directive0
Well-known member
Hello all! I am a long time reader of this AWESOME forum, but new to posting here.
I want to tell you all about my favourite new project; my old powermac 7100, but first a story.
When I was a young lad I spent many a night in the glow of my trusty viewsonic CRT and my beloved powermac 7100/66. I would creep silently to the computer room, placing my headphones in the phone slot so as to mute that massive and booming "BONG" startup. There with nothing but my self, some oreos, and my mac; creating worlds with Infini-D 4.5 and Bryce, pretending I was in space with Marathon and Escape Velocity, who knows what else. My halcyon days, those were. But time has a way of ripping us from our happy place, and soon the world had moved on. 66 Mhz was a paltry excuse for a computer according to some, and I listened. I got a shiny rev b green iMac and I moved on into the world of TLAs like USB and PCI, and eventually BSD and X86. But that 7100 never left my mind, even if it left my house. It was a hand me down computer from my dads office, anyways. So back it went, and served 5 long years as little more than an accounting computer, only to be replaced by a LCD iMac g4 when they were tossed to the wolves. So she sat, silently, in a storage locker out of the city. Waiting for the day when she would be useful again. Well ladies and gentlemen that day has come!!
I have recovered my beloved Butthead Astronomer, and I am struggling to bring her back into the fleet. Alongside a black 07' Macbook, a Dell Vostro 220, a Macintosh Classic II, and various and sundry other little computers along the way.
Loadout and Procedures:
As far as I can tell she is a standard 66 Mhz Powermac 7100, with 8 megs of ram.
She has only one card installed, it appears to be a VGA video card, but I dont recall installing it.
Battery is in decent condition, I have removed it to ensure it does not explode.
despite minor case scuffing she is in pretty good shape structurally, with no broken or bent plastic or metal components.
Problems:
- She lacks a modern Ethernet port.
- Her hard drive is no longer serviceable, I have replaced it with a Quantum 80meg drive out of an LC-3 I have.
- She lacks any modern db-15 VGA port
- No CD drive.
Intentions:
- She needs to run 7.6 at the very least, system 8 would be nice too, but without a CD drive I am limited.
- I will load it up as best I can with games and apps from my past.
- I will use it to organize a simple file server for shits and giggles
- try and get some light web-serving enabled?
- I want it to be network enabled to allow for the use of Appletalk to transfer items easily.
Secondary Equipment:
- I have a db-15 to db-whatever adapter, so she works with a standard LCD monitor.
- I have localtalk cables.
- I have a USB floppy drive
- I have a USB Zip Drive (and somewhere a SCSI one too!!)
- I have a mac with MacFUSE and FuseHFS installed so I can open and edit HFVolumes, and a windows PC with HFV Explorer.
Status:
- used my floppy drive to copy the system 7.5 install disks and installed system 7.5.? on the 80 meg drive with minor errors. Doing the installation in pieces made things easier.
- Have been able to boot into system 7.5 successfully.
- Having some headaches getting the myriad different disk image formats to write successfully onto my floppies.
To do:
- Need to find AAUI adapter (hopefully the one being offered in the trading post will materialize).
- Eventually need to figure out how to write floppies without issue. Sometimes I get them to work using HFV Explorer on windows, and sometimes using the DD terminal command on OS X. Never 100% success rating, problem seems to be the format of the disk image. With HFV Explorer .dsk images write without error, so I am using Mini vMac to help me organize and package disk images in a virtual mac and then burn them to a physical floppy with HFV Explorer. Not an ideal workflow.
- Find my SCSI Zip Drive.
ANY ADVICE RELATED TO MODERNIZING OLD MACS WOULD BE APPRECIATED! PICTURES TO COME!
I want to tell you all about my favourite new project; my old powermac 7100, but first a story.
When I was a young lad I spent many a night in the glow of my trusty viewsonic CRT and my beloved powermac 7100/66. I would creep silently to the computer room, placing my headphones in the phone slot so as to mute that massive and booming "BONG" startup. There with nothing but my self, some oreos, and my mac; creating worlds with Infini-D 4.5 and Bryce, pretending I was in space with Marathon and Escape Velocity, who knows what else. My halcyon days, those were. But time has a way of ripping us from our happy place, and soon the world had moved on. 66 Mhz was a paltry excuse for a computer according to some, and I listened. I got a shiny rev b green iMac and I moved on into the world of TLAs like USB and PCI, and eventually BSD and X86. But that 7100 never left my mind, even if it left my house. It was a hand me down computer from my dads office, anyways. So back it went, and served 5 long years as little more than an accounting computer, only to be replaced by a LCD iMac g4 when they were tossed to the wolves. So she sat, silently, in a storage locker out of the city. Waiting for the day when she would be useful again. Well ladies and gentlemen that day has come!!
I have recovered my beloved Butthead Astronomer, and I am struggling to bring her back into the fleet. Alongside a black 07' Macbook, a Dell Vostro 220, a Macintosh Classic II, and various and sundry other little computers along the way.
Loadout and Procedures:
As far as I can tell she is a standard 66 Mhz Powermac 7100, with 8 megs of ram.
She has only one card installed, it appears to be a VGA video card, but I dont recall installing it.
Battery is in decent condition, I have removed it to ensure it does not explode.
despite minor case scuffing she is in pretty good shape structurally, with no broken or bent plastic or metal components.
Problems:
- She lacks a modern Ethernet port.
- Her hard drive is no longer serviceable, I have replaced it with a Quantum 80meg drive out of an LC-3 I have.
- She lacks any modern db-15 VGA port
- No CD drive.
Intentions:
- She needs to run 7.6 at the very least, system 8 would be nice too, but without a CD drive I am limited.
- I will load it up as best I can with games and apps from my past.
- I will use it to organize a simple file server for shits and giggles
- try and get some light web-serving enabled?
- I want it to be network enabled to allow for the use of Appletalk to transfer items easily.
Secondary Equipment:
- I have a db-15 to db-whatever adapter, so she works with a standard LCD monitor.
- I have localtalk cables.
- I have a USB floppy drive
- I have a USB Zip Drive (and somewhere a SCSI one too!!)
- I have a mac with MacFUSE and FuseHFS installed so I can open and edit HFVolumes, and a windows PC with HFV Explorer.
Status:
- used my floppy drive to copy the system 7.5 install disks and installed system 7.5.? on the 80 meg drive with minor errors. Doing the installation in pieces made things easier.
- Have been able to boot into system 7.5 successfully.
- Having some headaches getting the myriad different disk image formats to write successfully onto my floppies.
To do:
- Need to find AAUI adapter (hopefully the one being offered in the trading post will materialize).
- Eventually need to figure out how to write floppies without issue. Sometimes I get them to work using HFV Explorer on windows, and sometimes using the DD terminal command on OS X. Never 100% success rating, problem seems to be the format of the disk image. With HFV Explorer .dsk images write without error, so I am using Mini vMac to help me organize and package disk images in a virtual mac and then burn them to a physical floppy with HFV Explorer. Not an ideal workflow.
- Find my SCSI Zip Drive.
ANY ADVICE RELATED TO MODERNIZING OLD MACS WOULD BE APPRECIATED! PICTURES TO COME!
Last edited by a moderator:
