PowerMac 6100 Upgrade Guide (2000)
kan.org
kan.org
With that being said, there is something warm-feeling and even whimsical about the classic Mac OS and classic beige Macs. I truly think the Apple Human Interface Guidelines of the 1990s were well written and are timeless recommendations for making great, usable software. I believe designers of today's user-facing software tools should acquaint themselves with a classic Mac running contemporary programs like Microsoft Word 5.1 and the ClarisWorks suite to see great examples of well-designed software. I also like both the System 7 and Platinum themes, with a slight preference toward Platinum. I'm really curious about A/UX, which married the classic Mac OS and Unix, and I'm also curious about Rhapsody, a predecessor to Mac OS X that was based on NeXTSTEP but featured the Platinum theme from Mac OS 8.
1. The increased iOS-ification of the user interface. I believe a desktop operating system should support desktop workflows and not import at wholesale UI elements that don't make sense outside of touchscreen environments; I have a similar complaint about modern Windows and GNOME.
2. The introduction of notarization.
3. Over the years I've noticed that macOS has gotten more annoying when it comes to notifications. Back in the Leopard era there was a classic commercial mocking Windows Vista's "Cancel or Allow" dialogs. Yet it seems I have to wade through many notifications whenever I'm using Macs these days.
In my opinion, it seems that the old guard from the days of the classic Mac, NeXTSTEP, and early Mac OS X with their deep knowledge of the UI guidelines of those eras has less and less influence at Apple these days, while younger software developers with little-to-no experience with these operating systems but who have extensive experience with the Web and newer operating systems are having more influence on the Mac's UI/UX. Unfortunately the Mac is becoming more like iOS and less like an operating system completely tailored to the desktop computing experience. Don't get me wrong, modern macOS is still a good OS, but I prefer the Snow Leopard era of Mac OS X.
http://morrick.me/archives/9220
Adding a new processor could be a huge speed improvement, adding a new graphics card would greatly expand your screen capabilities, etc.
This site alone has a system with a 601 at 60MHz replaced with a G4 at 300 MHz, and RAM from 8MB to 264MB. That's like going from 8GB to 256GB today, just insane difference to how you use the system (and RAM was much faster than the disk back then, so RAM disks made sense, etc).
I remember our last DOS computer had enough RAM that it made sense to RAMdisk most of the most commonly used programs we had, even though it slowed boot up copying them into the RAM disk.
That's a computer that came out in 1994 upgraded with a processor from 1999.
Even if you could put a 2022 chip in a 2017 Mac laptop, it wouldn't be the same sort of improvement.
IMO this slowdown in the pace of single-component improvements is what has killed upgradability - buying a computer in the 90s, you knew that within a generation or two you'd probably be looking at at least a doubling in general-purpose or capacity, applicable-everywhere performance within the same socket/graphics card interface/hard drive/memory interfaces. So not having component upgradability, like, say, in some eMachines without an AGP port, was a big limiting factor for the usable lifespan, in a way it just isn't anymore.
I do disagree with your timing though. I think the best of times was in the early to mid 90s. With radius graphics card. Daystar accelerators on Nubus slots. For some macs, separate math coprocessor. Asante network card. APS and LaCie external scsi hard drive and Daisy chaining them. Adb port devices. Nostalgia!!
Also, SCSI chains requiring terminators (or not), and internal SCSI drives with the jumpers in the wrong pins. Original Wacom tablets built like tanks. 21" CRT monitors that weighed a bazillion pounds, had half-a-mile of bezels, and sitting 2 side by side caused EMI so the images were disturbed. ProTools requiring DSP boards that numbered more than slots in the computer. Expansion chasis to handle all of the extras. All now outpowered by your damn social media device, er, smart phone
I also fondly remember DIP switches being added onto SCSI external drives along with their block-like 50Ω resistor terminations. Woe betide you if you pushed the case back against the wall and flipped one of those mid-write...
But I'm not actually saying the 6100 was "the best of" anything; it was the bottom-of-the-line cheapest one you could get at the time. I'm really just talking about pre-OSX. The early Macs were and are fun too.
Apple was failing in their quest to secure a modern successor to MacOS 7.
It sure was a lot of fun looking at what they threw at it, and MacOS 9.2 was polished for sure. But without MacOS X, MacOS would have gone the way of BeOS and Amiga...
Anyone else remember having a top-spec iMac G4 in 2002 that couldn't even scroll or resize a window smoothly? Pathetic, and painfully slow. I gave up on 10.1.x and just ran Yellow Dog for about a year until I managed to lay my hands on a copy of 10.2, which was marginally better, but still much slower than Linux at the time. The iLamp was a wonderful machine, but very much let down by its intended OS.
