Beige G3 Lives On!

[minimalist]

I haven't been using Mac OS a whole lot over the last few months, but I've been using this old beige G3 quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. With a decent sized hard drive (40 GB), a fair amount of RAM (384 MB), a monitor that displays more than 832x624 (1152x870), and Mac OS 8.6, this is quite a usable machine. And it's quite a bit of fun to use it as well.

I'm still kind of lacking in the browser department, but Internet Explorer 5.1 does a good enough job for my purposes. For email, Microsoft's Entourage does everything that I could hope for. And now that I actually have a printer networked to this machine, I can get some work done in Word. Toss in my favourite card game, Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, and I have a fairly decent retro machine that let's me send and receive email, browse most websites, get some work done, and kill time playing Solitaire. All in all, I'm quite satisfied.

I've thrown a few other odds and ends on to the old G3 too.

Ircle lets me do IRC chat with style. Although I'm partial to console based clients on Linux (BitchX or irssi -- irssi presently) Ircle is both fun and easy to use. I especially like the incredible amount of information about your IRC session that Ircle let's you have displayed on your screen. That's one slick piece of software.

Norton System Works helps me keep the old girl in tip top shape. Whether I'm backing up my hard drive, defragmenting my hard drive, recovering deleted files, or just sitting back letting Norton work its filesaver magic, I'm happy to know that Norton System Works is taking care of me.

MT-Newswatcher allows me to keep tabs on what's happening in the USENET newsgroups. It's one of the best USENET clients I've ever used on any platform. I'm quite pleased with its speed and abilities.

MacSSH lets me connect to my Linux server with ease. I can do all of my server maintenance right from Mac OS 8.6 thanks to MacSSH. It's really convenient.

I have a bunch of other stuff too. Mostly just alternative word processors and the like. Sometimes Word just isn't what I want to use, so it's good to have WordPerfect and AppleWorks available as well. I have a Hotline Client which I'll need when I finally get around to converting my old Quadra 700 into a fulltime Hotline server. But that's a subject for another day.

In closing, I just want to affirm my belief that the best days for this old beige G3 Macintosh are far from over. I look forward to using this machine more and more in the coming year, and can already see how this machine will play a pivotal role in helping me accomplish my lofty objectives in 2008.

[jwpacker]

Just found myself in possession of a 266 G3 beige desktop this afternoon. It's in really wonderful shape, 320MB of RAM and I think a 6 GB hard drive. It has the "Wings" personality card, so it has audio and video in and out, though my understanding is that that only works in the Classic OS.

Unfortunately, the one area that is broken is Classic OS. It's got 10.2.8 installed, and theoretically should boot into 9.2.2 as well, but I can't get it happen just yet. And the only OS restore CD I have handy that'll work with this beast is 8.0, so I'm loathe to reinstall over the existing hard drive. I may put a larger drive (I've a 20 GB hanging here doing nothing) and see if I can't get 8.0 installed. Though that may be less than ideal, because while that'll give me access to the A/V personality card, I'm afraid I'll lose access to the PCI card with 2 USB ports on it.

Can you imagine I got this unit for free?? lots of RAM, 17" Apple CRT, kinda beat-up keyboard and less than responsive mouse, and even a USB card in the darned thing. I must say I'm having a good time playing with it!