from Hacker News

Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

by FactCore on 8/2/20, 11:35 PM with 252 comments

• by jandrese on 8/3/20, 12:56 AM

  > In fact, for reasons I’m yet to discern, my iBook’s internal AirPort Wi-Fi card can’t connect to modern Wi-Fi networks—they simply confound it.

  WPA2 was standardized a year after his laptop was built. The ancient 802.11b card in it wants to do WEP. Getting driver support for a modern USB WiFi on that prehistoric version of OSX is no picnic either. It's a good thing he doesn't want to get it working.

• by RalfWausE on 8/3/20, 9:44 AM

  Why not use old(er) Systems when they fulfill your needs? A computer is a tool, such as a typewriter, printing press, paintbrush or hammer. Would anyone argue about the age of a typewriter or hammer if its in good working condition?

  In fact, i am using an Atari 520ST as my main computer since my laptop died a while ago. It started as an experiment, but now "it just works". I got network connectivity, email and (limited) internet access through a "Netusbee" adapter, and easy modern media access through a gotek floppy emulator.

  Perhaps i am just crazy, but it simply works!

• by linguae on 8/3/20, 1:18 AM

  One of the things I miss about older laptops is the keyboards. I would love to buy a laptop that is built like a PowerBook G4 or a ThinkPad X61 but with modern displays and modern internals, and with extra bonus points if it has user-replaceable batteries and user-serviceable storage and RAM. I've found the Thinkpad X62 (https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/) and X210 (https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/) projects rather intriguing. Unfortunately I missed out on the 2017 ThinkPad T25, which I would have purchased had I not been strapped for cash at the time.

  One idea that I have is for a laptop manufacturer to develop a chassis that comes with a high-resolution display and a high-quality keyboard (like those of older ThinkPads), and where the user can supply an Intel Compute Stick or a similar device for computing power. This way the chassis can be used for a long time while the user upgrades compute sticks.

• by wink on 8/3/20, 9:43 AM

  > Predictably, I’ve found that having a dedicated, internet-free laptop has helped me become more productive.

  > Old Mac Games Still Run, Too

  Spot the error.

  I still have a small-ish Centrino laptop from 2004 that's running Windows XP. It's been airgapped for roughly 10 years (wifi broke and at some point there were no updates for XP) but it's getting occasional use as a portable DVD player. I don't get why you'd willingly buy an old machine to be constrained but I hate throwing out old stuff that still works. And this does.

• by verytrivial on 8/3/20, 10:00 AM

  Old games, old productivity software. If they were good when they were new, I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes.

  It's a weird marketing and social undermining of comfort and control. Sure there is the 'security' argument, and an accretion of various quirks, but people were often happy dealing with these quirks in the day, and as OP says, making interoperability frictionful has an definite upside with all the media and IT giants trying to mine your attention span for money.

• by emersonrsantos on 8/3/20, 3:08 AM

  George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels, he saves his work on floppy disks. Of course, he has a second computer for email and web browsing.

• by jeffbee on 8/3/20, 12:23 AM

  Uh, if all you need is to write documents on an air-gapped machine, it seems like practically anything would do the job. Any Mac of any age whatsoever, a typewriter ...

• by mmphosis on 8/3/20, 12:29 AM

  new web browser for PowerPC Mac: http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

  new OS for PowerPC Mac: https://voidlinux-ppc.org/

  or, a new PowerPC computer: https://www.talospace.com/

• by toadi on 8/3/20, 3:24 AM

  because I didn't have a lot of money I was working on a 486 when pentiums were the normal. I used a pentium when most where on pentium 3.

  thank god for linux to make my computers workable. Mail: mutt, Editor: vim, actually most like newsgroups, irc, .. all had cli clients. Only netscape was run in a very lightweight window manager like blackbox.

  good thing about that in my teens is that I learned a shit load about computers and now 25 years later having a nice carreer thanks to tinkering with that.

