I'm running late, but I am enjoying reading all of this #Marchintosh stuff. It's making me feel that I should poke my own PowerMac with a stick, too.

I have a Graphite PowerMac with dual 450 MHz G4s and a clean install of OS 10.4.6. I am also nearly entirely unfamiliar with this era of Macs. Is there a safe and reasonable way to get applications on here over the Internet anymore? Or am I stuck with ferrying software over at USB 1.1 speeds?

#Retrocomputing #PowerMac

I am mixing and matching my Apple hardware, with a G4 tower from 2000, a keyboard from 2005, and a 3rd-party Bondi Blue MacAlly USB1 hub. This hub is a royal pain to photograph. The translucent shell is giving my phone, and my terrible old camera, fits.

#Marchintosh

@GamesMissed I think we had that same hub!

My Dad was relentless thinking that you could plug a Mac and a PC and a printer into it, so both could print to it.

Innocent times…

@GamesMissed But transparent design! 🤩 The Killer Peak of the 90s! (Remember the transparent N64!)
@fastjack25 Oh, I absolutely love my Glacier Game Boy Advance, and this aesthetic in general. But wow, does my camera not.

@GamesMissed

Oh how I lusted after that machine back when it was new. (Ended up getting a 533Mhz single core G4, AGP graphics as my first machine)

My first suggestion would be a network share as an intermediary.

If you have a drive that supports FireWire, that might be the next best thing. Otherwise, go looking for a used USB 2.0 PCI card?

@IrrationalMethod I absolutely did *not* lust after this Mac when it was new (well, aside from the fantastic case design). It was so far out of my price range back then, it wasn't even worth thinking about.

But, one of the regular vendor tables at the MIT Flea has a group that refurbishes and sells old, working Macintoshes for stupid cheap. I wasn't even in the market for one, and then their person called out, "CAN I INTEREST YOU IN A DUAL G4 TOWER?"

@IrrationalMethod I hadn't even gotten to the "o" in "No, thank you" when they followed up with "It's $20."

I'm not made of stone. There was no way it wasn't coming home with me.

@GamesMissed

Well that's an amazing bargain.

@IrrationalMethod Seriously! I've ended up chatting with them a few times now, they're genuinely cool people.

They all work across from an electronics recycling drop-off location. The public is allowed to take away anything that hasn't started intake and processing, and they stroll over at lunchtime and get their pick of G3-G5 towers and early Intel systems. They give them a fresh OS install, then sell them cheap so as to keep them out of the waste stream. All mine needed was a new battery.

@GamesMissed Macintoshgarden.org is available over old school HTTP
@MuseumJoe I wasn't sure it would work, but macintoshgarden.org comes up immediately in ancient Safari. That is just cool. Thank you!