733 G4 Digital Audio, still in use!

[uniserver]

http://lowendmac.com/ppc/digital-audio-power-mac-g4.html

We moved to the hood about 3 to 4 years ago. I never really talked to our neighbor very much. They invited us over one time, early on. For a sit down and a snack of Some kind of Japanese hot balls, and Squid Rines, The wife was making faces, she couldn't help it. The wife and I are Beef and Potatoes eaters etc. So in the sit down we were talking, etc... They are hard-core liberals, etc, and my wife is a Hard-Core conservative, NRA and GOP card carrying member

The conversations did not go well, Personally I just was trying to get along but anyways…

to add fuel to the fire :-(

Anyways they had some kind of child safety thing over the door knob in the bathroom so the kid could not escape the bathroom once the door was closed.

I couldn't figure out how to use it once i closed the door on my self, so once i was done with the potty, i ended up gabbing it and ripping it off the door, it broke into like 5 pieces… They were not pleased with me…

So we ended up heading home shortly after that About a year later, Our CAT was chewing on their fresh rhubarb plants they were growing along the fence line, They called the police and animal control on us, instead of tossing the cat across the fence, Oh well.

This week...

Their kid is now 6 years old, and the other day i was talking to his wife she was out and smiling enjoying the nice weather we've been having the last 2 days.

I asked her if she wanted to have a iMac, because i have a garage full of the dam things ( for the kid )

She said no they already have a working computer. So i asked what it was, She told me a 733 G4 Digital audio, as their only computer in the house.

Her husband is a Music teacher for the local public school.

I guess they Splurged and spend BIG money on this 733 G4 D/A when it was new, Bought all kinds of Music software for it.

ITs still running Mac OS9.

Anyways she said it still works like a Top, They clean it out every year, They are not going to get another computer until this one completely dies.

Talk about maximizing your ROI!

Anyways hopefully we can casually talk, i'd like to get along with these guys.

 

[bibilit]

:lol: :lol:

 

[commodorejohn]

Ahh, that's great

 

[beachycove]

Some say a fast G4 with appropriate software is pretty unbeatable for music in OS9. Why not keep using it if it works, especially if they don't want internet video/ to do programming etc./ have the applications set up, paid for, and learned?

Mind you, the time will come when the kid wants Facebook and SIMS 17, which will only run on a 64-core fission reactor and in several terrabytes of RAM, and then they will cave. You watch.

 

[TheMacGuy]

Mind you, the time will come when the kid wants Facebook and SIMS 17, which will only run on a 64-core fission reactor* and in several terrabytes** of RAM, and then they will cave. You watch.

*1-gigawatt or faster fission reactor required

**Actual minimum amount of RAM required is 3.5TB***.

***1TB=1,000,000,000,000 bytes

Grandkids will be asking how we got by on quad-core Turbo-Boosted 2.XGHz Ivy Bridge processor, less then 32GB of RAM, and 1TB HDDs/256GB SSDs.

 

[waynestewart]

To me it looks like everything is moving online. It'll be a wonder to the grandkids, a computer that runs it's own applications in it's own hard drive with no one watching over you.

 

[mcdermd]

The grand kinds won't care what's under the hood and be surprised that it used to matter.

 

[commodorejohn]

You might be surprised. Kids can take a lot more interest in things than some grown-ups.

 

[Unknown_K]

G4 AGP towers with OS 9 run pretty nice. If they still do the original job why upgrade.

Personally I know quite a few people my age (45) or older don't really do anything internet related besides browse the web for news and shop, its the younger people who live on the net 24/7 that want the latest and greatest.

 

[TheMacGuy]

To me it looks like everything is moving online. It'll be a wonder to the grandkids, a computer that runs it's own applications in it's own hard drive with no one watching over you.

All very true. Thats why we need to protect the internet for the next generation. Otherwise, sites like the 68kMLA might be blocked because of the fact they see it as an "Army".

 

[krye]

It doesn't matter what it's going to be. There will always be two camps: 1) where users don't care how it works as long as it works, and 2) those who tinker, hack, and upgrade.

 

[Cory5412]

to add fuel to the fire

Suddenly, property damage. I know that feeling though -- it always seems like when you're trying to do something right in a situation that seems sensitive, you do something inadvertently that makes it worse.

Some say a fast G4 with appropriate software is pretty unbeatable for music in OS9. Why not keep using it if it works, especially if they don't want internet video/ to do programming etc./ have the applications set up, paid for, and learned?

It's always fun to see how people configured a machine at a given time and how their use of it has changed over the years.

To me it looks like everything is moving online. It'll be a wonder to the grandkids, a computer that runs it's own applications in it's own hard drive with no one watching over you.

That's pretty harsh wording. Although, you're certainly right about a lot of things moving online. It'll be interesting to see if we continue to see hardware like the ChromeBook Pixel, equipped to give better and better web experiences. There have certainly been murmurs over the past several years about returning to centralized resource computing, and the web would make sense as a way to do it.

