About Industrial Light and Magic I know little - just that one
of the guys there was upgrading to a PowerPC. I've always
thought it was cool that intense video work was being done
using 68k computers, though.

For print production, I used the Quadra660av for design
and layout for years. Part of keeping it lean was preventing
the font folder from getting bloated (reduce the number of fonts
down to forty or so and it really makes a difference), and
stripping most third-party interface hacks. A 25-30 mhz
machine can handle Photoshop 3 or 4 without any
trouble (performance between the two on that machine
really depended more on RAM than anything else.)

Quark 3.3 was zippy too. One problem was Illustrator -
anything higher than 6 was impossible to handle,
with disappearing menus and stuff like that. Even
6 was hard to cope with. I don't think I tried anything
older than that.

These days, all of the machines are still in use, handling
in-house printing. We've got 2 Centris 650s, a Quadra700
and a Quad660av (and a <cough> 7100/80) each
connected to a Stylewriter4100 or the unbranded
HP Deskwriter 600. I picked most of the printers up
for about $20 or less. They make great copies and
the cartridges can be refilled usually 5 to 10 times
each. I haven't yet figured out how to get more than
one printer connected to each machine. Basically,
we can print a page that's slightly less impressive
than off-set printing, but much better than some other
cheap-o methods, which costs the price of paper and
a penny or so worth of ink (we get the ink itself in bulk
now, but used to just drain stamp-pad inkers that
sell for about $2 or $3).

In spite of my nostalgia for the Quad660av, the Centris
650s are probably my favourite machines. The number
of RAM slots, the cheapness of 72 pin 8 mb RAM means
that each of them are humming along with 40mb of
RAM, and most have a Barricuda 1.9 gb harddrive
(which makes it noisy as hell in here - minor draw
back ;-)).

Myself and a friend of mine used to refurbish 68ks,
stuff them full of cheap RAM and pass them on to
whoever needed them, but the results were sort of
disappointing. We had a lot of people who got
interested in computers and upgraded, simply
(horrors) trashing the trusty 68ks they were left
with (or becoming some of those people on eBay
who set a reserve price of $300 for a 10 year old
computer.) I always wanted to have a house full of
computers doing all kinds of things independently
of one another. It might be ten years later but I
can finally have that. ;-)

Cheers,

Cali