[rescue] looking for titanium powerbook

[Liam Proven]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2018 at 23:41, John Floren <john at jfloren.net> wrote:
>
> I've kind of become interested in Mac OS 9 after picking up a first gen
> iMac; it's flaky and prone to crashes but it can also be beautifully
> responsive and has a neat aesthetic. I'd like to get a titanium Powerbook,
> the "best" OS 9 capable laptop, but ebay is awfully sketchy. Anyone on the
> list have a working powerbook to part with?

Heh. Welcome to the club.

Classic MacOS was a lovely OS and there's never been anything else
like it. A lot of old Mac purists venerate the early versions -- a bit
like some Sun fanciers prefer the pre-Solaris SunOS days.

The Mac System 1-5 were written in Assembly and a bit of Pascal,
didn't multitask, and only networked with other Macs.

Mac System 6 had rudimentary multitasking, rudimentary TCP/IP and
Internet support, and was quite quick, and ran on everything.

Mac System 7 was partly rewritten in C, was bigger, slower, more
complex... but it multitasked a bit better and had more complete
Internet support.

Then Apple started dropping support for older machines, for
single-tasking operation, and it got a lot bigger and heavier. But it
also got a lot more versatile and capable and in many ways the UI got
better.

The last release for 680x0 kit is 8.1 and that's the most responsive
Mac experience you're going to get: a fast 68040 box with 32MB of RAM
and 8.1 is still a nice machine to use.

8.5 and later were PowerPC-only, but 9.2.2 was the last ever release
and it's still usable today.

That really wants a fast G3 or a G4, 64MB or more of RAM, and a fast
Internet connection.

The trouble is, its Web abilities are very limited today, and so are
its networking abilities and USB support. So the sweet spot is to
dual-boot with the latest version of OS X the machine can run, and use
that to fetch tools, drivers, updates etc.

Lovely OS, though. I miss it.

--
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