We have two old Macintosh Classics in perfect condition : one is the first Mac-computer I bought back then and the other is one i adopted when the mathematics department moved from UIA to our present place and the secretary wanted to throw it away. But what can we do with them??? Well there seems to be a lot of potential : for instance you can turn them into a linux-box of sorts, or you can get them to access the internet, some even claim they can be turned into a webserver. And I think I once saw a page telling how one could run OS X on a MacClassic (in fact really using it as an external terminal to a working iMac) but I can\’t find the URL right now. To me all this seems to be a bit pathetic, why use these nice little boxes for something they can hardly handle and for which we do have better equipmet around? So, what shall we do with those two boxes?

Why not just do the things we used to do with them back then : playing games (who did not play lemmings on a Classic? or gnuChess), HyperCard applications, I even wrote a fair number of TeX-files on a Classic. But as they have a harddisk of only 80Mb we have to make choices, or dont we? Well, not really as I still have an old SCSI 2Gig harddrive laying around (at the time 2 gigabytes seemed to be an enormous amount of space and admit it, compared to 80Mb it is enormous). So here is the plan : connect these two Classics via a SCSI-cable to the externed 2 GB harddisk and load the disk with all interesting stuff one can still find for 68k Macs.

Luckily there is a marvelous place for all these programs on the web : the UMICH Archive! I will download whatever I find interesting via normal means (that is an ordinary iMac) and dump it onto the external HD so we can use the two Classic-boxes mainly to play games (and there is a huge number of them on the archive). If you have better uses for them, please let me know…

Some interesting URLs for low-end Macs :
– The pure-mac Olden section
– Jag\’s house where older macs still rock
– The Kids domain Black and White Mac Shareware page
and all links contained in them.

(Added january 6th) I found the URL for turning a MacClassic into an extra terminal Controlling Mac OS X With A Mac Plus (or other Classic Mac)

games, mac
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