PowerMac G3 Blue & White

This is Clementine, my blue & white PowerMac G3. she's one of my newest acquisitions, bought at VCF west for $40. she's in pretty good shape, and has a few interesting cards inside that point to a long life. i found her stuffed under a table, with a price tag and a little sticky note saying she worked as of a month prior, and i immediately knew she was coming home with me.

the original drive was still installed and functional, and the remaining programs all pointed to a former life in a biology lab at a local university, apparently doing research on nematodes. unfortunately, the process of deleting data before getting rid of the machine had been something of a hack job, and the machine was missing all sorts of extensions, which left most programs unable to run. i eventually ended up grabbing an os 9.2.2 instlal disk and reinstalling the os over top of the existing one, which at least made the system much more stable and useable. some oddities do remain, but for the most part she works great, and even delivers performance rivaling my cube.

inside she's got a pair of scsi cartds, one from the factory connected to the 9gb hard drive, and the other seemingly unpopulated. i can only assume it was being used to connect to peripherals, as the external scsi ports on the two cards are different sizes and pin counts. the graphics card is also aftermarket, with the rage 128 being replaced by a radeon ddr mac edition. this not only significantly improved performance in games and other 3d programs, but it also allows digital video out over dvi, as well as tv out over s-video. the rest of the interior seems pretty stock, with 256mb of ram and the factory g3/400.

in an incredibly predictable turn of events, her firewire ports are completely dead, and so the only way to get data on (besides the glacial usb 1 ports) is over ethernet, either via a lan or from the internet. while i was getting her up and running, i was dumping large files over the lan from mica to the cube, and then from the cube on to clementine. this setup worked pretty well, especially since the 9gb hard drive meant i wasn't actually storing very much data on clementine. mostly i installed a few games and a handful of utilities, as well as classila for downloading files under 10mb. she is really not happy on the internet, even less so than the cube, which surprised me a bit as i had always been told that a g4 was just a g3 with a vector unit, and therefore the only difference between the two was 50mhz of clock. i suppose there's more going on with the motherboards tho. speaking of which, clementine is a rev. a g3, which means her onboard ata controller gets a bit funny with larger drives, particularly under os x. that's not a huge deal for me since i don't even intend to install os x, but it's still good to know.

uses for clementine are a bit thin at the moment, mostly because everything she can do, the cube can do better, and with better peripherals to boot (clementine currently has an old imac keyboard with a partially stuck space bar and a puck mouse). multiplayer works well in some games, but most of the os 9 games i have with multiplayer aren't the sort of things my friends are interested in playing. for the time being, she's acting as a second monitor for the cube, letting me do other work while i play some game or something. eventually i might try to work out how to encode video to play on a g3, which would be an interesting use, and i'm definitely going to be researching more multiplayer games, but for now she's not really got a lot going on. until then tho, she's a very pretty addition to my collection, and a perfectly capable performer under os 9.