#power mac g3

[thisischeri]

instagram: cheri.png

[forgottenfuturist]

Magazine ad for the Power Macintosh G3, 1999.

[digitalesleben]

Tag 8: Military Grade Computing Power von Apple

Drei faszinierende Apple Work Stations der Steve Jobs Ära. Von quietschbunt zur Käsereibe. Die Apple Power Macs mit den Prozessoren G3, G4 und G5 waren das beste was Apple bieten konnte. Alle drei Computer stehen in meinem Computermuseum.

Der achte Beitrag in meiner Reihe von Beiträgen zur Neugestaltung der Ausstellung in meinem Computermuseum. Heute und an weiteren 25 Tagen stelle ich die Zusammenstellung meiner Ausstellungsstücke vor. Habe ich schon erwähnt, dass ich ein großer Apple Fan bin? Und dass die größten Macs der letzten 25 Jahre in meinem Computermuseum stehen? Ja, es sind die Power Macs mit den letzten Power PC…

[krjpalmer]

MacAddict September 2001

Hits and misses (so far as the conventional wisdom went) cluster on the cover as MacAddict reached its fifth anniversary issue. "The best and worst of everything Mac" covered more than just the five years of the magazine's existence (with David Reynolds's editorial flashing back to being asked whether joining "a new Macintosh magazine" was a good idea in 1996 even as he declared he'd be leaving now); the news section happened to proclaim what the best and worst moments of the magazine itself had been.

[thembow]

Apple: iMac G3 "Flower Power" (2001)

[pc-98s]

i should install bugdom on one of my old macs

[natsumipocket]

Power Mac G3

[visiblenostalgia]

Placements I’d like to call thrifty:

Venus and Jupiter both seem to represent spending habits. In both unique to their own kind of ways. Jupiter for wealth and Venus for the physical commodity of what that wealth can bring. Saturn however represents the economy as a whole. The one that represents the entirety of what’s driven by Venus and Jupiter. Taking into consideration that Saturn can be restrictive and the respective signs of Capricorn and Aquarius can both represent a more cold wintry energy (henceforth where winter is hard to bear due to the impoverished harvest around that time), it can be safe to assume that Venus and Jupiter in those signs can prove to be thrifty. Being one to work on a budget rather than being a wealthy and born-into-success type deal.

Here’s some of my takes regarding those observations. And remember, these are in my opinion and solely mine. You’re free to disagree but let’s not cause war in the comments. It’s needless banter.

Placements deemed thrifty (MAJOR):

Venus in Aquarius (pretty self explanatory. The thrifty commodity finder. Someone to finds unique stuff at a goodwill or eBay for a good price and makes it either a fashion icon or a trend. The alternatively trendy.)

Venus in Capricorn (also self explanatory. Someone who saves a bunch of money before getting what they want. You’d see them decked out in some luxury stuff but they’d also be quite cheap and insisting on buying a great value box of sparkling water than Bubly or Topo Chico.)

Venus in Sagittarius (may be too wild in buying commodities. Watch for thoughtless/needless spending)

Saturn in Taurus (slow to build wealth but it may also be karma with wealth)

Saturn in Sagittarius (toning it down on the spending naturally or having karma with travel. Travel usually costing a lot of money can be an issue. Last minute spending due to so much karma in benevolence.)

Jupiter in Aquarius (wealth in alternative work routes. You take the interesting way to success and it’s guaranteed. May have had to manage money after you have spent on it. Paychecks may range variously.)

Jupiter in Virgo (I have this. Not everything is just handed to you on a plate. You have to have your x’s crossed and i’s dotted, your plans planned and your seats booked in order for there to be forward motion and a chance to get money. Wealth comes from years of knowledge. And knowledge is king these days.)

Jupiter in Capricorn (like above, you have to work for it. But for y’all power is gained. Alas, if you end up being frugal this is definitely a placement for it.)

Saturn in Cancer (you raise a household from a young age. You may have been sent out on grocery lists and handed a budget at ten. You had to follow it or be punished. If you managed to find cheaper deals and prices, you’d have extra money to spend on yourself. Alas, you only had so much so you had to enjoy one little consumer item all to yourself. Doesn’t matter what that was. Or if you were smart, you saved it for the piggy bank. Either way, another thrifter/frugality placement.)

