[NTLK] Off Topic: Macintosh SE/30 - to buy or not to buy?

[Gavin Watson]

If one was determined enough, they could probably also get a 7600 to run 
OS X with XPostFacto and a G3 or G4 upgrade. It wouldn't be quick, but 
it would be a very capable machine.

That said, I would recommend a beige G3 desktop as a bridge machine 
between modern computers and Newtons or old Macs. They're reasonably 
quick under OS 9 and officially support up to OS 10.2. They have 
standard RJ-45 Ethernet jacks (as opposed to much less common AAUI 
Ethernet jacks), serial ports, three PCI slots, a floppy drive, a CD or 
DVD drive, and even an optional Zip drive. Mine was a 266 MHz version 
overclocked to 333 MHz with 768 MB of RAM, the 6 MB VRAM upgrade, a DVD 
drive and the Bordeauxpersonality card. I loved that thing so much.

On 7/9/12 4:16 PM, Forrest wrote:
> I would recommend a Mac 7600. It was my first Mac...I don't have all the specs in front of me, but I (eventually) added a G3 daughtercard, which bumped up the processing quite a bit from the stock 604e chip. Apple said you could only install 512MB RAM, but in reality it would take 1GB. It also had 3 PCI slots and SCSI, which was really cool at the time (1997).
>
> I remember being very frustrated with it initially. I got it from someone whose girlfriend hated using it (because it wasn't a PC). I essentially got it for free because I helped him move in with her. (when I would see him later on he would always ask how I was; then, "How's the 7600?" I don't know what ever happened to him).
>
> I was frustrated because soon after I got it the HDD crashed. I only had PCs at the time, and was bootstrapped with the 7600--I couldn't download OS 7.6 because I had no way to get it on a Mac readable CD or even a Mac-format boot floppy disk.
>
> Many hours were spent at the local
> library reading and downloading documentation on it.
>
> I ended up buying a copy of 7.6 from a Mac User Group for $20, which I thought was kind of steep--but it also had some other software on it that they said I could use.
>
> I still have it. In fact, I connected my first Newton to it the first time, using NCU.
>
> It's a great machine, it still takes floppies, and you can run as high as OS 9.1 on it.
>
> Thanks,
> --Forrest
>
> Sent from my AT&T iPhone 4
>