I bought a Mac
loganius.org
loganius.org
But PPC32 Linux support is quickly falling off. Gentoo isn't just used because it's fun to leave your lampshade iMac G4 compiling a kernel for days, but because it's one of the few distros still supporting the platform. There's unsupported testing repos for Debian (and maybe Ubuntu?) plus the up-and-coming Adelie. Otherwise your best bet is OpenBSD - FreeBSD and NetBSD usually lack precompiled ports, and FreeBSD has announced the next major release will almost definitely drop 32 bit PPC.
The 64 bit G5 systems are much better supporte. I'm pretty sure they can boot ppc64le that many distros target. They're also even more modern - the final models had PCIe, SATA, and up to 16GB of DDR2 RAM. Sadly there's nothing modern about the power efficiency, nor the self-destructing water cooling system.
Microsoft was selling software and needed that software to work. Making it work in as much hardware as possible was a good thing.
Apple was selling hardware and needed customers to upgrade that hardware over time.
Microsoft sells hardware now too, and cares more about the cloud. So, they are not so much about deep compatibility anymore.
Especially nowadays it seems their biggest asset became that they produce good PC-hardware on such a high economics of scale that they're almost unreachable in build-quality...
I’m not so sure. We love to complain about Apple, but I don’t see many old timer Mac users now extolling the virtues of Windows. It’s dangerous extrapolating one’s own observations to the world at large, so maybe I’m wrong?
This might be true, but macOS in general is not what made Apple one of the largest companies on the planet.
That's not about complaining, it's about correlation and causation. It's like saying Apple's Wi-Fi routers must be the best because Apple became one of the largest companies on the planet.
I'd say without the iOS ecosystem they would be a well-respected company in the premium tier of their industry, like Dyson or B&O.
I switched to mac circa 2003 and reliably connecting to wifi was simple, clean, and intuitive. This was the height of the shitshow that was wireless networking on windows, where half the time windows would fight with the vendor software, etc.
I was even more shocked when I hit the "advanced" button and there was full and working advanced BSD networking settings cleanly laid out, from overriding IP/netmask/router, 802.1X, etc. Windows made it difficult and frustrating to apply these kinds of settings, because they wanted to hide it from the user.
Mac and macOS are afterthoughts at this point.
At some point you need to move on. Can’t support ancient platforms forever.
So little? macOS Sequoia is compatible with Macs that are over seven years old [1], macOS Sonoma goes back to 2017 [2].
At that point, it doesn't make much sense for anyone to still be operating these things in a production setting because of power efficiency and lack of RAM - and all Intel macOS machines can be used with even the most cutting-edge Linux distributions anyway if you wish to further extend their service life. If you need a modern Windows though, you'll most likely want to go via a hypervisor because of TPM concerns.
The old PPC clankers, it's a miracle the hardware is still running and they haven't died from bad capacitors, Soldergate or whatever in the time.
And Apple has poor backwards compatibility. You can't run 32-bit Intel binaries on anything newer than 10.14. PPC has been out of the question for over 15 years. Meanwhile even on Windows on Arm you can run stuff made with XP or even Windows 98 in mind.
... assuming they have TPM 2.0, which is far from a given.
> And Apple has poor backwards compatibility. You can't run 32-bit Intel binaries on anything newer than 10.14.
Fair point. Apple is indeed more aggressive on backwards compatibility in software... which is both a blessing and a curse. At the very least, it forces app developers to stay at least somewhat current, which means that Apple has far less legacy garbage to drag around - unlike Windows, where Microsoft went through at least half a dozen completely different programming frameworks and paradigms alone relating to "how to draw a window on the screen" which it has to support to this day simply because otherwise the complaints would be endless. And Linux is even worse in that regard.
> PPC has been out of the question for over 15 years. Meanwhile even on Windows on Arm you can run stuff made with XP or even Windows 98 in mind.
If you really have such old software and a need for it... run it on a VM.
Software devs come and go, there's no guarantee the dev will go back and update old software. Just look at the graveyard of abandoned Mac games on Steam. And even if they do, it often means rebuying or worse a subscription just for the sake of running what you already had.
Can I run something like Crysis in VM with good performance? Especially on a completely different architecture like ARM?