Saturn in Leo (the debilitated celebrity. Publicity karma. Being a celeb meant money right? With Saturn you may have had to become quite scarce in order to find some sort of karmic release. Your ego had to take a blow so you can find publicity. Without that you’d be probably more frugal than a Canerican Saturn. Prayers to you my love.)

House placements that might signify thriftiness and frugality (MINOR AND VARY):

Saturn in 2nd, 4th, 8th, 9th,

Venus in 9th, 11th

Jupiter in 12th

Before I continue, I may want to also kinda “add a cherry on top” by saying:

To be a thrifter is to be a future trendsetter’s inspiration. Apple took after the 90’s iMac G3’s for their color for their new mac’s. Same goes for our fashion.

Go out. Thrift for a bit. You never know what might be an inspiration to those in the future.

You can deadass be a trendsetter and not even know it.

Keep on rocking thrifting community! <3

[regretsretrotech]

Other Sides of the Coin

That phrase is the guiding philosophy for my computer collection: lets unpack it.

First off, I've been around PC's all my life. While I don't remember it, the family's XT clone, then a 486 and onwards. I know PC's in and out. While they are fascinating machines in their own right, they aren't the only computers out there.

So what is out there? Many systems, all shapes and sizes, commercial and enterprise machines that never see the light of day until they are scrapped and the consumer machines meant for the home. For me the commerical and enterprise machines don't hold that much allure, they are curiosities for sure and one of two of them may find their way into my collection but that's for later. I focus on consumer machines currently.

But wait, there are many of those machines!? How do I keep myself from drowning in silicon and rocks we tricked to think?

Representatives.

You'll see this more in the earlier systems that had a vast array of systems that either competed with the example in my collection or preceded it. CP/M systems were many in a vibrant competitive ecosystem, I simply cannot own an example of every kind that is out there, so instead I settle on a well known unit and say it represents what the other units are.

Lastly, I sort the collection into bittiness and while my decisions are arbitrary and subjective, there is method behind them:

8 Bit Systems: Everyone will think of systems like the C64 but I also class systems like the PC/XT and the TI99/4a in the same category.

Limited color palettes and sounds

expectation to load software from 5.25" disks, cassette tape or cartridge ROM's.

BASIC in ROM.

Majority of the IO or internal operations done in 8 bits.

Limited RAM to 1MB or less.

Examples in my collection:

Commadore C64/C128

IBM PC/XT

Apple IIeP (Representative for the Apple II line)

Kaypro 4-84(Representative for the CP/M ecosystem.)

Texas Instruments TI99/4a

Timex Sinclare 1000

Missing:

Atari 8 bit. :(

16 Bit Systems: Here the lines start to blur and you'll see why.

Enhanced colors and sounds

Expected to load software from hard drives and 3.5" disks, gone are cassettes and cartridges for computers.

Faster CPU's

Majority of the system conducts itself in 16 bit operations.

RAM expanding above 1MB.

Expected to run GUI's

Examples:

Commadore Amiga 1000

Atari ST520

Apple IIgs (16 bit CPU but does everything in 8 bits)

Apple Mac Plus

IBM PC/AT (HA)

Clone PC/386 (full 32 bit CPU but all IO is 16 bits)

32 Bit Systems (Early)

Why do I say early? The 386 is a 32 bit CPU, but it's in the 16 bit category. And to that, I say the 386 didn't have a standard 32 bit expansion slot for it to use, a CPU like the 486 had two.

High color resolutions, and high fidelity sound capabilities.

Hard drives are standard equipment now.

CPU's pushing mid double digit speeds.

Multiple megabytes of RAM are expected

GUI's and multimedia.

CD-ROM is the new hotness

Examples:

Gateway 2000 4dx2/66V

Apple Performa 630CD

Missing:

Commadore Amiga 2000/3000

Atari Falcon

32 Bit Systems (Late)

At this point we are seeing the foundations of the modern computers as we know them today.

Unlimited Colors and Resolutions

Hard drives pushing dozens of gigabytes

RAM in the hundreds of Megabytes

Advanced CPU's with SIMD instructions running at several hundreds of Mhz.

