• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Mass PowerPC liberation!

Hey everyone! Usually I'm just a lurker here but I thought you'd enjoy hearing of my recent stroke of luck and my ensuing vintage Mac liberation efforts:

So I've been working the summer in a lab in my university's psych department, writing up old forgotten experiments for grad students and doing assorted programming tasks, and since I do a lost of my non-taxing work on my PowerBook G4 a lot of the staff know I have an affinity for old Apple gear. Anyway, two weeks back one of the professors comes in and asks me if I'm interested in some old Apple gear the department's getting ready to toss as e-waste. I obviously say yes, and he takes me upstairs to a room full beautiful yellowing beige.

Here's what I found:

- Beige G3 Desktop

- Late model eMac (1.42, I think?)

- Blue & White G3 Tower

- Power Mac 6100/66AV

- 2x Power Mac 7200/120

- 2x Power Mac 7300/200

- ImageWriter II

- LaserWriter II

- Several old Apple CRTs, including a Multiple Scan 15 and a Multisync 720

- Several ADB keyboards & mice (including some Extended IIs), all in need of a thorough cleaning

- 3 or 4 PhoneNET adapters

- Several other odds and ends

Holy cow, I thought. This is a goldmine! The prof told me that I could have anything except the Apple II peripherals stashed in a corner and the gigantic G3 AIO they had already set aside for auction. As if that wasn't enough, the next day he asks if I want to see more stuff and shows me another room with even more goodies:

- 17" Core Duo iMac

- 2x 1.42GHz eMac

- 2x 400MHz Blueberry iMac

- Another Beige PowerMac G3 Desktop

- Another 6100/66AV

- iMac G3 keyboards and mice in several colours

- A few more Apple CRTs

- 1600x1200 Dell LCD

- An Apple IIe & monitor with "DEAD" etched under the keyboard

- An Apple Color OneScanner (!)

- An Apple Monitor /// (!!!)

The department wanted to keep the Monitor /// for obvious reasons ($$$), but the rest was similarly mine to take. Being a student in a city, I don't have room for anywhere near that much gear as much as I'd love to take it. Not wanting to see what I didn't take get tossed, I got in touch with a couple other local enthusiasts who I knew would be interested, and I'm happy to say that as of now all of the above gear apart from some of the CRTs has been given a good home! :)

What I took:

- B&W G3 (works, comes with SCSI & FireWire cards installed. HDD is super noisy, however)

- 7200/200 (also works, will become a playground for BeOS PPC and old Rhapsody betas)

- 6100/66AV (needs a new PRAM battery but starts with the on/off/on trick, now zipping along with a Sonnet G3 233GHz upgrade card in it that I got at my old e-waste job ages ago but never had a machine to use it in)

- Blueberry iMac (wanted one ever since elementary school)

- 17" iMac Core Duo (boots, but with screen lines issue. Considering repairing w/ a Unimac adapter and regular laptop LCD, since I have a spare C2D chip that should let it run up to 10.8 )

- Color OneScanner (works! Software was super hard to find but was able to scan to my Q700 once I found the right extension)

- PhoneNET adapters (need 4-pin RJ11 cables to test them, fiddled for hours trying to get them to work before I realized this)

- LaserWriter II (untested, don't really want to carry it all the way home but would be fun for writing papers on old macs. Comes with unopened box of toner!)

- Multiscan 720 (works, but will sporatically snap loudly and the image will shrink for a second before going back to normal. Any ideas?)

- Dell 1600x1200 LCD (now being used as a second monitor for my programming workstation in the Lab)

- Keyboards, mice, a USB floppy drive, some other odds and ends.

All in all, I'd say it was a pretty good haul :cool: . I'll post pictures when I get a chance. Very glad to have been able to save this stuff from the scrap heap!

 

IPalindromeI

Well-known member
Wow, this kind of stuff only happens once in a lifetime!

The 6100 is a unique machine, being the only PPC pizzabox. I hope you can cool that G3 in it though...

 

rsolberg

Well-known member
I had good luck with the Unimac LCD adapter in my 17" Core 2 Duo iMac. I found a compatible 1920x1200 panel from an Alienware laptop. While I appreciate the extra real estate over the stock 1440x900, I've discovered users with less visual acuity hate it due to interface elements being too small. (in Mac OS X anyway)

 
Wow, this kind of stuff only happens once in a lifetime!

The 6100 is a unique machine, being the only PPC pizzabox. I hope you can cool that G3 in it though...
The G3 has a much larger heatsink than the 601 on the motherboard, so hopefully heat won't be an issue. And yeah, the 6100 is one of my favourite PowerMacs, partly for the case, partly for the guitar chime, partly for the dual-monitor support with the AV card. I actually used to have another one back in elementary school (my school frequently threw out old macs, I eventually started taking them home and playing around with them which is why I'm a vintage Apple geek today), I remember hooking up a second monitor to it and thinking that it was the coolest thing ever to be able to drag a window from one screen to the other. It died shortly after I got it due to a failed PSU and was subsequently tossed, so I'm happy to have the chance to own another :) .

I had good luck with the Unimac LCD adapter in my 17" Core 2 Duo iMac. I found a compatible 1920x1200 panel from an Alienware laptop. While I appreciate the extra real estate over the stock 1440x900, I've discovered users with less visual acuity hate it due to interface elements being too small. (in Mac OS X anyway)
I thought that 1920x1200 at 17" might be a little hard on the eyes, thanks for confirming. I'm keeping my eyes out for a 1650x1050 or 1440x900 panel either locally or through eBay (I'm in Canada so shipping is often prohibitive for bigger stuff like that). Glad to hear the Unimac worked well for you.

EDIT: Some pictures from the rooms after I'd sorted some of the stuff:

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TheWhiteFalcon

Well-known member
You may be able to source a good 1680x1050 panel from a dead 17" MBP, there are plenty from the C2D pre-Unibody era with failed 8600M GPU's. 

 
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