Are these old computers viable to use daily? Is there any advantage over using an emulator on more modern hardware? (Obviously not the point of this project.)
Infinite Mac (https://infinitemac.org) is honestly incredible and gets you 99% of the way there for running old software for the nostalgia.
But there's definitely something fun about running the old hardware with an old spinning hard drive, clacking away while it boots up for 2-3 minutes.
And then launching Microsoft Word 5.1 and wondering if it locked up, while each toolbar loads in one by one!
Honestly though, if you just wanted to do word processing, it's fine for that, and with modern tools like FloppyEmu, BlueSCSI, and some of the networking hacks with modern cheap hardware, you can get one of these things to transfer files to and from a network share very easily.
The (lack of) latency is probably the most difficult part to reproduce not just emulation, but with a modern hardware+software stack period. It’s not necessary to go back as far as the Mac Classic to get that though, anything that can boot Mac OS 9 (including a few that can hacked to run it, like the G4 Mini) will get you that too. When I boot up my PowerBook G3 the sheer responsiveness when typing immediately stands out.
People bought them to do real work when they were new. I can't see why they can't continue to do that as long as you don't want to connect it to the internet.
His aunt obviously had good taste. -Eric "The Grouch" Shapiro
Are these old computers viable to use daily? Is there any advantage over using an emulator on more modern hardware? (Obviously not the point of this project.)
I have a relatively ancient 8086 I still use from time to time with plain text files and a simple editor.
It provides a distraction-free environment for writing.
Save it to a 720kb floppy that my linux box can still read, and move it to a "modern" system for editing and such.
Infinite Mac (https://infinitemac.org) is honestly incredible and gets you 99% of the way there for running old software for the nostalgia.
But there's definitely something fun about running the old hardware with an old spinning hard drive, clacking away while it boots up for 2-3 minutes.
And then launching Microsoft Word 5.1 and wondering if it locked up, while each toolbar loads in one by one!
Honestly though, if you just wanted to do word processing, it's fine for that, and with modern tools like FloppyEmu, BlueSCSI, and some of the networking hacks with modern cheap hardware, you can get one of these things to transfer files to and from a network share very easily.
I'm using a netatalk server on my Raspberry Pi to serve up Samba shares over AppleTalk. Very simple to do nowadays! https://github.com/geerlingguy/apple-pi
The (lack of) latency is probably the most difficult part to reproduce not just emulation, but with a modern hardware+software stack period. It’s not necessary to go back as far as the Mac Classic to get that though, anything that can boot Mac OS 9 (including a few that can hacked to run it, like the G4 Mini) will get you that too. When I boot up my PowerBook G3 the sheer responsiveness when typing immediately stands out.
People bought them to do real work when they were new. I can't see why they can't continue to do that as long as you don't want to connect it to the internet.
I identify myself as still living in the 1990s.