It was specially clear in the early days of MS-DOS versus Mac OS.
Hear, hear!
Outside the corporate world's devices, I insist that my personal computing choices bring me either high confidence or personally useful knowledge/growth, or I will ban the product/company with malice. I banned APPL for foisting the full load of supporting older devices onto me, and MSFT Windows 11 is facing my personal banishment for kicking all older (but perfectly serviceable) hardware to the curb.
I thank the Linux ecosystem every single day.
> specs in line with what I see on dell.com as still available in new systems
But I'm not sure if you mean the relative performance of an entry-level chip like the N100 or the raw numbers like "6-8 core, 3.8GHz" - the performance may be fine for your use-cases but doesn't actually compare to decade-newer chips like M2 when pushed.
> Apple still delivering some software updates yearly
They deserve a lot more credit for this transition than the PPC-Intel one, that's for sure...
I'm also seeing more software lately talking about dropping support for Windows 7 or 8 after a certain release.
It supports x86 emulation, for now.
I believe Windows has seen more architectures than Mac OS Classic and OS X combined.
Windows 3rd party software often drops support because Microsoft doesn't support the OS. It could be the desire to use new APIs that aren't included in 7/8 (or soon to be 10), but it's hard to support an operating system as an app vendor that the OS vendor doesn't support.
I always liked VMware's statement that they would support NT4 and above -- like, no you can't.
I have never been a Windows user, but I used to keep an eye on it when NT was still the separate business version (pre-Vista) and my NT 4.0 (or was it 3.51?) CD-ROM had x86, MIPS, Alpha and maybe PowerPC support. When things weren’t as clear platform-wise, NT was really a multi-platform system. Since then also x86_64, IA64, ARM64.
The same applies to Windows and Apple's OS.
The point about the command line is that it is there for people who want it. You can use all of them without using the command line.
Also, it doesn't look like OpenBSD has binary packages for 32 bit PowerPC:
https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.7/packages/
Although I do see packages for OpenBSD 7.6 from last year:
https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.6/packages/powerpc/
There's always NetBSD, though, which has tons of binary packages and which isn't going to be dropping architectures like PowerPC any time soon :)
OpenBSD still supports the Alpha, which is an even older and rarer (albeit 64-bit) architecture.
I love reading when the luna88k maintainer comes out of the woods a month or two after release to announce that the packages are done building. Realisticly I expect there are a few 88k users. But based on the radio silence I see on the lists it feels like there is one heroic user who really likes openbsd and is willing to make it happen. I find it very inspiring.
But their obscurity just makes them kind of neat!
I ran Yellowdog linux on it, and Fedora 4 back in the days when I didn't want to upgrade to a newer OS right away and I liked it.
- Only the G5 *Quad* had PCI-E, all the others were PCI-X (yuck)
The Quad was also the only one to take DDR2 RAM, though did support up to 16GB
All Apple Macs though are PPC64 Big Endian, not ppc64le. This causes no end of problems with software that now assumes "IF PPC = LE"
https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=Po...
The quad was just two dual cores in a single chassis, with an unfortunately prone to breaking liquid cooling setup.
Seems to me the trick to enhancing build times would be emulation using modern hardware, no? qemu, etc.
I'm very glad that it exists but is not at a point where a powerful Ryzen or Apple Mx can compile (much) faster than real hardware.
These machines were built as a package. Both the software and hardware was designed with an ethos in mind. It's bespoke.
I can't tell you what to do with your hardware, but if you want to run old linux, you can just do that in like qemu or something.
That seems okay...
> and not break it
Ah, there's the rub - when you're not actively testing on the platform, because no-one on your team has the relevant pieces around any more, then you don't know whether you've broken it.
And even if you do have the relevant pieces, there's a non-zero cost involved in testing every subsequent release on that environment, and implementing workarounds for every subsequent change or new feature in the future which fails to work on the old hardware, used by ~0.0% of your user base.
It's not just boredom that causes stuff to be dropped, it's when the cost of maintaining compatibility with the old hardware exceeds the benefit of retaining the compatibility.
I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to technology, truth be told there's a certain rose tinted nostalgia that I get from thinking about early 00's technology.
It was still the era where UI's felt immediate and snappy- that anything related to actual computation or internet was jank and slow, but it had a whiff of a hopeful future about it. Every PC upgrade made things more snappy back then... Now I dread upgrades.
