Macintosh 128K Demo
From George Engel:
Hi Dan,
Included is a pix of my Mac 128K. I did a demo of
at Apple's Millennia Mall in Orlando, FL. Lots of oooohs and ahhhs from
the Geniuses and the crowd of Apple customers. Note the original March
'84 magazines: original Macworld, vol. 1, Byte, Personal Computing,
etc.
The Mac is 128K original, manufactured in Fremont in March '84. I
bought it opening day at Harvard Bookstore in Mass. Months later my
wife bought the ImageWriter (original) and then later the 400K
floppy.
I owned an Apple Service Center (Macspert) in New York for 17 years,
so I know the Mac is in perfect working condition. I printed MacWrite
and MacPaint documents in the store from a 10-12 year old printer
ribbon in great condition. Ooooh and ahhhh.
What with the 25th Mac 128K anniversary coming up, any idea what the
system is worth, and where to sell it? (I'm trying to pay off my recent
Mac Pro 2.8 Quad Xeon!)
Thanks, Dan.
George Engel
What the above photo might look like on a 9" b&w Mac.
George,
We're very excited that the Macintosh turns 25 in
January - expect a lot of coverage. We're planning to publish a Top 25
Macs list, among other things.
As for the value of your Mac 128K, I couldn't say. We
don't pay much attention to the collectable market, and value will
depend on whether or not you have the original box, carrying case,
disks, manuals, etc. No idea what the market will bear.
I've played a bit with your photo in Photoshop to
emulate what it might have looked like dithered for use on your Mac
128K - enjoy.
Dan
Upgrade Potential of Old Macs
From Dustin Smith:
Hello! I am sure you get a ton of email about this, but I will try
my lucky.
I have an opportunity to purchase two low end Macs. One is a
Apple PowerPC 7200/120 the
other is an Apple Macintosh Performa 631 CD. My question is can
these be upgraded easily and cheaply to do video and photo editing as
there main chore?
Dustin,
It's a definite maybe with the Performa, as Apple sold
the Apple Video System card specifically for importing video. The big
drawback is that it only supports 320 x 200 resolution. That's not
completely horrible, and you may find it adequate for importing from
VHS. Apple also made a Apple Video/TV System which added a TV tuner to
the mix. Neither are particularly easy to find nowadays.
While this may be a great way to import low resolution
video, you probably won't find the Performa's horsepower satisfactory
for more than the most rudimentary video editing. The only practical
upgrade would be to replace the 33 MHz 68LC040 CPU with a full fledged
33 MHz 68040 CPU, which would speed up video processing.
As the Performa has no support for USB, there's no
practical way to get digital images from your digicam or flash memory
card into the computer. The Power Mac 7200 will accept a USB PCI card
with Mac OS 8.5 or later, although it only supports USB 1.1 speed. Any
USB card reader should work, and Photoshop (versions 3 or 4) should run
nicely on it; Photoshop 5 and later require a G3 and will not run on
the 7200.
The only CPU upgrade ever sold for the 7200 was the
Sonnet
Crescendo/7200 G3 500 MHz, which used to be a horrendously
expensive device (the 400 MHz version sold for $499 and $599 depending
on cache size). Fortunately Sonnet is blowing these out at just $40, so
you can gain 4-8x the performance at minimal cost.
I know there were video input cards and TV/video cards
for those old PCI Power Macs, but the only one I had any experience
with was the ixMicro ixTV, which worked very nicely in my SuperMac
computer. No idea how easy they are to find nowadays, but I couldn't
find any listed on
eBay or the LEM Swap List.
Dan
Leopard Perfectly Adequate on Digital Audio G4
From Carl Nygren:
In response to Benny Li's
comments on my
article:
Benny,
Thanks for sharing your comments!
You are indeed right that some configurations of the iMac G4 and the
Power Mac G5 came with 256 MB of RAM; I did not take that into
consideration. Sorry!
iLife 05, VLC Media Player, AppleWorks, iWork, and Preview all work
fine. So do heavier Core Animation programs such as Time Machine and
Cover Flow.
I do not use Microsoft Office; but I think the 2004 version should
run just fine. I doubt that the 2008 version will work fast, if at all.
(But hey, I'm a fan of old software!)
As Dan said, my needs are indeed quite modest. From using a Lombard and 667 MHz PowerBook G4; the
Digital Audio is a
huge step up. I'm not a heavy Mac gamer; apart from a few games of
Return to Castle Wolfenstein now and then, I do all my gaming on an
Acer Aspire notebook. RTCW works fine on the DA, by the way!
I find 512 MB of RAM to be sufficient in Leopard; on my 800 MHz eMac it was (though I
upgraded to 1 GB later). But, once again, my needs are quite
modest.