In 2002, Macworld was happy with the iMac G4 performance:
"Generally, using the iMac was a pleasure. It was speedy and responsive in most cases, although the Mac OS X version of iMovie was more sluggish than we’d expect from a G4-based machine."
PC Magazine gave it 4 stars and an Editor's Choice award. Readers gave it a 5 star member rating.
I disagree.
I loved BeOS. I still miss it. It was a great OS, and I preferred it to NeXTstep.
But it wasn't just the OS. NeXT had 2 key things Be didn't: [1] state-of-the-art dev tools [2] Steve Jobs.
Stealing from my own blog post on the subject...
Apple's then CEO Gil Amelio was considering buying former Apple VP Jean-Louis Gassée's company Be, for BeOS, or Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' company NeXT Computer, for OpenStep, the successor to NeXTstep.
They went with NeXT. BeOS was excellent - small, fast, efficient, modern, streamlined, and ran on Apple kit. The company was small, with some excellent engineers. The snag is, Gassée wanted a lot more for it than Apple was offering. Although this was bad - terminal - news for Be, it was probably all for the best for Apple.
BeOS was a great OS, but if Apple had moved to it, its 3rd party developers probably would not have, for the most part, and it would have killed the company.
Apple needed a follow-on for classic MacOS, it needed it urgently and it needed to be a blinder. BeOS did not have one crucial advantage that NeXTstep offered, and as such, it would not have had the same appeal, the devs probably would not have fallen in love with the new Apple OS, and Apple would have withered and died. What didn't BeOS have that NeXTstep had? Well...
NeXT was going cost a packet anyway - it was doing better and had some big names on board. Some were working for it, including several people who worked on the Mac in the early days, including, of course, Jobs himself. It also had some serious clients, including CERN - where Tim Berners-Lee developed the WorldWideWeb on a NeXTstation, and corporate clients such as the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS). NeXT's OS was also beautiful, sophisticated & very hi-tech - but didn't run on Macs, nor even on the Mac's PowerPC processors. It offered 2 major advantages over Be, though: #1, getting Steve Jobs back, and #2, one of the great strengths of NeXTstep was its world-class, industry-leading development tools. Be had nothing to rival these.
Amelio went with NeXT. If the Mac had to move to a new OS, then all Mac developers would have to learn to code for the new OS. Mac devs were pretty wedded to their platform, as were Mac users. And transitioning to a whole new OS, Apple really needed to get the devs on board.
Classic MacOS's dev tools were nothing special and quite hard work. Be was moving its dev tools over to GCC but whereas this was good, it was nothing amazing. But NeXT's Objective-C and Interface Builder were in a whole different league. Getting the Mac 3rd party devs to move to NeXTstep would be vastly easier than to BeOS, as NeXT's dev tools were almost universally recognised as among the best in the industry.
So that's what Amelio did, and history has proved him right.
The excuse was always that Be had no software. But NeXT stuff getting into OS X wasn't exactly perfect. Part of me thinks that at least one or two looked at getting A/UX or MAE or something on top of Be, just like Blue Box or whatever got onto OS X.
The high order bit in Apple's resurgence was Steve Jobs. He's mostly known for his charisma on stage, but he was instrumental in restructuring the company from the ground up.
Despite early pains, the NeXT technology stack has proven to be an incredibly capable platform which has served Apple extraordinarily well as the basis for two decades of macOS development, and as the software foundation for the iPhone and iPad. The fact that it was underpinned by UNIX was how the Mac got taken seriously by developers in the mid-2000s.
We had “Sorry, a system error occurred” bombs. It was “funny” that those errors remained in 1 bit color even though the entire system had full color support for decades.
System 6, 7, and 8 could crash in spectacularly visual ways, as some off-by-one memory access wrote into the VRAM.
I remember it was a point of pride that macs crashed in ways that Windows BSODs could only dream of.
The first generation iMac, on the other hand, I did think was a lot of fun. All of the sudden the UI was responsive and the software was surprisingly reliable.
I had a Mac from that era that sipped with a software modem, and at some point I upgraded to a serial modem for exactly that reason.
Mine had an annoying beat, like two fans running at slightly different speeds. Apart from that, it was a great machine, and ran Logic really well which was it's main job.
Classic Mac OS was designed to handle events raining in from the keyboard and mouse and was able to run on the 128k classic Mac but Apple was in serious trouble in the 1990s until MacOS X which was competitive with the competition.
Don't forget that until Windows 2000, neither was Windows
System 7 had neither.
Apparently the first 1MB of RAM was mapped for compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows, which meant that the common bug of writing through a null/zero pointer could easily crash the system.
I know it had preemptive multitasking, but did it have memory protection? I didn't use Windows in that era, but my recollection is it didn't.
