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Joined: 2011 Nov 24
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Great Website

It's nice to see that there is plenty of stuff still available for my old Mac's. I bought my first one in 1988 which was a IIcx which I am happy to say I can still boot right up at any time as it still works perfectly. It better since I have yet to purchase a car to date that cost me more than that computer did to make it functional out of the box. I used it regularly all the way until 1999 when I finally was able to afford my next new one which was one of the first G4's. Purchased that the day they were announced and waited 4 months for it to be delivered because of the huge demand for them. It was a G4 450 and was the most powerful machine to date at that time. Unfortunately I didn't get the use out of it that I did the IIcx because it actually became obsolete and unsupported more quickly. It had also gotten damaged due to a lightning hit that nailed my house. The computer survived but the ethernet port got fried and neither the port nor a ethernet card would work in it. I was able to purchase a G4500 motherboard to replace it off of eBay rather cheap. I had also picked up a few lesser models since, a Quadra tower, can't remember the model but it was the best of those towers and a power mac 8100/110. They are all functional with the exception that the hard drives have died and they likely all need new PRAM batteries. I also think the 3.5 floppy drives have mostly crapped out. I may have one good one between them all. Most recently my brother had given me his G4 which was the fastest model prior to the mirror door models. I have it up and running but have a terrible time on the internet with it as it only capable of I believe 10.4 if that? It's been over a year so I don't remember.
I haven't touched any of the Mac's in over a year but now my 10 year old son is very interested in them causing me to work on them again.
I will say it's nice to have a 68k, Quadra, beige PPC and a G4 that all potentially work because it gives me the opportunity to use software now spanning into nearly 4 decades. Everything that works on works from 6.0.8 to 10.4 I still have nearly all of the software that I have purchased, download or collected from user groups or whatever and I will be happy to share anything that is allowed to be shared. It's no longer on 3.5 floppy's as over the years it has been moved over to zip discs, CD's and finally DVD's. I did my best to preserve everything as I could. However I have both saved the files in the original floppy formats either being via installers and disk images and also installed versions. Installed meaning that if something went into the system, extensions, control panels folders ect. I saved those items into folders telling you where to put them.
I'll have to see what all I have but I know it's an extensive collection, again if it's allowed to be up here I'll put it up if it's not here. I have a couple requests myself which I will be posting too.
As great as the new Mac's are, there is a lot to be said for the classics. I have found that some of the best programs ever made came on a floppy or two back in the day. Today similar programs that come on a DVD or two can't compare, they are just bloatware. Thank you for this website

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Bolkonskij's picture
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Joined: 2009 Aug 3
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Welcome to the MacGarden, MacNut!

It was interesting to read your story, looking forward to your uploads. Don't give up on 10.4 yet, I'm still using it as my main OS on my PowerBook / PowerMac. Especially if you upgrade your computers a bit, you can still get lots of productivity out of it. Thanks to TenFourFox, we have an up to date browser as well. Anyway, have fun with your Macs! Smile

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Joined: 2011 Nov 24
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TenFourFox? I never heard of it but I told my son about it and he is downloading it as we speak LOL All I have to do now is try to find some of those old school internal SCSI drives for the vintage Mac's. I wonder what the largest one I can get for them is now a days? I remember when 120MB was massive LOL

IIGS_User's picture
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Joined: 2009 Apr 8
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Do you remember the all-time first hard disk, produced by Apple, with a capacity of 5 MB?

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Joined: 2011 Nov 24
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LOL wow. No that was just a tad before my time with it. However, when I went to purchase the llcx they offered it with a 20MB hard drive, 256k of RAM, a 3.5 floppy drive, no video card and a keyboard and mouse for about $5k. Before I even walked out the door I upgraded the hard drive to the 40MB which the salesman said I'd never fill and 8MB of RAM which was unheard of. The salesman said that much RAM would be a waste of money because I'll never need it. Out the door I left with the llcx 8MB RAM, a 24 bit video card, 40MB hard drive, the 3.5 Floppy superdrive which just came out, greyscale Logitech Hand scanner with ScanMan, a screaming fast 2400 baud modem and a 15" monitor. Plus Stratavision 3d, Soundedit with the MacRecorder Mic that looked like a giant bar of soap, Pixel Paint Pro, System 6.0.8 and MacroMind Director 1.1. A grand total of nearly $14,000

T-1000's picture
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Joined: 2011 Sep 15
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You are very welcome! If you are uploading stuff and still have the original media, make sure to make good disk images. For CD-ROM:s you could use either Disk Utility in Mac OS X, creating a .cdr or you could use Toast creating .toast. There is also a way to create .iso in the Terminal. For floppy disks, please use Disk Copy 4.2 under Mac OS 9 or earlier. Also read the thread about not mounting your disk images before you stuff them.

Mac OS 10.4 is still great, it is really a shame that development seems to have ended for it.

I upgraded from my iMac G5 with Mac OS 10.4 just a month ago. I bought a MacBook Pro with Mac OS 10.7 installed, however I immediately downgraded it to Mac OS 10.6... Smile

There is a way to fool the Mac OS 10.5 Install DVD into install Leopard on slow G4:s (it requires 867 MHz or more). However, it isn't recommended anyway as I think it will be really slow anyway. I am running Mac OS 10.2 and 10.3 on my 1 GHz eMac.

espectalll123's picture
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Joined: 2011 Dec 5
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Hi! I'm a new user too. And all I can say is... what a beautiful garden! Laughing out loud

Well... now I can say more things Tongue This website is really good. Not only its content, but in the few minutes I was here I could saw that there's a friendly community, that helps happily to the website's members.

Now... here's my story. I'm "new" with Macs (my last PC was a 1999's Pentium III, but I bought my first Mac at January 2010), but now I even emulate the Apple I! I came to Mac world with an iMac 21'5'' with OS X 10.6.2. It was a perfect computer, compared with any PC I ever seen before. Fast, easy, modern, powerful... In brief, the experience that feels every new Mac user. The sensation was so strong that I wanted to investigate about Mac's history, about what I lost the last years... Well, now using OS X 10.7.2 with the same Mac, I emulate System 7 at Mini vMac, System 7.5 at Basilisk, Mac OS 9 at SheepShaver and OS X 10.2 at PearPC. Now I think is obvious that Mac was (and still is) always better than DOS/Windows PCs.

I found Macintosh Garden over a year ago, but I don't decided to register me. I downloaded things as System 7.5 or apps as MacWrite, and sometimes I came here just for fun. And finally, today I made my account. And I don't think I will regret.

Thanks to the admin (who?) and the community for making this website. This is really a beautiful garden Smile

P.S.: Sorry if you don't understand something I wrote up, I'm learning English (I'm from Spain) and some of my words and phrases are actually "Googlish" Tongue

Bolkonskij's picture
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Joined: 2009 Aug 3
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Bienvenido espectall,

I agree, this is truly a wonderful garden. The admins (Maedi & Balrog) have been doing a great job. If you just entered the Mac platform with Snow Leopard you really missed a lot, haha Smile

Have fun surfing the site and if you have some time, help looking for some older software on the net and add them to here. (the Garden is so beautiful because people sit down and invest time to locate old software and archive them)