Carl
Leopard on G4 Upgraded Pismo
From James Little:
Hi Dan,
Just to let you know that I've successfully installed Leopard onto a
Pismo with a G4 550 upgrade, 1 GB RAM.
I've also got the DVD player to work by copying:
- ATIRage128.kext
- ATIRage128DVDDriver.bundle
- ATIRage128GA.plugin
- ATIRage128GLDriver.bundle
- ATIRagePro.kext
- ATIRageProGA.plugin
using Pacfist. This has
made scrolling much better in Safari as well - but not solved any
screensaver loading issues or enabled CoverFlow in iTunes.
I've yet to fiddle properly yet with the kexts for the battery bay,
which the left one doesn't report back any information. However the
right ones does report back all information correctly.
Regards,
James
667 MHz TiBook Running Leopard
From Leonard Amurao:
This is the field report for my Leopard installation:
1) PowerBook G4
Titanium (VGA)
- 1 GB RAM
- 667 MHz
- 16 MB Rage Mobility (?)
2) Modified installer
- stripped Leopard to fit single layer DVD, then used open firmware
trick (LeopardAssist didn't work)
3) Everything works fine so far
- only tested front row (runs smoothly), runs VirtualPC (newest
version, still just as slow as in tiger), opera works great, vlc works
fine streaming a dvdrip avi from a networked PC but failed when trying
an HD movie (CPU too slow?)
4) dock scrolling left to right (with magnification) seems slower,
restoring minimized windows from dock is slightly slower (using suck
effect), otherwise pretty much identical
if I ever get around to it, I'll post benchmarks and maybe try some
old games.
the guide on the site was extremely helpful, only had to use a
different site in order to find out how to construct the single layer
dvd.
- Leonard Amurao
Booting an iMac from a Xubuntu LiveCD
From Chris Kilner:
Dan:
I saw your iMac booted and went black - here is some info (re:
Xubuntu 6.06 LiveCD on an iMac 500) from the Ubuntu forums that should
help
Re: SOLVED: Help booting X on iMac G3 from live CD
Ok, ok, I got the live CD working on my G3 iMac. Some of the
instructions were here: <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCKnownIssues#head-cae29299476585f042f0185bea1d51b9372722c8>
But here is what I did step by step:
- Slip in the CD, turn on Mac
- Hold down c until "boot" appears
- Hit return
- After the Xubuntu screen load all the drivers and screen goes
black, wait 1 min and press CTRL, ALT, F1
- Keep doing that until you get a ubuntu prompt
- type sudo pico /etc/X11/xorg.conf
- scroll down and look for "dri", place a # at the beginning of that
line
- scroll down and look for "glx", place a # at the beginning of that
line
- Scroll down and look for Identifier "Generic Monitor" Under this
section, change the HorizSync to 58-62
- Scroll down and look for Identifier "Generic Monitor" Under this
section, change the VeriRefresh to 75-117
- Type Control O, then press return
- Type Control x, this puts you back at the Ubuntu prompt
- type sudo killall -HUP gdm and watch what happens!
Up pops the Xubuntu mouse on screen and then the GUI
and boom! You are set.
Hope this helps.
Chris
Chris,
Thanks a million! I now have Xubuntu up and running on
my 400 MHz iMac. The blue theme looks much nicer than the brown used by
regular Ubuntu. I've visited several websites in Firefox, and
everything looks good. It's not speedy, but I'm sure part of that comes
from running off the CD and not being able to cache files to the hard
drive.
Next project: Back up the iMac's hard drive, partition
it for Linux, and do a full install to the hard drive.
Dan
Blank Screen Booting iMac in Ubuntu
From Vic Mabus
Hi, Dan - I had this same bump in the Linux installation road. It
can be simply fixed. See <http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=296870>
The LiveCD does not set up xorg.conf correctly for the iMac G3. The
fix, after you get to that blank screen, is to drop to a shell prompt
and edit xorg.conf.
If you don't know how to do this:
After booting is complete,
- ctrl-option-F1 (should give you a command prompt)
- type: sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf (return)
- Modify "HorizSync" to 58-62 and "VertRefresh" to 75-117. Both are
in the monitors section.
- Disable DRI (in the modules section, put a hash mark (#) at the
beginning of the line containing "load dri").
- ctrl-O (return) to write edited file
- ctrl-X to exit nano back to command line
- type: sudo killall -HUP gdm (return) to restart Gnome
Good luck!
Vic Mabus
Vic,
Thanks for the tip - you're the second to send it, and
I've already got my iMac up and running from the LiveCD
:-)
Dan
Linux/PPC Far From Dead
From Claudio Miranda:
Hi Dan. Thank you for your wonderful articles. I've been a Low End
Mac fan for about 10 years now and hope LEM continues spreading the
retro-Mac love for many years to come.
