a wonderful machine, but very much let down by its intended OS.
Reacquiring Steve Jobs was probably worth it for Apple. ;-)
In 2002, Macworld was happy with the iMac G4 performance:
"Generally, using the iMac was a pleasure. It was speedy and responsive in most cases, although the Mac OS X version of iMovie was more sluggish than we’d expect from a G4-based machine."
PC Magazine gave it 4 stars and an Editor's Choice award. Readers gave it a 5 star member rating.
> Still a pity it didn't literally go the way of BeOS by acquiring Be
I disagree.
I loved BeOS. I still miss it. It was a great OS, and I preferred it to NeXTstep.
But it wasn't just the OS. NeXT had 2 key things Be didn't: [1] state-of-the-art dev tools [2] Steve Jobs.
Stealing from my own blog post on the subject...
Apple's then CEO Gil Amelio was considering buying former Apple VP Jean-Louis Gassée's company Be, for BeOS, or Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' company NeXT Computer, for OpenStep, the successor to NeXTstep.
They went with NeXT. BeOS was excellent - small, fast, efficient, modern, streamlined, and ran on Apple kit. The company was small, with some excellent engineers. The snag is, Gassée wanted a lot more for it than Apple was offering. Although this was bad - terminal - news for Be, it was probably all for the best for Apple.
BeOS was a great OS, but if Apple had moved to it, its 3rd party developers probably would not have, for the most part, and it would have killed the company.
Apple needed a follow-on for classic MacOS, it needed it urgently and it needed to be a blinder. BeOS did not have one crucial advantage that NeXTstep offered, and as such, it would not have had the same appeal, the devs probably would not have fallen in love with the new Apple OS, and Apple would have withered and died. What didn't BeOS have that NeXTstep had? Well...
NeXT was going cost a packet anyway - it was doing better and had some big names on board. Some were working for it, including several people who worked on the Mac in the early days, including, of course, Jobs himself. It also had some serious clients, including CERN - where Tim Berners-Lee developed the WorldWideWeb on a NeXTstation, and corporate clients such as the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS). NeXT's OS was also beautiful, sophisticated & very hi-tech - but didn't run on Macs, nor even on the Mac's PowerPC processors. It offered 2 major advantages over Be, though: #1, getting Steve Jobs back, and #2, one of the great strengths of NeXTstep was its world-class, industry-leading development tools. Be had nothing to rival these.
Amelio went with NeXT. If the Mac had to move to a new OS, then all Mac developers would have to learn to code for the new OS. Mac devs were pretty wedded to their platform, as were Mac users. And transitioning to a whole new OS, Apple really needed to get the devs on board.
Classic MacOS's dev tools were nothing special and quite hard work. Be was moving its dev tools over to GCC but whereas this was good, it was nothing amazing. But NeXT's Objective-C and Interface Builder were in a whole different league. Getting the Mac 3rd party devs to move to NeXTstep would be vastly easier than to BeOS, as NeXT's dev tools were almost universally recognised as among the best in the industry.
So that's what Amelio did, and history has proved him right.
I always wondered if Apple/Be could have had OS X running faster than Apple/NeXT did.
The excuse was always that Be had no software. But NeXT stuff getting into OS X wasn't exactly perfect. Part of me thinks that at least one or two looked at getting A/UX or MAE or something on top of Be, just like Blue Box or whatever got onto OS X.
Apple and the Macintosh platform was on a downhill trajectory in the mid-1990s. Whether a hypothetical Be acquisition could have resulted in a successful operating system is kind of moot, because there's nothing to suggest that a Be acquisition would have arrested the overall decline.
The high order bit in Apple's resurgence was Steve Jobs. He's mostly known for his charisma on stage, but he was instrumental in restructuring the company from the ground up.
Despite early pains, the NeXT technology stack has proven to be an incredibly capable platform which has served Apple extraordinarily well as the basis for two decades of macOS development, and as the software foundation for the iPhone and iPad. The fact that it was underpinned by UNIX was how the Mac got taken seriously by developers in the mid-2000s.
There were no kernel panics back then. There was hardly a kernel per se until 8.6.
We had “Sorry, a system error occurred” bombs. It was “funny” that those errors remained in 1 bit color even though the entire system had full color support for decades.
I had a 7200 and it never really performed very well. The "software" modem/telephony device was interesting, but the backing software was too crashy. Mostly I remember it seeming slower than the last generation of 68k Quadras; I had one of those on my desk at my day job.