Otherwise, sites like the 68kMLA might be blocked because of the fact they see it as an "Army".

What? Who is "they"?

Grandkids will be asking how we got by on quad-core Turbo-Boosted 2.XGHz Ivy Bridge processor, less then 32GB of RAM, and 1TB HDDs/256GB SSDs.

It'll actually be really interesting to see. The system requirements for software haven't increased significantly in the past few years, and reasonably nice hardware from 2004 or 2005 that runs Windows XP well will run Windows 8 well enough too. Of course, certain components have improved a lot and we have more capacity now than we've had before, but the average computer today probably isn't much faster than it was a few years ago. Our high end has gone up and our low end has followed lazily along, of course, but not so much that in seven years, computers are unrecognizeable. (Which I realize sounds odd in the light of recent threads where I've talked about computing changing exceedingly quickly and only being around in their current commercialized graphic interface form for 30 years, but

Well, except for UltraBooks, which almost prove my point by coming out with slower processors. (matched to faster SSDs though.)

Although by the time someone my age (or even someone a decade my junior) produces grand-kids, on average we'll be sixty years in the future, and the original Macintosh will be 90 years old.

It'll be interesting to see if anything at all resembling the current desktop metaphor with files in directories on filesystems is in use at that point in time.

 

[TheMacGuy]

What? Who is "they"?

Big brother. One day, if we are not careful, the Internet will be regulated everywhere, and big brother might block it "for our safety". I wouldn't be to worried about it, seeing how SOPA and PIPA failed miserably, I think we can agree everyone loves their Internet without restrictions, and it will stay that way for decades to come.

It'll actually be really interesting to see. The system requirements for software haven't increased significantly in the past few years, and reasonably nice hardware from 2004 or 2005 that runs Windows XP well will run Windows 8 well enough too. Of course, certain components have improved a lot and we have more capacity now than we've had before, but the average computer today probably isn't much faster than it was a few years ago. Our high end has gone up and our low end has followed lazily along, of course, but not so much that in seven years, computers are unrecognizeable. (Which I realize sounds odd in the light of recent threads where I've talked about computing changing exceedingly quickly and only being around in their current commercialized graphic interface form for 30 years, but

My grandmas old tower (HP Pavilion from 2005) worked great on XP. Stock, it had 3GHz Pentium 4, 512MB of RAM, and a 160GB 7200rpm HDD. She had it upgraded to 1.5GB of RAM in 2007 and it was used regularly until last year, when she donated it to a local computer shop that provides these computer to schools to have students tear them down and rebuild them. It is to fuel the next gen of geeks.

Also worth noting that this computer was thrown against a wall in 2006 when she got pissed at HP Tech Support after being on the phone for 16 HOURS. She now used a MacBook Pro 2010 model.

Most people are amused by the fact she knows how to use a computer, but at work she actually used an original IBM PC in the 1980's to the late 1990's and was one of the early adopters of America Online (and she still uses her original AOL email!).

Well, except for UltraBooks, which almost prove my point by coming out with slower processors. (matched to faster SSDs though.)

Yeah, even the entry level MacBook Air is pretty slow. The only real "UltraBooks" (if you can even call them that) that people should consider are the ones that fit into the same area of the MacBook Pro with Retina Display. I think Dell and HP make some decent competitors to the MBPwR, so does Lenovo. Honestly though, I would pick a Lenovo if Apple ceased to exist. I have never heard of any major problems with Lenovos, especially the ThinkPads.

Although by the time someone my age (or even someone a decade my junior) produces grand-kids, on average we'll be sixty years in the future, and the original Macintosh will be 90 years old.
It'll be interesting to see if anything at all resembling the current desktop metaphor with files in directories on filesystems is in use at that point in time.

Hell, it will probably be 15 or more years before I even consider having kids. By then the 128k will be 45!

Only time will tell if the filesystems will remain the same.

This also reminds me I should probably get a 128k before they become more scarce.

 

[Schmoburger]

Hahahaha that was the best story ive heard in ages! And props to them for keeping a DA up and running still... I remember when they were still new I was awestruck by them.

I actually still use a Yikes G4 myself as my everyday computer... it's running a 500mhz Encore CPU upgrade and maxed out at 1GB of RAM and runs Panther wicked fast and even runs Tiger nice and smoothly, if a little slower than Panther due to the graphics-intensive nature of the UI and the fact it's still running the stock 16Mb Rage128 graphics card. My parents paid for half of a G3/300 B+W for me many many years ago now, which I promptly ripped apart and rebuilt with rev.2 gear and a 450 processor and a fair chunk of ram and DVD burner so I could use it for graphics and video escapades... I eventually maxed it and then decided I needed a G4, which is the point where I got the Yikes, put in the sonnet upgrade, a gig of RAM, a DVD burner, and a couple of 40Gb drives, which at one stage were pretty big... how times have changed lol.