I've recently been following the LEM Mailbag on the topic of
GNU/Linux on the PowerPC (or "Linux/ppc" for short) for some time now,
and I've yet to get the memo on the death of Linux/ppc. It seems that
the death of Linux/ppc has been greatly exaggerated, mainly on some
misconceptions of what "unsupported" means.
Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has announced that it would
not officially support the PowerPC platform as of 6.10. Like many
others, I was worried about what the future would hold for the PowerPC
port of such a great GNU/Linux distribution. However, as time
progressed I noticed that my worries were all for naught. Canonical's
announcement only meant that they would not handle the continued
development of the PowerPC port but would instead leave it up to the
Ubuntu/ppc community to maintain currency with the official releases.
To my fortune, this turned out for the best. The Ubuntu/ppc community
has managed to keep in pace with the official ports, maybe falling
behind by a day or two. Even the Fedora Project has left it up to the
community to maintain a release of Fedora 9 for PowerPC, and the
improvements are definitely showing.
The hardware support has also gotten much better since it's been
community-driven. I noticed that with 7.04 and subsequent releases that
my iMac G5 finally gained the proper fan and thermal support that was
lacking in 6.10 and previous versions, causing my iMac G5's fans to go
full-on and full-off in intervals. I also noticed a significant speed
increase from 6.10 to 7.04 and even with 7.10. About the only thing I
still couldn't get working right was my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse,
but that wasn't a major concern for me at the time. I have not yet
tested with 8.04 but will soon.
And speaking of things not working, you mentioned that there is no
support for the Broadcom chipsets in the AirPort Extreme cards. This is
not true. As a matter of fact, the Broadcom chipset has been supported
natively for some time now under GNU/Linux. The only caveat is that you
need a package called bcm43xx-fwcutter to acquire the firmware to
activate the chipset and expand it for use, which means you either have
to download it manually or install it from the repositories using the
ethernet connection on your iBook/PowerBook. Fortunately, once you
install that package, the package manager will ask you to download the
firmware from a preset URL and will configure everything for you. To
take it one step further, the Restricted Drivers Manager (a.k.a.
"Hardware Drivers Manager" in 8.04) does all the work for you to the
point where you don't even have to launch the package manager and
search for it manually. The PowerPC FAQ on the Ubuntu Wiki
has more information on how to get that up and running, as well as
other general information to consider when installing Ubuntu on
PowerPC.
If you are going to install Ubuntu, I definitely recommend using the
Alternate Installation ISO images over the Live CD. Even on x86, the
Live CD tends to give a less-than-stellar installation experience. The
Live CD is great when you want to get an idea of what running Ubuntu is
like on any platform. However, because they've included a live desktop
environment in the CD, the Ubuntu team had to sacrifice a lot of
features that are normally found in the Alternate Installation. And
while the Alternate Installation is not as pretty or mouse-driven as
the Live CD installation, you get a lot more options during the
installation process along with all the automated configurations and
hardware detections. At the very least, it's about as difficult as
installing Windows XP on a PC (although the Alternate Installation is
much more versatile than any Windows installation process). Everyone
that I've spoken to that has had a bad experience installing Ubuntu
(regardless of the architecture) has told me they've used the Live CD.
After recommending them to the Alternate Installation, I have yet to
hear from them about post-installation problems. Give that a try and
see if things pan out better for you.
And if you still have problems, there's always the old reliable
GNU/Linux distribution: Debian.
There is not one working system that I've come across that
Debian could not install on, even on the x86 side! Debian also has a
lot less overhead than Ubuntu, which makes it a nice choice for Old
World and earlier New World Macs. Plus, their debian-installer (which
is what's also used in the Ubuntu Alternate Installation) now includes
a graphical option for those who fear text-based installations (just
type "installgui" at the prompt, although I fear this is not an option
on Debian/ppc).
And while there might be some concern for PowerPC support waning
even on Debian, consider the following: Not until Debian 4.0 "Etch" was
support for 68K Macs dropped, and that was only because it failed to
meet the release criteria (http://www.us.debian.org/ports/#released).
That's roughly ten years since Apple discontinued the 68K Macs.
With that kind of track record, I have no doubt that the same would be
the case for more modern computers running PowerPC.
For the record, I've been using Apple products for about 20 years
(starting with my Apple IIc), Macs for about 15 years (though my first
intro to a Mac was with a Plus in the late 80s, at which I was
blown away), GNU/Linux for about 12 years, and Linux/ppc for about 6
years beginning with Yellow Dog Linux.
And with great resources like Low End Mac, I hope to continue making
them all a part of my computing experience for a very long time.