Hey ho.
It's endearing to know that one more bit of early 00's technology has been given a new lease on life. Would be cool to write some native software for it!
And firing that up and getting back in really hit me like a ton of bricks, yeah there are all sorts of capabilities available now on the newest systems, but the UX there was just so much more pleasant in a number of tiny ways.
You've also said it well, in fact I'd go further and say there was far more then a mere "whiff" of a hopeful future. I looked forward very much to each new release, with concrete useful improvements and the promise of more. In retrospect that was actually the pinnacle of Apple's (genuinely quite decent and promising) server efforts, of a potential alternate world line where they positioned themselves as a strong solution for running things without internet dependencies and subscriptions required. The MP continued to iterate along reliably and nicely until 2010, at which point it died off as a focus at Apple with absolutely agonizing slowness, and with it the dream of a continued upward progression in market support for value oriented hardware capabilities beyond what Apple themselves deigned to offer.
Sigh.
Not that GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc on modern machines are bad exactly, but you definitely feel a considerable amount of extra latency everywhere vs. e.g. a 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running OS 9 or OS X 10.2-10.4, which drags the experience down. I’m sure some of degree of latency increase is unavoidable thanks to all of the layers involved in the Linux stack as well as compositing and all that, but I’d bet that there’s a considerable amount that could be optimized away if there were a concerted effort to do so.
Odd thing...
While I agree regarding the snappiness of older OSes, the Mac was for me always a bit of an odd exception.
I started on Macs in the 680x0 era and Mac System 6, and I worked on them through 7.x, 8.x, 9.x and into OS X.
For me, no PowerPC edition of either Classic or OS X ever felt as responsive as Classic on a 680x0 Mac. I narrowly missed out on a Quadra 840 on Freecycle over 15 years ago and still regret it -- that was the fastest 68040 Mac ever made.
NeXTstep was of course originally built on and shipped on 68030 -- it's a CISC native OS. PowerPC Classic was always mostly running emulated 680x0 code.
I read analyses of Mach API calls that explained that calls on RISC were less efficient in register usage or something.
But then, Intel Macs came along. Mac OS X returned to x86 from PowerPC. And suddenly Mac OS X felt snappy again in a way it never did for me on PowerPC.
As an old-time Motorola user I was conflicted about Intel Macs. Macs weren't meant to be PCs. I didn't want Windows on a Mac. But the feeling of using 10.4 on Intel converted me: it felt snappy and responsive in a way Windows NT never did on Intel.
(NT was built on RISC and ported to Intel, the reverse of NeXTstep.)
I thought I didn't like Apple computers, but in hindsight I remember feeling that the eMac/G5's that I was using at school were clunky and slow compared to the contemporary Windows XP machines.
This was 2005- so XP on period correct hardware was extremely lean in comparison.
I think the latency was a pretty substantial reason for this in retrospect. I did not have nearly the same experience in 2012 when I bought my first Macbook Pro. (which I purchased because it was a UNIX that could run Microsoft Office and our VPN software... and I've been a MacOS user on/off ever since).
That M1 Macbook Air killed any sort of desire to get an iPad or any other computer for that matter. I'm looking forward to upgrading this year or next year, but somehow even that feels superfluous. Except for RAM. Damn low RAM.
I have a first-generation Framework - the ones with the shitty Intel CPUs that don't support proper S3 sleep, only the awful "modern standby" - and I often throttle the clock to 400 MHz to save battery. GNOME's performance doesn't degrade at all; the only place it feels "un-snappy" is when starting heavier apps.
Right now, I have enough small but annoying hardware issues with my Framework laptop that I'm not bothering to improve anything for myself, either software or hardware related. I currently use it only as a desktop, and don't have anything but Windows installed at the moment.
In the past I've always recommended Framework, and I still feel I can't just leave my negative tone above sitting without further comment.
<Start of rant>
All the issues I've had would be trivial fixes, except that I'm not in a country that Framework ships to, and they can't send to anywhere outside that list, or allow freight-forwarding. Even for simple, inexpensive parts. I don't know the reason for this, but I do genuinely trust that it is because of a real problem for them, not just a lack of effort.