• by CPAhem on 8/3/20, 12:21 AM

  Maybe it's just me, but the user interface on that old PowerPC Mac looks gorgeous - way better than modern "flat" UIs

• by kitsunesoba on 8/3/20, 12:44 AM

  It's nice to see old laptops get a new lease on life this way, but it's hard to deny the compromises that come with such an approach. As nice as the old 12-inch Powerbooks/iBooks, T60s, etc were, they leave a lot to be desired by modern standards.

  This brings me to wonder how difficult it would be to develop a notebook that is specifically designed to be a focused offline ultraportable, using the most power efficient and cost effective components available along with an extremely lightweight, nearly nonexistent OS (think classic Mac OS) with some modern affordances and high-end touches (USB-C charging, milled single piece enclosure, etc). The imagined result is a machine that costs less than a decent Chromebook while being more responsive, having dramatically better battery life, and being generally more pleasant to use.

• by novaleaf on 8/3/20, 2:38 PM

  For those finding this route interesting, just spend 4x more ($200) and get a modern-ish laptop, used, off craigslist or offerup.

  I'm typing on a Lenovo X1 Carbon (gen2) I bought for $200 last week. Win10, 1440p touchscreen, ssd, bitlocker encrypted with fingerprint biometrics.

  I've seen macbooks at the same pricerange, but I'm a windows guy.

• by AdmiralAsshat on 8/3/20, 12:20 AM

  There are some Linux distros that still support 32-bit PowerPC architecture. Many old Macs find second-life running Mate or Xfce desktop.

• by major505 on 8/3/20, 12:18 AM

  Las week I brougth an old G4 the poped up in the marked. A rare thing to occour here, since they where super expensive when new.

  I paid something like 20 bucks for it. It came with a busted ide hard drive, but no worries. I went online and brought an ide to sd card adapter, and will now install Tiger in it.

  I don't spect to take any serious workload, but It will problably be fine to run Starcraft and Diablo II in it. Will see.

• by glouwbug on 8/3/20, 12:55 AM

  I run a T43 for doing serious single threaded programming. Not that anyone would want to, but its surprisingly productive for pumping out clean work. I mean, its SO slow that firefox can't even open reddit or facebook without having a heart attack.

• by incanus77 on 8/3/20, 4:32 PM

  I’ve recently revived a boxy, suitcase 386 and the biggest thing that jumped out at me was the lack of distraction and the similarity to an old tool. I blogged about it a bit recently:

  https://justinmiller.io/posts/2020/06/17/project-386-part-4/

  I mean, yeah, it’s not _capable_ of a whole lot, but it’s a refreshing perspective to look back at computing from then and to think about how much we did that wasn’t sitting at the computer as a nerve center of our lives.

• by yelling_cat on 8/3/20, 2:17 AM

  I used to have an old Windows 2000 laptop without onboard WiFi that I called "Deadline" and used for the same purpose. If you have work you can do without connectivity for extended stretches I recommend it.

• by lostgame on 8/3/20, 1:28 AM

  Hey; me, too! I use my iMac G4 and PowerMac G5 (with 16GB RAM and 2x1TB SSDs) daily. Love ‘em. Thank God for TenFourFox!

• by shortformblog on 8/3/20, 11:18 AM

  I literally spent the weekend setting up Debian on a Mac Mini. While I had trouble getting anything more modern to install (certain dependencies are hard to find), I was able to get Arctic Fox working, and found that it was fairly snappy given the fact it’s running on a G4 processor.

• by dividedbyzero on 8/3/20, 9:48 PM

  I wish I had something like that, but I never got into PowerPC Macs, I bought into the ecosystem with I think the second generation of plastic Intel Macbooks (which, looking back, were quite terrible), and while there's still an early 90s Schneider home computer somewhere in the basement, I fear it won't work anymore and not be any joy to use anyway; that thing was incredibly primitive. It took almost a whole afternoon for my dad to make it play a really simple child's tune for little me. I don't think I appreciated it properly at the time.

  I wonder if a Pi 4 would have the horsepower to run a PowerPC emulator with OS 9 properly. If it did, the biggest difficulty might be finding a decent small-ish external screen.

• by sentientforest on 8/3/20, 5:36 PM

  I have a lot of vintage Apple tech. Much of it still works...