The first generation iMac, on the other hand, I did think was a lot of fun. All of the sudden the UI was responsive and the software was surprisingly reliable.
Yeah, good memories of that era. I had a 7500, which was a very upgradeable machine, taking lots of memory and CPU (and cache cards - remember them?).
Mine had an annoying beat, like two fans running at slightly different speeds. Apart from that, it was a great machine, and ran Logic really well which was it's main job.
OS 8 and 9 were unreliable at using the internet because unlike Windows or Linux it was not a 32 bit OS with real memory protection. I remember various releases that struggled with the problem, especially they added a whole bunch of locks to protect memory structures which slowed the machine down dramatically.
Classic Mac OS was designed to handle events raining in from the keyboard and mouse and was able to run on the 128k classic Mac but Apple was in serious trouble in the 1990s until MacOS X which was competitive with the competition.
> Windows 95 absolutely had memory protection and preemptive multitasking, at least for “native” Win32 applications.
Apparently the first 1MB of RAM was mapped for compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows, which meant that the common bug of writing through a null/zero pointer could easily crash the system.
Win32 processes were isolated. The problem is that certain kernel objects were limited and could be leaked leading to stability problems. Compatability with DOS required some regions of memory to be unprotected.
I ran NT4 on my laptop in the late 90s and remember it was somewhat unusual. A little clunky, my memory is some common things like changing screen resolution required a reboot, but it was more reliable and responsive overall. Most people stuck with the 95/98/Me progression due to cost (2000 wanted more memory than Me and partially for that reason Me was default preload on most PCs).
I ran NT4 on my Thinkpad briefly around 98 or 99... it sucked. Power management didn't work at all. USB didn't work at all. The video driver was awful. The built-in ethernet didn't work; you had to use a PCMCIA card to get networking at all.
Essentially, it turned the laptop into an under-powered desktop with a built-in UPS and slow video.
These things were generally better by the time 2000 came around... but NT4 was never any good on my laptop. (And at the bank where I worked when I graduated in 1999, it was terrible on those as well. The senior managers' laptops were the only systems in the bank allowed to use 98.)
NT 4 was rubbish for laptops. But it was a state-of-the-art OS for desktops in 1996.
Laptops were not so crucial then. Few people used a laptop as their primary computer; they were an adjunct to a _real_ computer, suitable for emergency working on the move, but with poor CPU, slow disks, poor graphics, etc.
The default computer for business until ½ decade or so into the 21st century was a desktop PC, and for them, from 1993 onwards, NT was unrivalled.
And I speak as someone who spent their own money on OS/2 2.0. I've been working in the industry since the 1980s, which means I never spent my own cash on software. (I'm not a gamer.) I've been using FOSS for 25+ years now, but OS/2 2.0 was worth the money.
> NT 4 was rubbish for laptops. But it was a state-of-the-art OS for desktops in 1996.
That matches my recollection. I was working in a shop that used NT 4 on 15000+ desktops. (I do recall SP3 or SP4 causing a ton of drama on those.) We were never able to get it to run acceptably on a laptop.
I never used OS/2 2.0 in anger. I did run Warp 4 on a few systems and recall preferring it over NT 4. It was also only suitable for desktops, though.
Same history here, but to be honest, a good day with Mac OS 7/8/9 was literally defined by having no forced reboots due to a crash. Especially somewhat heavy multitasking with Photoshop, BBEdit, Netscape and Eudora usually lead to a system crash once every few hours. You can tell the seasoned Mac user by them having seconds enabled on the menu bar clock, so they can see whether the machine is still doing anything :)
With later hardware and software, especially G3/G4 with Mac OS 9.x, the machine crashed less often, but usually still did at least a few times per week.
Yes, for a while IE was the best browser for Mac, not just in terms of stability. But before that time, we had to make do with Netscape, as there wasn't really any worthwhile competition.
For a long time, the Mac version of IE 5 was one of the best browsers on the market. It used a completely different renderer from the Windows version; as a result, its CSS support was quite good. It even supported transparent PNGs, which the Windows version of IE struggled with for years.
> Same history here, but to be honest, a good day with MacOS 7/8/9 was literally defined by having no forced reboots due to a crash.
I recall having unexpected reboots every few days (except on systems with complicated SCSI chains, what a nightmare), but my bar for system extensions was also unreasonably high. I remember feeling a little sick seeing multiple rows of extensions when friends restarted their Macs.