Ive been using it for years and it has never really exceeded my diminishing requirements until recently, where I came to a realisation that I was outgrowing my hard drive, and the internet had gotten fat too.. I'd also intended to do somethng about an upgraded graphics card but never gotten round to it. So here I am now faced with either upgrading the hard drives to a pair of 120Gbs, which is the upper limit of what it will support, and spending a still rather high price for a Mac Edition Radeon 9000 PCI graphics card, and having a somewhat more usable machine with absolutely no more room to expand, or retiring after nearly 13 years and replacing it with something a little more capable.

I have no intent to ever own an Intel-based mac in the near future (dont bother, it's an argument nobody will win with me ), and with the market for PowerPC systems down the toilet now a few years since the release of the Intel architecture Macs, I can buy any Powermac G4 for almost nothing, and last gen G5's even for a tiny fraction of the orignal retail price. I' love the nutso capabilities of the G5, but I always loved the last-gen G4 MDD, and I can pick one up for less than the cost of a sodding graphics card for the Yikes. So yeh I'm looking at a Dual-1.25 FW800 MDD as a successor, in keeping with my penchant for old-tech, which will cost me half of what a hens-teeth PCI Radeon for mac and a pair of new hard drives will, give me room to upgrade, and even as it sits, perform infinitely better than the old Yikes... I very much doubt i will find myself growing out of it soon, as the Yikes took me this long.

Theres something intrinsically satisfyng about maxing out a Mac to its ultimate form, so Ill probably upgrade the Yikes to that point anyway, but its definitely time to stick it on the toy bench finally.

Oh incidentally I still have the G3 I mentioned too, also running the same specs as the Yikes but for the processor

 

[Schmoburger]

My grandmas old tower (HP Pavilion from 2005) worked great on XP. Stock, it had 3GHz Pentium 4, 512MB of RAM, and a 160GB 7200rpm HDD. She had it upgraded to 1.5GB of RAM in 2007 and it was used regularly until last year, when she donated it to a local computer shop that provides these computer to schools to have students tear them down and rebuild them. It is to fuel the next gen of geeks.
Also worth noting that this computer was thrown against a wall in 2006 when she got pissed at HP Tech Support after being on the phone for 16 HOURS. She now used a MacBook Pro 2010 model.

Most people are amused by the fact she knows how to use a computer, but at work she actually used an original IBM PC in the 1980's to the late 1990's and was one of the early adopters of America Online (and she still uses her original AOL email!).

My grandmother also adopted computers fairly early on in the piece... back in the P1 days, with a little push from my dad who was one of the two guys who set up our towns first locally run ISP. Nan was a writer, a lobbyist and also had a few penpals so her initial interest was in the PC as a tool to replace her Canon word processor (anybody remember that piece of ancient history?)... meanwhile I got my grandfather, a former private pilot, interested in MS Flight Sim which ive been a tragic for since very early childhood.

Well... come the turn of the century, email was taking a hold as a mainstream communications medium, and so she got herself a newer PII-based rig and connected to the net then familiarised herself with email and the rest of the netlife. a year or two later she decided to go buy a brand new P4 setup and got right into the groove of modern day computing at the time... blogging, forums, web-mailing lists, digital photography etc...she left my grandfather foundering in a basic knowledge of how to browse the web. When she passed away at the end of 2006 at the age of 71, she was among the most tech-savvy people I had ever seen. The way she embraced the technology truley amazed me.

 

[Cory5412]

If storage is your only constraint, you could grab a SATA card, or put a big ol' SATA disk in a Firewire 400/800 enclosure, either of which is likely to be faster than ATA.

The other thing you could do if you wanted a modern computer that wasn't Intel is to look into Windows RT. I've got a Surface RT and have observed that it's a lot like a G4, the main downfall is that there's no desktop hardware that is really suitable for connecting to a monitor and a number of USB devices. The 1.4GHz quad-core ARM chip and Internet Explorer 10 are pretty good at web sites, too.

 

[Schmoburger]

I had considered the idea of a SATA card or SATA drive via Firewire, however it still leaves me with a basically maxed out system in every other respect... the RAM ceiling of the Yikes is 1Gb which Ive reached already, and the CPU speed is as far as it can be stretched too... the logic board on Yosemite/Yikes basically only allows for a CPU clock multiplier of 5x the bus speed meaning 500mhz which its also runniing at now. I believe one can hack the bus speed from memory but its not guaranteed to work stabley or reliably. It's been fun seeing my Yikes progress into this monster over the years, but I do think its time I finally put it to the side and started a new PPC build-up. I'm looking at a dual 1.25 FW800 MDD at the moment with studio display to match for about 50 bucks so I'm thinking thats gonna be the new toy.

 

[ianj]