I do remember all the apologetics for cooperative multitasking, because that's what Macs were stuck with so it had to be justified.
Essentially, it turned the laptop into an under-powered desktop with a built-in UPS and slow video.
These things were generally better by the time 2000 came around... but NT4 was never any good on my laptop. (And at the bank where I worked when I graduated in 1999, it was terrible on those as well. The senior managers' laptops were the only systems in the bank allowed to use 98.)
Laptops were not so crucial then. Few people used a laptop as their primary computer; they were an adjunct to a _real_ computer, suitable for emergency working on the move, but with poor CPU, slow disks, poor graphics, etc.
The default computer for business until ½ decade or so into the 21st century was a desktop PC, and for them, from 1993 onwards, NT was unrivalled.
And I speak as someone who spent their own money on OS/2 2.0. I've been working in the industry since the 1980s, which means I never spent my own cash on software. (I'm not a gamer.) I've been using FOSS for 25+ years now, but OS/2 2.0 was worth the money.
That matches my recollection. I was working in a shop that used NT 4 on 15000+ desktops. (I do recall SP3 or SP4 causing a ton of drama on those.) We were never able to get it to run acceptably on a laptop.
I never used OS/2 2.0 in anger. I did run Warp 4 on a few systems and recall preferring it over NT 4. It was also only suitable for desktops, though.
Also, Windows 9x had plug and play and the NT family did not.
Most home users didn't switch over to the NT family until Windows XP.
Windows 2000 is NT version 5.
In 1993, NT 3.1 was a full 32-bit OS with memory protection.
So was NT 3.5, NT 3.51, and NT 4...
And seven years later the 5th version, Windows 2000.
With later hardware and software, especially G3/G4 with Mac OS 9.x, the machine crashed less often, but usually still did at least a few times per week.
I recall having unexpected reboots every few days (except on systems with complicated SCSI chains, what a nightmare), but my bar for system extensions was also unreasonably high. I remember feeling a little sick seeing multiple rows of extensions when friends restarted their Macs.
This exact combo, plus MacSSH, Ircle and SoundJam, for years.
As another respondent also remembered it, I would probably get less than one crash a day. Windows 95 had it's own (multifarious) problems. I was maintaining servers with years of uptime and definitely looking forward to OSX. :)
This isn't my recollection at all, although the lack of protected memory on "Classic Mac OS" means that you would've personally experienced unreliable anything if you were also running poorly-written extensions or other software on your system.
System 7 (1991) was the first 32-bit version of Classic Mac OS, and Internet Explorer for Macintosh was very advanced for its time. Classic Mac OS had a healthy browser ecosystem which also included Cyberdog, iCab, Netscape, Opera, and WannaBe (a text browser).
"That first day I used iCab instead of IE, I had no crashes. Not a single one. Hmm." "I could never convince Apple. This was such a big lament for me at the time. I couldn’t convince anyone that it wasn’t the Mac OS that was at fault. Then one day Gil Amelio told me that Apple—in addition to avoiding excess production and inventory and keeping expenses down—was going to buy a new operating system."
The NeXT merger was publicly announced in February 1997, so that private conversation with Amelio about their intent most likely would have been some time in 1996: https://www.tech-insider.org/mac/research/1997/0207.html
iCab, on the other hand, didn't ship until February 1999 as a time-bombed beta: https://web.archive.org/web/20020305110041/http://advergence...
I wonder if he was experiencing instability due to Code Fragment Manager instead of IE itself? Mac IE was even late shipping for 68K Macs due to problems with CFM-68K.
"Finally, Internet Explorer has been hit by the CFM-68K bug. Microsoft was on the cutting edge in adopting the Code Fragment Manager for 68K Macs, and due to the well-known bug in CFM support on 68K Macs, Internet Explorer is currently only available for PowerPC-based Macs. Apple should have this bug fixed soon, though, and Microsoft plans on releasing a 68K version at that time." — https://www.macobserver.com/reviews/ie3.shtml
CFM-68K was infamously unstable until version 4.0 shipped in April 1997, and even the PowerPC-native version saw a bunch of improvements around that time, so this lines up with a 1996/1997 timeframe in iWoz if one ignores the anachronistic iCab story:
"A revised Code Fragment Manager that helps some large, PowerPC-native applications launch faster and enables some applications to launch in low memory situations" — https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-releases-syste... (September 1996)
"In late November 1996, Apple announced a bug in the CFM-68K Runtime Enabler extension. This bug could cause random crashes and hangs, resulting in application instability and potential loss of data. Because of the potential seriousness of these problems, Apple recommended that customers disable the extension. Also, Mac OS 7.6 would prevent the extension from loading. Mac OS 7.6 does support the the 4.0 version of the extension." — https://macgui.com/kb/article/502 (May 1997)
(Tangent: IIRC there were Macs where the CPU had a 32 bit pointer width but you could only use 24 bits of address space. And sometimes software would work on this assumption and break with a full 32 bits. But that's neither here nor there.)
