Not a Dell for once! :)

[quinterro]

Today I found a PowerMac 7100/66 A/V at a local thrift store for $9.99.

It has a 1.2 GB Quantum Fireball hard disk, a 1x (I think) Sony CD-ROM drive that needs a caddy, the A/V card which does not work, and a SuperMac Thunder/24 full-length video card with the Image Processing Accelerator daughtercard. Also there's a 256k cache card.

4 SIMMs are present - two of them are 32MB and 2 are 8MB.

It boots into glorious MacOS 9 in beautiful black and white (2-bit)!

I spent a little while taking it apart and cleaning the dust out of it. It needs to be wiped but otherwise appears to be a nice machine if not a little slow.

EDIT: According to the System Profiler, it's a 512k cache card.

 

[p.amadeus]

nice find even if just for the Thunder card and the cache card!

 

[quinterro]

I replaced the A/V card with a HPV card. With that one it works a bit better - the A/V card showed a series of lines on the screen.

I'm trying to set up 7.6.1 on it, but have run into a few snags:

1) Hard disk is not Apple-ROMed. This can be circumvented by FWB HD Toolkit or a hacked Apple Drive Setup. Sadly the only Apple-ROMed drive I have is a 2GB IDE drive, which won't help much in this case.

2) It would be really nice to have an internal tray-loading drive.

3) With a 4GB Compaq hard drive, it tries to boot but gets about halfway through the process and restarts.

I'm still working on getting it to work - it would be nice to get some of my older programs up and running like CodeWarrior and Freehand Graphics Studio 7.

 

[SiliconValleyPirate]

Mind your knuckles on the case, won't you

Corruption lines and blocks on the screen usually indicate bad VRAM.

 

[quinterro]

It's been kind of busy, but I'm finally trying to work in this 7100.

While 7.6.1 can't recognize the 1.2GB drive as an Apple drive, 8.1 sees the drive just fine.

Before I wipe the drive I've been trying to find out a little about who has owned it previously. Apparently this one was given to an older woman by her daughter. That's about all I can see so far.

It also has an SMI for the Global Village Teleport software.

 

[kondspi]

Out of curiosity, what thrift store in Raleigh sells Macs?

 

[quinterro]

Normally they don't. This was at Cause For Paws off of Raleigh Blvd, across the street from the American Way thrift store. I was looking for a 'mickey mouse' power cable for a laptop AC adapter and happened to see the 7100. The price was right so I took a chance and bought it.

American Way infrequently has them too - they had an older Powerbook last month but wanted $40 with no AC brick. Since I have a Lombard, I passed on it. There's another thrift/resale shop just to the right of Cause for Paws but I don't go in there often.

The 7100 now has a fresh install of 8.1 on its 1.2GB hard drive. IE has not been updated yet so it's at version 3.1. I even remembered to bring home the AAUI-Ethernet adapter, but I thought there were 2 in my parts boxes.

 

[Bunsen]

and a SuperMac Thunder/24 full-length video card with the Image Processing Accelerator daughtercard. Also there's a 256k cache card. /EDIT: According to the System Profiler, it's a 512k cache card.

Those two scores alone make it worth the price of entry and then some!

Stick a G3 in that puppy and watch it scream!