Advanced OS's

Examples:

Compaq Deskpro EN866

Apple Imac G3(750)

Missing:

To be decided

The tail end:

Here the lines blur to the point it's difficult to call, so it's here where I plant the end of my collection, at least for now.

The modern computer as we know it has been invented and we start to shed the legacy of decades of computers that came before them. It is here that the coin has become flat. Apple is still doing their own thing with the Power PC's but will soon drop them in favor of x86. Intel is scratching it's head at the Pentium 4, AMD is ruling the roost with it's wildly successful Athlon processor.

There may be a home for systems in this era in the future as memories coalesces into nostalgia. There is already a root forming with two systems that blur the late 32 bit system lines, a Pentium 4 XP box and a Sawtooth G4.

Perhaps I'll get a G5. That would really blur the lines.

Thank you for reading.

Here is were I will put my wish list. Some of these systems are my biege whales, I would love an Amiga 4000T but at the costs of these machines, it is unlikely without shelling out as much as a decent used car.

Commadore Amiga 4000T

This machine doesn't have a direct comparison with either a PC or a Macintosh, but there are contemporary machines that would be added to the collection with it.

IMSAI or Altair 8800

Mostly for it's front panel toggling goodness. I'd reasonably be just as happy with something like a modern clone for me to twiddle the switches but still have something usable afterwards.

[nmb725]

I disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled this power mac g3 I got from a thrift store (it was absolutely disgusting) but it looks awesome now. I got all the panels off and gave them a good wash :)

[thisischeri]

ig: cheri.png

[blazehedgehog]

Sir BlazeHedgehog, where is your nickname from?

Oh wow, somebody actually asked for once instead of me having to volunteer it.

This is probably at least the third time I've said this just on this blog alone, but since tumblr search is worthless, we'll take it from the top one more time, but I'll hide it behind a "read more" tag for those who would rather skip it.

And because I'm going to be hiding it behind a tag, I'm going to go all in and tell a story.

The short answer is I made it up.

I am from a time before the internet was everywhere, on everything. In the 5th or 6th grade, our computer lab teacher introduced us to the world wide web using the suite of Apple Macintoshes they had available.

And when I say "Macintosh" I mean the original. Black and white screens, Hypercard, the whole deal from 1984. Keeping in mind it was currently 1995.

About 25-30 of these little guys split in to two rows. In the middle of the classroom sat a lone Macintosh Performa. Good kids got to use the Performa.

The Performa was the only computer that was capable to render what we would begin to know as the modern internet. It had Netscape Navigator installed, which supported the somewhat-new technology of webpages with embedded images.

For the rest of us, we were introduced to the text-based internet. You would bring up a terminal application and have to type out commands to interface with the school's webserver in order to check things like email (using PINE). You browsed the internet using Lynx. There was no mouse, no clicking. You scrolled using the arrow keys and could highlight links with tab.

They taught us other terminal commands, like how to open a direct text chat with another student in the lab, some basic formatting and typing stuff, etc. It was slow, difficult to use, and the internet was a lot smaller back then. We had somewhat strict rules on what we could and could not do on these machines, but since they couldn't do much, it wasn't hard to enforce.

In high school, half of the lab was a mixture of older 5200 Performas and newer 6600 "Pizza Box" Performas, with the other half being more left over monochrome Macintoshes. They also had "the one really nice computer" but this one was a modern (by 1997 standards) Power Mac G3. New tech came newer rules: no installing games, no adult content (even soft stuff, like girls in bikinis), and no chat rooms.

We were teenagers, though. You tell us not to do something, and that immediately makes you want to do it. I remember catching some of the particularly geeky among us logging in and playing online MUDs (the precursor to MMOs), and others trying to get around the Foolproof Software locks to install games or look at porn.

(This is a newer photo of that same computer lab, and I'm unsurprised that, outside of kids being on more modern hardware, absolutely nothing about the setup of that room has changed.)

I wasn't really in my spiral of depression yet, so I used the computers like a good little boy and followed the rules.

Until the last few days of the semester before summer break. That's when everybody -- students, teachers -- collectively stop caring about keeping up proper appearances. I remember having big free periods and spending time in the computer lab. I was usually the only one in there. So, immediately, I began looking up chat rooms.

