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Comment by albertkoz | Hacker News Reader

I got classic Mac, unfortunately I find it quite boring. I would love to get NeXt but these are really expensive nowadays.

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Yeah old Macs on their own are very dull computers. Once you start to get into third-party tweaks and games that push the hardware to its limits are where it really starts to get interesting.

My favorite classic Macs are the ones with color screens and CD-ROM drives. The multimedia possibilities really start to open up! I have a Performa 575[1] that was just about perfect for this, but it suffered a fall in storage that shattered the case. If it ends up being a total loss I'm going to start looking for a Power Mac 5200[2] which is better looking and can run early PowerPC applications.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC_500_series [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_5200_LC

Thanks! I acquired my first vintage Mac couple months ago (two Macintosh Classic) and I was very surprised with the machines. I think I need to look more into what was possible. Thank you for the ideas, I will definitely look into getting another early Mac computer.

Maybe look for a macintosh ii, big desktop case and some were able to run a unix variant. Otherwise the SE30 was the ducks nuts of the classic macs.

The Macintosh Classic is my favorite compact Mac, even if the SE/30 was technically miles ahead. The Classic looks the best (in my '90s-biased opinion) and is the only one that has a working operating system in ROM, which I think is pretty cool. I traded a Mac SE (FD800) for mine and haven't looked back.

I also really enjoy the LC line, especially the pizza box form factor. They have similar styling to the Classic but have a color monitor, and still don't take up much space. There was also an Apple][-on-a-card that could plug into an LC's expansion port and allow it to run Apple ][ software... I haven't tracked one of those down yet, but I see them come up occasionally.

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