I Needed to Find an Older Mac

- 2008.02.13

My Turn is Low End Mac's column for reader-submitted articles. It's your turn to share your thoughts on all things Mac (or iPhone, iPod, etc.) and write for the Mac web. Email your submission to Dan Knight .

I have very fond memories of the Mac. From my first one back in 1992 up through the $1,700 iBook I bought for college, I've always loved Macs.

Lately, however, I have been stuck on PCs. Most engineering programs are written mainly for PCs, and most big firms use them exclusively.

While reminiscing with some of my high school friends, I remembered some games that I used to play on our Performa 5200s at school. I found some online, but I could not get them to run on my iBook, even in Mac OS 9.2.2. I decided I needed to find an older Mac.

Low End Mac really has a ton of great info when it comes time to choose an old Mac, and I decided on a Performa 6400. I've always wanted a Mac with the Performa name on it for some reason, and the 6400 was the best Performa ever.

The even have a site devoted to them, www.zone6400.com. On that site, I found someone who was looking for a new owner for his Performa 6400 and would part with it for the shipping costs. $45 later, and this magic box showed up at my apartment.

I downloaded a few versions of iCab, Netscape, and Eudora, burned them to a disk, and loaded them on the Performa. After telling the TCP/IP control panel to use ethernet, my "new to me" Mac was online with high speed Internet! It took almost an hour of fiddling to do the same thing with the wife's PC laptop running Vista. The Mac was up and running in less than five minutes!

Of course, the old games (Maelstrom and Battle Tanks 2.1.2) are just as much fun now as I remember, and the old Mac OS is still better than anything from Microsoft.

Hard to believe that I replaced a dual Xeon workstation with a Performa 6400, but that's what happened.

Long Live Macs!

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Recent My Turn articles

Back to Mac OS 9 Because It's All I Need, 2011.01.26. Sebastian Patting sold his Intel Macs and went back to PowerPC Macs and Mac OS 9. Here's why.
Using Low End Macs for Internet Radio, 2008.08.18. When the local public radio station moved classical music to HD radio, it was time to find another way to listen. An old iMac with iTunes solved the problem.
'That's Not a Computer', 2008.07.30. Salvaging a broken PowerBook by turning it into a desktop computer.
More in the My Turn index.

Links for the Day

Mac of the Day: PowerBook 5300, introduced 1995.08.25. The first PowerPC PowerBook - known for flaming performance.
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