I gave up the "Oscar the Grouch" system extension where said Oscar sung a little song on emptying the Trash only reluctantly, but doing so did make my system more stable.
Of course, I only mentioned the essentials :) I wasn't much of an IRC person, and I remember using a different SSH client, but don't recall which one. Also, Fetch.
same, but I pissed off Onno when I pirated Ircle, and ended up going with a different program. ShadowIRC. :) still friends on Facebook with the developer all these years later.
Well we all pirated it, but I think actually I ended up paying for it in the end. I did spend some time on ShadowIRC. I have a vague recollection that that author hung out on Undernet and his website had an animated gif of the moon that I spent WAY too many hours trying to duplicate in PhotoShop. DShadow?
I recall OS 8 crashing often and loosing lots of work. Back then I was doing graphic design work and just getting into web programming. Photoshop, Illustrator and QuarkXpress all day with those apps crashing unexpectedly. MS Word for Mac was awful back then too. OS 9 was much better and Windows 2000 was actually really good. It's great that that sort of instability is a thing of the past!
As another respondent also remembered it, I would probably get less than one crash a day. Windows 95 had it's own (multifarious) problems. I was maintaining servers with years of uptime and definitely looking forward to OSX. :)
> OS 8 and 9 were unreliable at using the internet because unlike Windows or Linux it was not a 32 bit OS with real memory protection.
This isn't my recollection at all, although the lack of protected memory on "Classic Mac OS" means that you would've personally experienced unreliable anything if you were also running poorly-written extensions or other software on your system.
System 7 (1991) was the first 32-bit version of Classic Mac OS, and Internet Explorer for Macintosh was very advanced for its time. Classic Mac OS had a healthy browser ecosystem which also included Cyberdog, iCab, Netscape, Opera, and WannaBe (a text browser).
Woz has an interesting section in his book "iWoz" regarding System 7 stability before/after Internet Explorer was installed. A fresh install of System 7 would operate just fine, but as soon as IE was installed, weird things would happen. It's definitely worth reading if you haven't already.
"That first day I used iCab instead of IE, I had no crashes. Not a single one. Hmm."
"I could never convince Apple. This was such a big lament for me at the time. I couldn’t convince anyone that it wasn’t the Mac OS that was at fault. Then one day Gil Amelio told me that Apple—in addition to avoiding excess production and inventory and keeping expenses down—was going to buy a new operating system."
I wonder if he was experiencing instability due to Code Fragment Manager instead of IE itself? Mac IE was even late shipping for 68K Macs due to problems with CFM-68K.
"Finally, Internet Explorer has been hit by the CFM-68K bug. Microsoft was on the cutting edge in adopting the Code Fragment Manager for 68K Macs, and due to the well-known bug in CFM support on 68K Macs, Internet Explorer is currently only available for PowerPC-based Macs. Apple should have this bug fixed soon, though, and Microsoft plans on releasing a 68K version at that time." — https://www.macobserver.com/reviews/ie3.shtml
CFM-68K was infamously unstable until version 4.0 shipped in April 1997, and even the PowerPC-native version saw a bunch of improvements around that time, so this lines up with a 1996/1997 timeframe in iWoz if one ignores the anachronistic iCab story:
"In late November 1996, Apple announced a bug in the CFM-68K Runtime Enabler extension. This bug could cause random crashes and hangs, resulting in application instability and potential loss of data. Because of the potential seriousness of these problems, Apple recommended that customers disable the extension. Also, Mac OS 7.6 would prevent the extension from loading. Mac OS 7.6 does support the the 4.0 version of the extension." — https://macgui.com/kb/article/502 (May 1997)
Seems like they conflated 32-bit with lack of memory protection.
(Tangent: IIRC there were Macs where the CPU had a 32 bit pointer width but you could only use 24 bits of address space. And sometimes software would work on this assumption and break with a full 32 bits. But that's neither here nor there.)
But in addition to lack of memory protection, cooperative multi-tasking was also a big problem. It was a pretty common experience to see something do intense work rendering a progress bar and the rest of the system would slow down. IIRC this made having something like a web browser open sometimes painful.
> Classic Mac OS had a healthy browser ecosystem which also included Cyberdog, iCab, Netscape, Opera, and WannaBe
Ehh...
Cyberdog was never widely used. It depended on the OpenDoc framework, which most users didn't even have installed, and was only available as a beta for a year or so. It was never a serious contender.
iCab was a latecomer -- it was released in 1999, long after most of the mainstream browsers. It was used by a few people, but was never particularly popular either.
