Quadra 660AV what's with the "PowerPC" label?

[Liam Proven]

On 13 June 2016 at 20:18, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Jun 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
>> ... that looks like a 6100 case, so maybe someone re-cycled part of a
>> case cover or something?
>
> I think that's likely. I don't see much else that could explain it. It's
> just that it's weird, since the owner didn't seem very technical.

Might have got it like that & never noticed...?

>> A decade later, I'm still sad and annoyed that I missed a Quadra 840AV
>> on my local South London Freecycle group. I'd always wanted one.
>
> I had one of those for a while. I have to say that, even though it was
> more expandable than the 660AV, I still had trouble warming up to the
> machine. It was too big, has the rounded-face style that I dislike, and
> can't run A/UX. Of course on the latter point, neither can a 660AV.

That's very true. I've never used a live A/UX system and badly want a play.

Tempted to try Shoebill...

https://github.com/pruten/shoebill

... but emulators aren't the same.

>> I did have a Quadra 650, though. Lovely machine. I sold it when I left
>> the country -- I no longer own a house, so I don't have the space. :-(
>
> I always thought of that machine as a "quality Performa" since it has a
> similar case style to the one many of the Performas had.

I guess so -- I don't know all the models that well. There are also
US-model Macs that always remained very scarce in Europe. The G3
All-in-One is an example -- I've never seen one in the flesh.

>> I kept a beige G3 or two. I will revive and restore them at some point,
>> and keep the best and sell the rest. They'll at least use EIDE drives,
>> cheap plentiful SD-RAM and can run (elderly versions of) OS X, which
>> makes it dramatically easier to get stuff on and off them, either by
>> Internet or by disk, especially USB disk.
>
> Hmm, yes, I can see how that would be an easier machine to cope with. I
> lost interest in Macs after OSX came along. It's a strange phenomenon. I
> am a dyed-in-the-wool Unix zealot. So, you'd think I'd love OSX. Many of
> my co-workers love it. I don't hate it, but I don't bother with it because
> I prefer a stock [Free|Net] BSD box.

I can see that. To this day, I don't consider OS X to be the _real_
Mac experience. I like it well enough -- I'm typing on it right now,
on a Macintel with an original ADB keyboard.

It's a nice OS, I like and appreciate the NeXTstep heritage, but it's
not a _proper_ Mac.

But I spent real money -- very very rare for me -- on upgrading an old
7600 or 7700 I got for free to run OS X 10.0, to get to know the new
OS. More RAM, G3 upgrade, EIDE controller, etc. Then I got a free
Blue'n'White and it was my main machine for a while. Then I switched
to Linux full-time and never looked back.

> I like the 68k Macs because they
> remind me of simpler times and I love the M68k. Plus, I have a massive
> collection of M68k apps/games I can easily load onto them without much
> effort.

Me too, although I'd not call my s/w collection massive.

But the snag is that 68K means SCSI, and SCSI is a pain when it doesn't work.

It also means AAUI, ADB, weird monitors, etc.

The G3 era meant more standard bits, but the beige machines are still
a classic Mac. They'll take a cheap PCI USB card, you can use vanilla
USB mice, with a graphics card a standard monitor, etc. -- but they're
still _Macs_. They boot to a happy (or sad) Mac, and they run Classic.

The last Mac that was vaguely a Mac, for me, was the Blue'n'White. All
modern and it used PC componentry, but it has an ADB port. (And
Firewire.) When ADB went away, soon after, classic MacOS went away,
and then, they're just weird PCs with (briefly) weird processors that
only run a weird Unix (or Linux).

Nice boxes, but they don't feel all that Mac-like to me.

The Beige machines have a foot in both eras -- they take, or can take,
PC hardware, but they're proper classic Macs with Mac firmware and can
run both the actual Apple Mac OSes.

> OSX went too far off the rails for me.

I can understand that.

> Plus, I find that I don't
> get along with the current OSX/Mac crowd much.

Also a point.

>  System 9.x and before are
> "something different" for me, a break from my mostly hardcore CLI
> existence.

Yes, true. An OS I still miss, for all its instability and quirkiness.
I'd love to see a modern FOSS recreation, at least of the concept and
the style, even if it was binary-incompatible.

I wish the Star Trek project had come to some kind of fruition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

>
>> It feels a tad dishonest, like cheating, but it's far easier to fire up
>> 10.3, fetch something off the Web or a thumbdrive or something, unpack
>> it, then reboot into MacOS 9 and actually use it, than it is to get
>> access to that stuff direct from classic MacOS.
>
> I know what you mean, but that's why you wanna get your M68k Mac onto your
> network and just use FTP, instead. That helps tremendously. However, until
> that point it's floppies and CDROMs, so I know what you mean.
>
> USB is about the only "modern" development that I very much miss on older
> machines. It's so nice to interchange mice, keyboards, and mass storage
> devices that way.
>
> -Swift
>



-- 
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