Excepting that, I've always had very high-quality, prompt responses. I'm currently waiting until Framework expand their supported countries, I move country again, or I can arrange to send parts to someone else I know who can forward parts on to me.
From soon after purchase, I was silently enduring a rattling fan, and the 1st gen 1TB expansion card overheating issue. Recently, the 1st-gen backup battery design issue has suddenly made itself known to me, and now I'm more pessimistic. It seems all it takes is moving to a non-supported country to turn what was designed to be a repairable laptop, into something less convenient to fix than my previous preferred choice (any of the more repairable, common enterprise laptops).
For anyone living in a supported country, I would still suggest a Framework laptop, but with slightly more hesitation than before. <End of rant>
It’s hardly a dealbreaker and not even really a problem (which is probably why it’s still there) but making software instantaneous does wonders for improving how it feels to use.
In an era of soldered-on RAM, this is becoming a rather annoying problem. Unfortunately, Linux doesn't offer the same APIs Windows does to take preventative action before running out of RAM. Windows' auto-growing page file also makes for a less crashy experience than Linux' static swap partitions (or constant-size pagefile). Plus, Windows comes with memory compression (zram/zswap) out of the box, configured to use both memory compression and disk swap to catch these situations.
I wish Windows wasn't such a slog on the CPU and GPU because making Linux work in low-memory situations is an absolute pain.
When you phrase it like that, I'm actually more surprised Linux suffers from the extra latency. When most software is written to scratch an itch and optimization beyond "works on my machine" is for fun, you'd expect latency to evaporate over time
Another big chunk likely comes down to the tradeoffs all the big DEs have made in favor of making development easier or improving DX. This is understandable but at the same time it would be nice if at least one took a hardline stance towards commiting performance reductions and placed responsiveness as a chief concern, much as the operating systems of yesteryear did.
Sure they are pretty looking but so was stuff like Aero which felt faster on worse hardware so what is going on? I feel like around the mid 2000s we went down the path of putting heavy, slow web-like user interfaces into the OS and brought everything down with it in favor of the scalability of DPI and easier (?) development. It's not really the OS either it's the apps. We've been making trade offs at the cost of usability and speed.
I'll never forget my first smartphone. Whenever somebody called, it took so long for the screen to turn on, that the other person would often hang up before I could answer. I'd just sit there with a ringing phone in my hand, waiting for its screen to turn on.
I deeply miss my Palm m100 and it's snappy interface and ability to run all week on some AAA batteries.
I think I took the PRAM battery and hard drive out because both were dead. But the RAM I cannot remember what happened, either me or someone else might've scavenged it for another project
But if you don't, you're much better off getting a Mac mini G4. I'm biased because I have a hobby business selling SSD upgraded ones running a hacked Mac OS 9 [0]. But compared to the MDD G4, the Mac mini G4:
- Uses a fraction of the energy
- Takes up a fraction of the space
- Largely can run the same operating systems
- Is much quieter (as the article alludes to, the MDD G4 is loud)
- For single core can actually be faster going all the way up to 1.5 GHz (MDD can go there with an accelerator)
- Has more integrated parts so has less parts that can fail
There are some cons to the G4 mini versus the MDD G4 though:
- Almost no expandability
- Limited to 1 GB of RAM
- No dual processors
- The hacked version of Mac OS 9 needs USB sound and some models can have some display incompatibilities at high resolutions
But for the vast majority of applications these don't matter much.
Fastest that can natively run OS 9 with full driver support is going to be the MDD.
Best low cost and low space for tinkering is going to be the mini with the caveats you mentioned.
Best price to performance on the used market for PPC OS X software is probably an iMac G5.
Absolute best performance for PPC OS X stuff is going to be the PowerMac G5.
Honorable mention to the eMac, which can be be found for ~$100, 1ghz combo drive models and below can natively run OS 9 with full driver support or you can go with up to the 1.42 ghz model which is going to be similar to the fastest G4 minis, and comes with a beautiful built in CRT, with the caveat that it takes up as much space as a CRT.