A few friends and I had gotten into deep trouble a few months earlier, because one wild night during a sleepover we called into a "party line", which was a service where you were hooked into what is now known as a "discord group chat." Except you didn't know who you were getting connected with. They were total strangers. That was part of the thrill. It was new and exciting. We happened to be lucky enough to get a group of girls who were near enough to our age (maybe a little older), and we spent hours talking with them via speakerphone.

The thing was, there was a precedent that doing that cost money. You were calling a 1-800 number, and there were service fees associated with that. Per-minute. So we racked up a bill of something like $70-$100+ that night. That was a big problem.

But internet chat was free. The allure was impossible to ignore. And with it being the last few days of school, who could stop me? At worst I'd be kicked out of the computer lab, but they weren't going to, like, expel me. Being in trouble was a fake idea.

I forget where I ended up the first day, it was some kind of general Yahoo chat or something, but I remember I was too shy to be myself. Being 13 or 14 at the time, I decided to roleplay as Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon. One of the only times I ever did anything like that. I was full-on "I send a rose to all the ladies @}---;----" and everything, it was awful.

On the final day, I started looking up Sonic fansites and ended up somewhere called "Ruby's Sonic Page." This was the homepage of Dawn Best, under the handle Ruby the Echidna. It was there she talked about a game I'd never heard of before -- Sonic Adventure -- and provided a link to the announcement trailer in glorious 160p MPEG-1 video. I was blown away. They were making new Sonic games again?

Provided was a link to discuss the game with other Sonic fans, and it lead to Missy's Sonic Chat, a Beseen Chat Room on a website called Xoom (one of the many Geocities clones). Beseen Chats weren't live chatrooms like we'd think of modern-day Discord, or even AIM or IRC. Beseen was much more comparable to Twitter, or Tumblr, in that it was a website where you could post messages and could refresh the feed to see what other people had posted. It was a bit of a hack, but it worked well enough.

The whole thing was broken down in to different frames (if you're too young to know what those are: imagine multiple separate embedded webpages, sectioned off to specific portions of the screen). So you'd have a frame on the left that was a userlist, where people had set names and even large image avatars for themselves. At the bottom you'd have a text entry field with two buttons at the end: Send and Refresh. And then taking up most of the screen real estate was the feed itself. Something sort of like this, I guess:

And a lot of people in this Beseen chat had made up their own, original characters. This was my first introduction to Sonic OCs. And Missy's chat was a veritable who's who extremely talented fanartists. Ruby, Barachan, T2, J. Axer, Rinacat, etc.

I wanted to fit in, so I felt like I needed to come up with "a character" of my own.

Literally the first name to jump to mind was "Blaze the Hedgehog." I didn't like it. It was too obvious. Surely there had to be other Blaze the Hedgehogs out there, right? And I wasn't even particularly attached to "flame" powers.

So I sat there for a few minutes, trying to think of something better. My mind went blank.

Admitting defeat, "Blaze the Hedgehog" it was.

The chat was rather dead, given it was still technically a school day, and once I went home that afternoon, that was the end of my access to the internet. The best we had at home was some sort of Hyundai thing -- amber monochrome monitor, no graphics rendering, no hard disk, basically just a glorified word processor.

That changed once my mom got her tax return a little while later. She invested in a 233mhz Packard Bell desktop computer with Windows 98 and a subscription to America Online.

When prompted to make my own AOL username, I decided to go with "Blazehgehg." BlazeHedgehog. The character I'd made up at school.There it was. For the first time, for real, it was set in stone. And from 1998 to 2023, I've never changed it. Other "Blaze the Hedgehog"s have come and gone, but I've been the constant.

Later that night, I found my way back to Missy's Sonic Chat, and I grabbed one of Axer's Sonic images, sloppily recoloring it in MSPaint. I printed it out for posterity and kept it in a folder with artwork I'd actually drawn.

Blue and green were my favorite colors. Sonic was blue, so Blaze was green. Instead of shoes, he had boots. He wore a leather vest with a black t-shirt on underneath that covered most of his body. And atop his head, a sprout of hair, colored like a flame.