I have never even heard of WannaBe. Based on what I see online, it looks pretty obscure.
Having fully indexed instantaneous search for my emails in 1996 was absolutely living in the future.
Especially if you subscribed to a lot of mailing lists and went looking for information on something specific that you knew you had read, but didn't know where.
Yes. It was a sad day when I had to move on from it. Curious as to other applications which were way ahead of the curve (and the hardware) which could be remade today & fly.
To memory what really messed with OS stability when browsing the internet on System 7.5.3 (the first Mac OS I used) up through 9.2.2 were browser plugins.
Earlier on, Java applets were by far the most notorious troublemakers in this realm. I remember as a kid bumping around the internet on a Performa 6400 with Netscape looking for online games, and that machine could never go long without the browser crashing or the dreaded "Sorry, a system error occurred." dialog popping up after browsing a few pages with applets.
Shockwave and Flash were reasonably stable for the most part, until 3D Shockwave games started appearing… those were almost as messy as applets were.
> To memory what really messed with OS stability when browsing the internet on System 7.5.3 (the first Mac OS I used) up through 9.2.2 were browser plugins.
OS Extensions in general were a source of instability. It's like kernel extensions on Macs or kernel drivers on Windows today, there is no safety net and coding errors can take down the entire system.
You really needed to weigh the reputation of a company for stability before adding an extension from them.
> You really needed to weigh the reputation of a company for stability before adding an extension from them.
And the interaction between different extensions. You could be fine with some set of extensions, fine with a different set of extensions, but then have an unusable system if both sets were active.
> Mac OS X is the next big thing for the Mac. A fusion of Apple and NeXT technology, OS X is fully native, fully pre-emptive, fully protected and full of the bells, whistles and buzzwords we've been promised since PowerPC first appeared. It supports symmetric multiprocessing, to go along with the multi-G4 machines shipping now and the multi-core CPU's currently under development.
>Sadly, Mac OS X probably will not run on a 6100, no matter what you do to the hardware.
Anyone know why that was? Looks like people got OS X to work on iMac G3's so you'd think that a PowerMac with upgraded G3 and memory should be able to run it. Some other HW/MB feature missing?
edit: This[1] video about upgrading to OS X on an iMac G3 mentions the need to update the Mac's firmware so I guess there may not have been a FW upgrade for the 6100.
Early versions of OS X did run on Old World Macs, I remember running it on my 7500. I think the limiting factor was the Mac had to have Open Firmware, which started with the PCI Macs.
Afaik MacOS X didn't boot on old world PPC machines with NuBus slots, but 10.2.x can be installed on a PowerMac 9500 with a G3 upgrade and with a 32MB PCI Radeon GPU the UI was even usable. It helped that the box was also upgraded with >800MB RAM spread over 12 DIMMs as well as two 10kRPM U160 disks in HW RAID1. Still the slow 50-60MHz PPC60x bus was beyond painful.
I think it would be possible, but you'd likely need to drop into the open firmware and type in a magic incantation to make the bootloader think it was a supported system (don't ask me to remember exactly what that might be. It was a looong time ago, but I did get both PPC OS X and Darwin to run on an unsupported mac clone that had an upgraded cpu. I remember submitting a posting to resexcellence about it!)
OS X (10.0 - 10.3) worked out of the box on my iMac G3. It was pretty sluggish until 10.3 came out, but I didn't need to do anything tricky like firmware upgrades to get it running.
IIRC a big problem was the CPU. PowerMacs with 603s or 604s were "supported" by XPostFacto, but not the 601, which is why the 7200 could not boot OS X despite not using NuBus. The NuBus Macs also did not use OpenFirmware, contrary to all PCI (and AGP) PowerMacs.
> The basic requirement for Mac OS X to ever work on a machine is that it have a PowerPC processor, a PCI bus, and Open Firmware. So the earliest PowerPC computers from Apple (e.g. the 6100, 7100, and 8100) are not likely to ever work with Mac OS X.
No OS X, but you can run the Mach 3/osfmk-based MkLinux. My 6100 was one if the first in Europe to run it and served as ftp server to distribute MkLinux. Must have been 1996 or 97, I think…
I paid $3k for a PowerMac 7100 in 1994. I remember paying $1600 for an extra 32 MiB RAM around 1996. I also bought L2 cache (an external module back in those days), and then a G3 upgrade.