  I have a 2001 PowerPC G4 Quicksilver tower. Haven't booted it in a while, but it worked fine last time I did. If you can find these local to you, you can often get them very cheap. Shipping is expensive though, so buying them on a place like eBay is kind of a non-starter. I recently found a sealed old copy of Cubase VST available online for about $10. Bought an old M-Audio PCI card a long time ago for this machine too. At some point I may set it up as a Digital Audio Workstation.

  I found a pair of old (2001) PowerPC iBooks on eBay a while back. They're good for running kids games and software - useful if you want an inexpensive, air-gapped machine for a young child you don't want on the open internet. Or typing / writing. These can be had very cheaply, I think because many schools bought them and eventually liquidated their inventory to replace with newer equipment. I had no problem finding inexpensive new batteries for these on eBay, and bought a couple extras.

  More regularly, I use my old mid-2007 black macbook to run the original Starcraft. I'm running it via the OS X Installer (it's originally a PowerPC OS 9 game). I'm not much of a gamer these days, but Starcraft can be fun once in a while... like when PG&E in California shuts off the power for days and you want to conserve your main laptop's battery for work... And it's cool to have games that actually support local lan multiplayer, which Blizzard moved away from over time.

  For anyone looking to delve deeper into this topic, here's some recommendations (off the top of my head) on what version of OS X to settle on for a given machine:

  For older Intel Machines, I recommend 10.6 Snow Leopard. This is the last OS to support Rosetta, which allows you to run PowerPC OS X software. Note: PowerPC OS X software, not PowerPC OS 9 / Classic software.

  For older PPC machines, I recommend 10.4 Tiger. This is the last OS to support running OS 9 applications via the Classic environment. Or of course, you can just install OS 9 and forego OS X altogether.

• by jerzyt on 8/3/20, 5:41 AM

  I'm on a Dell Precision M6400 - it's 12 years old. When it came out it was a $3,000 laptop. I bought mine for about half of that on a fire sale a year later. Still love it, although I do have a 10 year younger ThinkPad, I prefer the much older Dell.

• by squeezingswirls on 8/3/20, 8:44 AM

  > Does this mean we’ll see another PowerPC desktop computer or laptop in the future? Not likely.

  This project https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/ is pretty advanced in that regard.

• by mcdramamean on 8/4/20, 5:00 PM

  For me the the issue with upgrading is that when you buy a piece of hardware, specifically DJ gear (Serato), mixers/interfaces, etc; the latest and greatest often doesn't support it. Then you are hoping and wishing for the company to create drivers to support your expensive hardware on the latest Catalina OS upgrade. That's why when you see interviews with many musicians that have home studios, the computers aren't the newest. Once you have a stable situation that works, why change all the time?

• by mmglr on 8/3/20, 2:24 AM

  I enjoy the nostalgia of booting up and using old machines. After the first sentence this article came off as disingenuous. There are easier ways to stay productive without needing to break out a 17 year old Mac. It’s almost like the author is trying to convince himself this is a good idea. Turning off WiFi and using apps in full screen seems much easier.

  The author mentions Slack. I’ve been using Mattermost for about 2 years now. I’ve found that having a mandatory offline schedule is important. I’ve been vocal about that with my team. Usually I’m offline from Mattermost for about 2-3 hours a day. Which allows me to focus on my work.

• by zelos on 8/3/20, 8:11 AM

  > Of course, it goes without saying that my ancient iBook can’t run Slack

  Out of interest, I wonder what the minimum spec to run an IRC client is?

• by AnonHP on 8/3/20, 7:15 AM

  > By 2006, Apple had transitioned away from IBM’s processor designs.

  Wasn’t the initial PowerPC architecture and designs done by Apple, IBM and Motorola, with Motorola and IBM also working the fabs for processors used by Apple during that time (before the switch to Intel)? When did Apple stop being involved in the design of specific processors used in its systems?

• by stanislavb on 8/3/20, 2:22 AM

  There is a histerish cafe in Sofia, Bulgaria, that has one of those Macs in every room and allows customers to play/select music from it. I think they never updated those machines as they just work and make the vibe of the cafe even more interesting as time passes.

