For someone of my generation there’s something pleasing and right about a computer unapologetically announcing its presence on a desk like this, and the stunning K2 case design, introduced with the Power Mac 86, is the perfect, ultimate refinement of the beige box, speaking of power and capability. It’s big, by today’s standards, but that isn’t only a bad thing in my eyes. The Power Macintosh G3 minitower is also just a marvelous hunk of hardware.
#CREATE A BOOTABLE USB FOR POWER MAC G3 MAC OS#
It needs Mac OS 9.1 to actually use the card, but even without it, with the stock Mac OS 8.1 that the G3 came with, it still dumbly supplies power, which is all I need. That would ordinarily be useless in a Mac that predates Apple’s adoption of USB, but James happens to have fitted a PCI USB card in this one. Some of these adapters are mains powered, but mine happens to be powered through USB.
This connects to the ethernet port and is configured via its internal web server as far as the Mac is concerned, it’s just connected to a regular ethernet network, but the adapter is actually passing off the data to Wi-Fi. Smarter people than me will know if there’s a way to fit an 802.11 card in one of its PCI slots and have Mac OS 8.1 recognize it, but I had a quicker and simpler solution: a Wi-Fi adapter. Unfortunately, I don’t have any space to set it up next to my router, so I needed to make it wireless. Happily, it has an ethernet port, so that’s already most of the hurdles crossed. Now look, since we’re all gathered around it in my living room, I can’t let you go without a little tour around the G3 itself. Today, a computer that effectively doesn’t connect to the Internet strikes a regular user as pretty useless, and it makes you wonder, really, what the hell we used computers for in the days before the Internet. It’s a notable shift in how we use computers now compared to only a few years ago.
And of course you can’t-even if you succeed in connecting it to the Internet, the browser standards and media requirements have moved on so much that asking it to display anything more complex than is almost guaranteed to fail-as here, loading the Macworld homepage on the G3. Perhaps I’m not typical, but I suspect that, like me, when you boot a vintage Mac, the first actual thing you do, after admiring the hardware and OS, and having a bit of a poke around in the Control Panels, is go to launch a browser so you could share your latest acquisition on Twitter, catch up with what’s happening on Facebook, or perhaps satisfy an itch to catch up with House of Cards on Netflix. The overwhelming majority of the traffic on our networks is actually flowing straight out of and into our apartments, condos, and houses as we become more and more dependent on the Internet and the world-wide web for work and for play. For most of us, though, at least at home, that kind of stuff-puttering about on the network of devices within our homes-represents a vanishingly small percentage of what we actually use our networks for. ethernet too is increasingly a premium or optional feature as you push further back in the Mac’s history, and although we had LocalTalk essentially for ever, it feels ponderous and fiddly by today’s standards, today when everything is connected to fast, frictionless LANs and WANs.īesides, in those early days of the Mac, networking was just about sharing files and sharing network resources such as printers. Wi-Fi, of course, is still a pretty new thing, so it’s no surprise that it’s unlikely to feature even as you start to move backwards along the hardware timeline, and even if a device has Wi-Fi, you might run into problems joining it to your network, since, for example, modern encryption standards may not be supported. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc, etc I didn’t even see that.”Īnd I’ve been thinking about that recently, ever since developer James Thomson kindly donated a Power Macintosh G3 to Think Retro, because it brought into focus something you can’t help but think about if you spend much time playing around with vintage computers.īoot a Mac today, and it will be seconds before you’re connected-apparently magically, thanks to Wi-Fi-to a network, and from there connected seamlessly to the Internet.īoot a vintage Mac, though, and the same is unlikely to be true. “One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming they showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. Here’s Jobs himself, speaking in 1995, on the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds: So blinded by the GUI’s brilliance was he that he failed to notice two other key innovations there that day. Famously, when Steve Jobs and his colleagues visited Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in 1979, he was utterly dazzled by the graphical user interface that Xerox’s Alto computers had adopted.
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