But in addition to lack of memory protection, cooperative multi-tasking was also a big problem. It was a pretty common experience to see something do intense work rendering a progress bar and the rest of the system would slow down. IIRC this made having something like a web browser open sometimes painful.
Ehh...
Cyberdog was never widely used. It depended on the OpenDoc framework, which most users didn't even have installed, and was only available as a beta for a year or so. It was never a serious contender.
iCab was a latecomer -- it was released in 1999, long after most of the mainstream browsers. It was used by a few people, but was never particularly popular either.
I have never even heard of WannaBe. Based on what I see online, it looks pretty obscure.
Especially if you subscribed to a lot of mailing lists and went looking for information on something specific that you knew you had read, but didn't know where.
Earlier on, Java applets were by far the most notorious troublemakers in this realm. I remember as a kid bumping around the internet on a Performa 6400 with Netscape looking for online games, and that machine could never go long without the browser crashing or the dreaded "Sorry, a system error occurred." dialog popping up after browsing a few pages with applets.
Shockwave and Flash were reasonably stable for the most part, until 3D Shockwave games started appearing… those were almost as messy as applets were.
OS Extensions in general were a source of instability. It's like kernel extensions on Macs or kernel drivers on Windows today, there is no safety net and coding errors can take down the entire system.
You really needed to weigh the reputation of a company for stability before adding an extension from them.
And the interaction between different extensions. You could be fine with some set of extensions, fine with a different set of extensions, but then have an unusable system if both sets were active.
> Mac OS X is the next big thing for the Mac. A fusion of Apple and NeXT technology, OS X is fully native, fully pre-emptive, fully protected and full of the bells, whistles and buzzwords we've been promised since PowerPC first appeared. It supports symmetric multiprocessing, to go along with the multi-G4 machines shipping now and the multi-core CPU's currently under development.
>Sadly, Mac OS X probably will not run on a 6100, no matter what you do to the hardware.
Anyone know why that was? Looks like people got OS X to work on iMac G3's so you'd think that a PowerMac with upgraded G3 and memory should be able to run it. Some other HW/MB feature missing?
edit: This[1] video about upgrading to OS X on an iMac G3 mentions the need to update the Mac's firmware so I guess there may not have been a FW upgrade for the 6100.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_ROM
(Could be wrong about that—that was a long time ago.)
https://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cf...
Source: https://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cf...
While 512 meg SIMMs are possible, they'd be custom. Otherwise, a 256 meg SIMM would be a single bank, which wouldn't make much sense.
It lasted me a good 10 years.
I remember doing exactly this around the same time. Back then, RAM was almost considered a durable good, because RAM prices had remained stable for so long. I thought, "well, this is expensive, but I'll get most of my money back if I ever sell the computer," and this wasn't a completely insane idea at the time.
My entire 6100/60 with 24MB RAM was around $2500 with the card in 1994 right after the 6100/66 came out.
That's odd - I remember memory prices being really low around those times, and my friends and I loaded up our Windows 95 machines with 16 or 32MB for $50-$150 when it was on sale
1996 Best Buy ad for reference: https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/enhanced/web...
It makes me feel somewhat good to read this page and realize how charming I still find it.
I bet it’s still in a box somewhere in the basement… (checks weekend calendar)
I learned OS X on an old PCI PowerMac that a client gave to me in exchange for some unpaid bills. It's 20 years ago now, so I am not 100% sure but I think it was a 7600. Over the next few years, it got transformed, incrementally and with inexpensive 2nd-hand parts:
CPU: 200Mz PowerPC 604 → 333MHz G3
RAM: 32MB → 768 MB
HDD: 2GB SCSI → 40GB EIDE
Graphics: onboard unaccelerated framebuffer → PCI ATI Radeon
Ports: ADB + SCSI → USB 2 + FireWire
All gradual, and it remained working and usable throughout.
It started out with MacOS 7.6 or so, and ended up on 10.2 "Jaguar", while still able to run the same apps.
An astonishingly upgradable computer, and the OS was made possible at all by XPostFacto.
the bottleneck became the SCSI drives and then networking, being limited to the 10mbit AAUI port.
I too have happy memories of those days. Computers were a whole lot more fun.
Connectix’s Speed Doubler had a much better emulator.
Apple did have "fat" binaries during the classic Mac OS transition, and interestingly enough, so did NeXT. The implementations were very different, however, and OS X eventually got the NeXT implementation.
This is how we used to talk to each other.