• by vaxman on 8/3/20, 10:39 AM

  I used to run YellowDogLinux (now famous for “yum”) on my last (17”) PowerBook G3 and had triple boot with ClassicMac emulation along with MacOS X Lompoc. F’ing mainboards blew several times on all of my non-plastic PowerBooks and MacBookPros, except for the latest, which just had its keyboard and screen replaced (and its second keyboard is going out again). Some of the machines had broken DVD injectors, memory sockets that would come short (the real reason they solder it now), lots of them have had power supply issues. They always want us to buy the next one which is supposed to fix the thermal or mechanical or whatever.. My favorite was the MBP+LG UltraFine 5K that would reboot when a shortwave operator keyed up the mic. The guy from HP who specializes in Chinese supply chains and runs Apple now is an iPad Pro power user and it shows. Just buy iPad Pro —if you develop for them, then switch to Flutter and add an Xcode-server to your network.

• by scarface74 on 8/3/20, 1:03 AM

  One of these days I’m going to dig up my PowerMac 6100/60 with the DOS Compatibility Card and my LCII with the //e card and 5-1/4 inch drive from my mom’s house. All of my disks are in a bedroom so they might still be usable.

  Any way I can get old Ambrosia games?

• by qubex on 8/3/20, 12:41 PM

  He calls it an iBook but I’m pretty sure it’s a PowerBook 12”. I got one of those when they were released and it soon earned the pet-name of ‘sparky’ because when charging it wasn’t very well grounded and would regularly give me shocks.

• by dddddaviddddd on 8/3/20, 3:29 AM

  Trying to get a new battery is one of the worst parts of trying to use an old notebook.

• by tantalor on 8/3/20, 2:44 PM

  > it goes without saying that my ancient iBook can’t run Slack

  What? That's a very surprising statement! Of course Slack has a web client. Does it not support any browser that runs on the old hardware?

• by sys_64738 on 8/3/20, 1:30 AM

  Crazy the battery still holds charge. Those were first to go for me.

• by napolux on 8/3/20, 10:25 AM

  You can just setup a raspberry pi with no wifi and write in a dos like env like DOSBOX o FreeDOS.

  I have a raspberry pi 2 I can use for that, probably.

  Ok, I've found my weekend project :P

• by nonamenoslogan on 8/3/20, 4:22 PM

  I still regularly use an iBook G4 to write HTML and play games. Love the simplicity of the oldies but goodies.

• by 1MachineElf on 8/3/20, 7:57 PM

  Ah nostalgia. Thinking about grabbing a used iBook for playing Bugdom.

• by prvc on 8/3/20, 2:25 AM

  >Still

  Recently acquired, however.

• by dilandau on 8/3/20, 11:55 AM

  Ah yes, the "computer as glorified typewriter" blog post. Needless to say, I think these appeal to people because:

  Encourage consumption (of old/novelty hardware)

  Promise of "productivity" (the holy grail for hn commenters)

  A pip on your shoulder for being different/special

  Deflect from the hard problems internet addiction and procrastination, to "hey do this instead"

• by Wandfarbe on 8/3/20, 2:13 PM

  "I have a completly outdated system with internet connectivity because i'm not using what an average user is doing at all and now i'm writing an article about it"

  I have upgraded from a X220 to a X390 for a single reason: YouTube Videos, which i like to watch on my laptop, started to put the x220 under high load.

  I'm just not writing an Article about it.

  Ah and one generic reason for not having something with is 20 years old: You do wanna have security updates.

• by tengbretson on 8/3/20, 12:20 AM

  I'm not trying to be a downer, but there is absolutely no reason to do this. For $50 you can do so much better without really trying all that hard.

  Now I fully appreciate the draw of doing something like this as a hobby or something, but this article is talking about productivity. This is not an investment for productivity.

• by sneak on 8/3/20, 12:25 AM

  For approximately 10x as much ($500 USD), you can get a pre-retina Air, which has a much improved keyboard, working wifi, flash storage, and a modern OS and browser. It also happens to be way lighter.

  To me that’s more than a 10x improvement over the setup the author describes. There’s relatively little you can’t do on such a $500 machine.