Sincerely,
Claudio Miranda, avid LEM fan. :-)
Claudio,
Thanks for writing and sharing the wisdom you've
acquired over many, many years with Macs and Linux. You're not the
first to recommend Debian, and it's probably what I'll end up
installing on my 400 MHz iMac.
We are working toward developing an incomplete
guide to Linux and BSD for older Macs, which will list the
distributions that support Macintosh 680x0 and/or PowerPC hardware,
include a link to the page listing supported software, and hopefully
grow into a set of articles where our staff shares its experience with
Linux/BSD on whatever hardware they've tried it on. The plan is for
this to grow into a good introduction for newbies that will help them
choose the distro and desktop that are likely to work best on their
aging Macs to meet their needs.
Long term project, but then that's exactly what LEM
has been.
Dan
Mac OS X Bests Linux and BSD
Dan,
Good luck with your Linux adventures.
I've tried many of those that you listed and settled for the LTS
version of Xubuntu 6.06 (with Xfce desktop) for my PPC LiveCD
adventures. I find it less sluggish than either Ubuntu w/Gnome or
Kubuntu w/KDE on my 867
TiBook. I've tried 7.10 but found it way too buggy. I tried the
latest 8.04 in Ubuntu form, which I again found sluggish, but I wasn't
able to find the Xubuntu version (which I again would expect to be more
responsive) and so I've stuck with Xubuntu 6.06.1 for the time being.
But I find the choices of Linux for PPC rather limiting. None of them
would be my first choice for a LiveCD or installed distro on an x86
machine, but those are really the only choices available for a PPC Mac
unless I want to build my own (like Gentoo or from ROCK or LFS).
Perhaps these are more trouble than they are worth. All told, I tinker
with Linux much less on PPC than on x86 simply because I find more
options that I prefer on x86 (Puppy!) - and I'd choose *BSD over Linux
if given a choice between the two. Furthermore, MacPorts allows me to do much of what I
could with *BSD or Linux without giving up an of my Mac OS X
positives.
I agree that it might be nice if Apple offered a more tailorable
experience, but in general I have been very pleased with Apple's
approach. Hearing many complaints from folks who've tried Vista on
relatively recent machines that met or exceeded the "minimum
requirements", MS really didn't have a choice but to offer a lower mode
for Vista. I use XP on a Core 2 Duo machine at work, and it cannot touch
Mac OS running on my wife's MacBook Pro. XP feels slow compared to the
Mac OS when run on comparable machines, and Vista feels a lot slower on
the same hardware. Apple's OS is so efficient, it runs quickly enough
on a lot of older hardware without a lower mode. My hat's off to
Apple.
I've had the pleasure of installing sequentially, one right after
another, multiple OSes on a G3 iBook 600 MHz: Mac OS X
10.3, Mac OS X 10.4, Gentoo Linux, Ubuntu Linux (yes, the Gnome
version. I hadn't discovered Xubuntu at the time), and NetBSD. I tried
several window managers and desktop environments for the Linux and
NetBSD trials, with the exception of Ubuntu, which I did not modify.
For each of these, I measured the boot time and the amount of RAM used
at idle and the time to launch some multiplatform applications like
AbiWord and OpenOffice. And that is when I developed much greater
respect for Apple and their OS. Except in the most extreme cases (like
using a trivial window manager on NetBSD instead of a full up desktop
environment) Apple's OS booted faster, launched applications faster,
and used less RAM than any Linux, by a wide margin. Even with a stage 1
Gentoo install, compiled a stripped down custom kernel, optimized for a
G3 with the recommended flags, the Mac OS beat it in terms of
efficiency, hands down. NetBSD was a lot closer to Mac OS, but it also
did a lot less out of the box than the Mac OS. Add those features back
in to NetBSD, and even that couldn't quite match the Mac OS, but it was
a reasonably close second. I didn't keep any records from my tinkering,
and I've since given my iBook G3 to my dad to handle his music duties,
but I think you get my point: Apple has surprisingly good performance
on older hardware when compared to the Linuxes and *BSDs running on
that same hardware, so a "lower mode" is really not required. I think
Apple gets it right without having multimode support, and that's
without even account for the quality of the Mac's level of
integration.
But don't take my word for it. I suggest you try what I've suggested
and try a couple different options on your iMac and see if your results
are anything like mine. For me, it was a real eye-opening experience.
If you do, I'll be curious what your results show.
Regards,
Jeffrey
Jeffrey,
Thanks for sharing your discoveries. I finally have
Xubuntu running on my iMac, thanks to some reader tips on how to
configure things. It's no speed demon, but I just wanted to see that
Linux could run before I went to the hassle of backing up the hard
drive, reformatting for Linux, and then installing (probably
Debian).
I've heard a lot of good things about BSD and may give
that a try later on. I'll keep our readers posted.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