Blaze's only real role as a "character" was in the first and only fanfiction I ever wrote for him; the story was a blend of Final Fantasy VII and an anime I was in love with at the time named "Green Legend Ran." It's better it was lost to time. Besides, I don't think it was ever finished.

Blaze would go through several revisions over the years. More immediately, The Matrix hit the next year, and Blaze was given a trenchcoat. Also, since I could like, actually draw, I decided to stop painting over other people's artwork and draw Blaze for myself.

Eventually, Blaze Hedgehog the character fell out of favor. I grew up. I never really used him for much more than a forum avatar anyway, and even then, I felt like people were judging me for having a Sonic OC. Especially a green hedgehog. There were a dime-a-dozen green hedgehog Sonic OCs floating around.

Once Sega introduced Blaze the Cat in 2005, that sort of became the final nail in the coffin. But by then, I'd been using "BlazeHedgehog" as an online username for seven years. I'd grown attached to it. I didn't want to change it. So... I didn't.

As I've gotten older and put some distance between myself and that time, I find myself a bit nostalgic for the character of Blaze the Hedgehog. I redesigned him a bit a few years ago to look more like a traditional Sega Sonic character, swapping in a bomber jacket and getting rid of the shirt.

And, of course, there was Sonic Forces. Options were limited there, but a brown leather jacket and the weird black bodysuit got closest. I was most surprised by the hairstyle options. While we don't get the classic yellow-to-red, we do get a green-to-red, which is good enough. And I really like these ring-strap boots.

That's about all there is to say, really. These days it's just a username for me, and I keep it so old friends can find me more easily. I'm pretty terrible at keeping up with some people, and I get the feeling I probably come off cold to others when that's never been my intention. But for those who want to keep tabs on me, they know where to find me.

[figureofdismay]

sometimes i am really tempted to buy one of those semi functional g3/bubble back imacs that pop up on ebay, i was just looking at the listings earlier lol. they were the computers in my middle school computer lab and i wanted one sooooo badly but my parents always refused bc A) they didn't want to rebuy all the programs for mac instead of windows and B) the desktop we had was actually more powerful than the imac by a lot lol. In this day and age it would be essentially like buying a vintage type writer in terms of "usefulness" (and about the same price range), and i don't have a spot where it would go, so I won't.

But someday! that was such a specific era both in my adolescence and aesthetic and design language that hasn't really come around again, and it seems worth preserving.

[imkrabs]

Well, that first paint drying attempt died horribly in an irrecoverable kernel panic. To be expected, I guess. Either way I honestly don't know if I would have had time to complete it before the December deadline (it was almost *too* slow)

Thankfully, I have *endless* horrible ideas! Which are well underway! I'll be creating the Worst Possible(TM) Mac OS X experience I possibly can, with the help of my Power Mac G3, Gentoo, QEMU, and a lot of time. The plan is to install Gentoo (with Gnome!) on the Mac, install QEMU on that, and then install Mac OS X Tiger inside of QEMU, to come full circle. Final goal? Play DOOM or something, I guess :)

Now let's hope this goes better than last time...

[krjpalmer]

Macworld May 2002

Apple's latest hardware received feature coverage in this issue. In his back-page column, Andy Ihnatko described his difficulties "compiling open-source apps to run on Mac OS X," but still speculated they could become an alternative to having to subscribe to commercial software.

[aroneox]

Apple Power Macintosh G3 “All-In-One” (AIO). Also known as “Molar Mac” due to its resemblance to a molar tooth. The G3 AIO was a replacement for the PowerMac 5500 used heavily in education. The G3 AIO was sold exclusively to the education market, and had a very short product lifespan of just five months. It was replaced with the iMac G3.

This G3 AIO is running MacOS 8.1, with the top-end 266 mhz processor, and sports 64mb ram (expandable to 1gb), a 4gb mechanical spinning hard drive, 24x CD-ROM, 3.5″ floppy drive, 100mb Zip drive, and the “Wings” audio/visual personality card (audio/video in and out).

Because it was exclusively sold to certified education customers only, and because of its short lifespan, the Power Macintosh G3 AIO is extremely rare, and very sought after for those that collect Apple and Macintosh computers.