Greetings from my Performa 6200!

[LCGuy]

So I'm currently surfing the forums on my Performa 6200 (the one I liberated last week) through the Dell. System 7.5.5, Netscape Navigator 3. Pretty cool...reminds me of when I first got online back in the mid 1990's...I was 11 - 13, and a complete Mac fanatic...and until I was 13, I had never, ever used a Mac on the Internet. It amuses me to think that I would have shat myself to even get anywhere near a setup like this back when it was new.

Have to say...the forums actually aren't too bad in Netscape 3...it doesn't do CSS, meaning its fast, but ugly. And I've got Java turned off, since the old old old Javascript on here was causing our friend Mr. Type 11 error to rear its ugly head!

 

[jkoci]

Congrats. A 6200 was my first Mac. Obviously not the best of its time but it taught me alot about Macs and computing.

 

[Gil]

How? Whenever I used Netscape 4/IE 4 for anything recent, it crashed. I could never get anywhere, besides the Google homepage.

Cool, nonetheless.

 

[Christopher]

I used it on an old AIO once, took ages to load anything.

 

[System7]

Ah the x2xx motherboard architecture.....a classic of enginnering. 8 bit 16 bit and 32 and 64 bit buses living together with no hardware bridges.

Left 32 and Right 32.

The processor runs a 75 MHz, while the motherboard runs a 37.5 MHz.....

Then the GPU, stolen from the Quadra 630 requires a 33mhz Bus, 32 bits wide.

The Comm slot bus is 10 MHz bus, 8 bits wide.

32-bit PMMU, same as 630, runs at motherboard speed.

Processor Bus 64 bits, 37.5 MHz

Network/SCSI/audio/ADB L32, 10 MHz

Memory Controller R32, 33 MHz

Graphics Cont R32, 33 MHz

IDE/Video/TV R32, 12 MHz

And there were no hardware bridges between left and right 32. It was done right on the CPU, using this equation in ROM:

37.5 = 3/2 * 25 12.5 = 1/2 * 25 10 = 2/5 * 25 33 = 4/3 * 25

And some ROMs were bad, making them extremely nasty.

 

[Gil]

Ah the x2xx motherboard architecture.....a classic of enginnering. 8 bit 16 bit and 32 and 64 bit buses living together with no hardware bridges.Left 32 and Right 32.

The processor runs a 75 MHz, while the motherboard runs a 37.5 MHz.....

Then the GPU, stolen from the Quadra 630 requires a 33mhz Bus, 32 bits wide.

The Comm slot bus is 10 MHz bus, 8 bits wide.

32-bit PMMU, same as 630, runs at motherboard speed.

Processor Bus 64 bits, 37.5 MHz

Network/SCSI/audio/ADB L32, 10 MHz

Memory Controller R32, 33 MHz

Graphics Cont R32, 33 MHz

IDE/Video/TV R32, 12 MHz

And there were no hardware bridges between left and right 32. It was done right on the CPU, using this equation in ROM:

37.5 = 3/2 * 25 12.5 = 1/2 * 25 10 = 2/5 * 25 33 = 4/3 * 25

And some ROMs were bad, making them extremely nasty.

It's a miracle these things even bothered to get up in the morning, isn't it. :b&w:

 

[LCGuy]

How? Whenever I used Netscape 4/IE 4 for anything recent, it crashed. I could never get anywhere, besides the Google homepage.
Cool, nonetheless.

The key is to turn off Javascript. I'm using Netscape 3, with Javascript turned off, and it doesn't render CSS, so its just plain text and images. So its as ugly as sin, but there's not much that can go wrong.

System7: Thankfully, mine has the "good" ROM Still, it makes me wonder just what the hell they were thinking when they designed the thing.

 

[Rodus]

And some ROMs were bad, making them extremely nasty.

The whole 62/300 and 52/300 line up was nasty, in fairness though when I took my 5200 from 7.5.5 to 8 there was a big stability improvement and it seems slightly faster, I wonder if Apple did some tweaking in the OS for this lineup.

 

[jkoci]

in fairness though when I took my 5200 from 7.5.5 to 8 there was a big stability improvement and it seems slightly faster

As I remember upgrading to OS 8.1 helped my 6200 quite a bit.

 

[porter]

As I remember upgrading to OS 8.1 helped my 6200 quite a bit.

My 6200 dual boots 8.6 and Debian Woody Linux.

 

[Pinstripes]

I used to really like Netscape Navigator 3. It's the first browser I got onto the internet with (well, after Lynx.)

 

[LCGuy]

Same...actually, I started with Netscape 2 back in 1996, and remember when Netscape 3 came out, and it was the new, new, new thing. I've spent many hours with that browser.

 

[alk]

I seem to remember that NS 3 was incredibly unstable (type 3, 4, 11 errors all over the place). Am I remember wrong? Was it NS 2 that was bad? Which one practically required Netscape Defrost?

Peace,

Drew

 

[LCGuy]

I think that was Netscape 3...back in the day I only ever used it on Windows systems so I have no idea what it was like on Macs. But I think a lot of it was because of its implementation of Javascript. With Javascript turned off it seems to be fine.

 

[vassilizaitsev]

last time using CAB... oh sorry iCab on my 68k mac for internet, iCab did the most reasonable job.

 

[Mike Richardson]

Netscape 3 was the first browser I used that I considered modern. It was bundled with our Power Macintosh 6500 and worked in conjunction with AOL 3.0. This was one of if not the last Macs to ship with Netscape set as the default. After that, IE was the default thanks to Microsoft's little payout.

I remember loading Nick.com and thinking it was just the coolest thing ever. They had Frames, they had Java, they had Shockwave, the whole mess took over a minute to load but it was the coolest page I ever remember. Unfortunately the Web Archive never got a good look at it.

Before that I used some no-name stuff that came with AOL 2.7. The big feature in AOL 2.7 Browser vs 2.6 was that they added Table support. Compared to AOL 2.7, Netscape added Frames, JavaScript, Plugins, Java, etc.

AOL 3.0 had a better but still poor browser (MSIE Mac v2.1 rendering engine. Still the same code base as NCSA Mosaic at this point in time). Frames were supported. I do not believe Plugins or JavaScript were present though.

 

[joshc]

Does OS 8 really improve performance/stability on a 6200/6300 series Performa? The 6200 was the first computer I owned myself, and it was my main system up until mid 2001. I only ever experienced it with 7.5.5, and later 7.6.1. So I cannot say first-hand how one would perform under OS 8, or even OS 9. The reason I ask is because I am acquiring a 6320 tomorrow, along with some other Macs. Will be interesting to see which OS runs best on it.

 

[porter]

Does OS 8 really improve performance/stability on a 6200/6300 series Performa?

I recommend 8.1 or 8.6, with a large IDE drive and extended HFS.

 

[Gil]

I don't know about you guys, but I put 8.6 on my 6200 and it was BRUTAL! I can't even begin to imagine what OS 9 would be like.

I wouldn't mind getting one of the x200/x300 machines with a bad ROM, if there are any even out there. } IIRC, didn't some of these also have bad 603's? I could have sworn that I read that a particular shipment of 603's from Motorola were known to be defective, and ended up in this series of machines (as if they didn't have enough problems).