Welcome

It's 2014, and I'm about 10 years late to blogging.  Allow me to introduce myself.  I'm a Systems Engineer in New Zealand, and I've got an interest in retro-computing.  I really don't like seeing computers going into the tip, and into our landfills, so here I am "pushing the envelope" to get the most out of old-school technology in 2014.

About a year ago, I discovered PowerPC Macs (circa 2005).  These are machines which were hugely expensive when they were brand new.  Now you can find them online for practically nothing.  The reason ?  Apple changed architecture from RISC based PowerPC to Intel in 2005, and now these machines are deemed vintage / obsolete.  Probably in many cases (and for many applications) they are: there aren't any new commercial applications being written for them by the major vendors, there aren't any security updates being shipped by Apple.  (Incidentally, Apple themselves were the first to 'disown' the platform - they only supported it for a relatively short time before moving exclusively to Intel.)

I wasn't really sure what I was buying at the time as I'd only had limited exposure to Macs up to this point.  However, a year down the track, I've learned a few tricks (from others online and also via experiment) - and reckon I've got a few units of knowledge to impart.

There are many PowerPC blogs out there.  My point of difference is that I'm "app" or "task focused" - I want to be able to show that these machines can be very functional and productive, even using (shock, horror) old software, and I want to show that this all can be done at the fraction of the cost of what a new machine with a Windows license will cost you.  Furthermore, in my experience, the platform is very secure.  The UNIX based MacOS X was pretty robust to start with, and there isn't going to be anyone targeting this platform now.

The downside of working with these machines is that you do need to invest time and effort, and in many cases "pull out all the stops" to get things working nicely.  But once you get past these initial hurdles, in my experience, you can get them to do great things.

I'm going to keep track of how much things end up costing me along the way.  I want to show that people can have an awesome, safe & reliable computing experience at a fraction of the cost of what a new computer will costs.  I'm going to cover things like macports (UNIX / X11 applications), other free software, and probably cover some commercial products (but only those that I manage to buy legit online).

I'm writing this after working with a PowerMac G5 (late 2005, 2.3GHz Dual Core) for about year.  I've just been lucky enough to purchase a top of the line 2005 PowerBook 15" 1.67 GHz for a whopping $63 including delivery off TradeMe.  This time, I'm going to blog about the out-of-the-box / setup experience, and provide a walkthough of my "ultimate PPC setup guide" for 2014 and beyond.