>I remember paying $1600 for an extra 32 MiB RAM around 1996
I remember doing exactly this around the same time. Back then, RAM was almost considered a durable good, because RAM prices had remained stable for so long. I thought, "well, this is expensive, but I'll get most of my money back if I ever sell the computer," and this wasn't a completely insane idea at the time.
My Powermac 6100 AV, bought second hand for $1500 in 1996 came with RCA connectors, I got it to make music. That purchase kickstarted my career in all things digital. Came with 200MB drive I upgraded to a whopping 2GB. I travelled with it until I got an ibook, which was much more portable for gigs!
I had a 6100 with one of those 486 cards too! I bought it with the hope of playing PC games on the Mac but I don't remember any of them actually working at playable speeds. How about you?
I was able to play Doom, Descent and most of the popular shareware games at the time. But I had to buy a separate 72 pin SIMM that attached directly to the card instead of having it share memory with the Mac.
>> I remember paying $1600 for an extra 32 MiB RAM around 1996
That's odd - I remember memory prices being really low around those times, and my friends and I loaded up our Windows 95 machines with 16 or 32MB for $50-$150 when it was on sale
While Macs did have the same specs and connectors for SIMMs as PCs, they were much more picky in terms of which modules they'd accept. You could do some research and find out which cheap modules were 100% compatible, or you could buy special Mac compatible modules for a quite notable markup from Crucial, Kingston and the like. This might explain the price difference.
I never had a 6100 (honestly never even had a Mac pre-OSX), but I'm getting a massive amount of nostalgia poisoning from just the website. For most of the 90s, probably into the 2000s for a bit, finding a "fan page" like this was like striking gold. I feel like the equivalent today is some mix of finding a well-written Wiki page and a well-moderated subreddit on some topic or product you are interested in, but the personal touch on pages like this is somehow cooler.
It makes me feel somewhat good to read this page and realize how charming I still find it.
I love this site. I just recently used it to pick out some RAM upgrades for my own PM 6100/60MHz upgraded with a MAXpowr G3 266MHz CPU upgrade. It also helped me confirm that a 7100 video card I had in my parts bin could be used on it as well!
I learned OS X on an old PCI PowerMac that a client gave to me in exchange for some unpaid bills. It's 20 years ago now, so I am not 100% sure but I think it was a 7600. Over the next few years, it got transformed, incrementally and with inexpensive 2nd-hand parts:
CPU: 200Mz PowerPC 604 → 333MHz G3
RAM: 32MB → 768 MB
HDD: 2GB SCSI → 40GB EIDE
Graphics: onboard unaccelerated framebuffer → PCI ATI Radeon
Ports: ADB + SCSI → USB 2 + FireWire
All gradual, and it remained working and usable throughout.
It started out with MacOS 7.6 or so, and ended up on 10.2 "Jaguar", while still able to run the same apps.
An astonishingly upgradable computer, and the OS was made possible at all by XPostFacto.
Still has the same old problem:
The built in video runs 68k faster than the HPV Card.
The HPV cards are all interchangeable. I had a 4MB/8100 HPV, and put it in a 7100/66^80 and later moved it to a 6100/G4.
IBM Later admitted that the 601 silicon was all the same, except for the 100/110.
6100s run at 80Mhz all day.
macintoshgarden has all the software, and macintosh respositary and archive.org has mirrors.
I loved my old 6100/66. had like 264 (2 x 128mb + 8mb onboard) RAM, that AV card, and a Sonnet G3/233 card. I absolutely loved that machine for as long as I could until the OS X era came around.
the bottleneck became the SCSI drives and then networking, being limited to the 10mbit AAUI port.
I too have happy memories of those days. Computers were a whole lot more fun.
I had a 6100/60. It was one of the most significant personal computer upgrades I’d ever done- the Rosetta that ran 680x0 code on PPC was impressive. This was also around the time I think Apple decided to start to stay processor-agnostic by starting the LLVM project when OS X/Rhapsody became a thing
LLVM was Chris Lattner’s graduate work. Apple didn’t start it. He finished his PhD and got hired by Apple in 2005, well past when Max OS X came out. For a longtime the toolchain for OS X (and iOS) was GCC.
LLVM was started far after the 6100 and, afaik, didn't move to an Apple backed project until 2005[0].
Apple did have "fat" binaries during the classic Mac OS transition, and interestingly enough, so did NeXT. The implementations were very different, however, and OS X eventually got the NeXT implementation.