Even though the computer was already obsolete in 2009 (I used a 2006 Core Duo MacBook as my daily driver, which ran circles around the old Power Mac G4), it was a capable machine that could run Mac OS X Leopard and could handle the Web of that era, even YouTube videos. Eventually, sometime around 2013 the Web became too much for my Power Mac G4, but it remains a very nice machine for Mac OS 9 and early Mac OS X retrocomputing. I now have faster PowerPC Macs in my collection (a 1GHz PowerBook G4 and a 1.25GHz Mac Mini G4), but my Power Mac G4 is the fastest machine in my collection that could run the classic Mac OS without any modifications, and it is also the fastest Mac in my collection that has expansion slots.
I'm keeping an eye on 2019 Mac Pro prices (I own a 2013 Mac Pro, which I purchased refurbished in 2017 and used as my daily driver until 2022, when I switched to a Ryzen 3900 build). I love the aesthetic, but they're pricey since they are still quite capable Macs despite the transition to ARM. Once they drop to under $500, I plan to buy one and add it to my collection.
Update: I found my old blog post about my Power Mac G4: https://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-power-mac-...
It runs linux great, and with 12 cores, 32G of RAM- it could be an extremely capable server. If not for the minuscule SSD.
It also draws a fair amount from the wall (98W~), which is probably the dual GPU's not having power control with Linux.
If only Thunderbolt 2 drive enclosures would come down in price a little.
Eitherway, I share your enthusiasm for the Intel "cheese grater" Mac Pros', those have got to be effectively e-waste to most people soon and I'd love to hoard some for myself.
You can get adapters from Apple's custom slot to a standard M.2 form factor, allowing you to use a modern M.2 NVMe drive. As long as you have already installed the firmware update that adds support for NVMe in addition to the AHCI protocol originally used by that machine, there shouldn't be any issues putting in one of today's relatively cheap multi-TB drives. The Mac Pro didn't have the physical space limitations that made some SSD adapters problematic for the laptops.
Regarding the 2019 Mac Pro, I just took a cursory look on eBay for 2019 Mac Pro models, and it appears they are still going for over $1,000. macOS still supports the 2019 Mac Pro, though its days are numbered since Apple usually has a 6-7 year window for supporting Macs.
I believe there are two main reasons why the Mac Pro is still so expensive despite the fact that a M4 Mac Mini would outperform it:
1. RAM. Not only does the 2019 Mac Pro support DIMMs, but it also supports a gigantic amount of RAM: 768GB on models with 8-16 cores, and 1.5TB on models with 24 or 28 cores (https://support.apple.com/en-us/102742). No ARM Mac supports this much RAM. This makes the 2019 Mac Pro a nice machine for very RAM-intensive tasks that require Mac software.
2. The 2019 Mac Pro has expansion slots, though the 2023 Mac Pro also has expansion slots.
I swapped my trash cans CPU for an E5-2560L v2 I had laying around and I pull like 30-40 from the wall of if I remember right. 20 cores at 1.7GHz. Low and wide, which for my purposes (low grunt container workloads, home assistant, and such) is perfect. 70W TDP compared to the 130W standard six-core CPU.
A lot of those old Macs would make decent little random servers if you could attach faster storage or networking without spending a ton.
Is that a typo?
(I used a kill-a-watt meter on my homelab at some point).
- They're forever going to be the fastest Intel Macs, which makes them highly desirable.
- The Mac Pro simply does not sell at volume anymore, unlike the Power Mac G4 which did sell quite well to regular consumers. So they're quite rare.
- Everybody in the market for a Mac Pro knew the Apple Silicon transition was right around the corner, so they probably sold even less than we think. Even rarer.
- The iMac Pro had been out for a little while when those came out. Most people who needed Pro hardware had probably bought an iMac Pro. Even rarer still.
No joke, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple sold less than half a million of those 2019 Intel Mac Pros.
The fans in it are also astoundingly loud, and was often given the nickname of the "wind tunnel" Mac, because of the holes in the front.
Fortunately it wasn’t fatal, but I stupidly did that as a kid. It was my first PC build (an Athlon Thunderbird system) and it was crashing. I fixed the problem by adjusting the PSU voltage rails with a screwdriver while the system was running so I could see the changes in the BIOS.
Not my smartest decision.
I remember my Dad had the first G5 with the new thermal architecture, with everything blowing through the front cheese grater grill. That was much better for the components, and blissfully quiet at idle at least.
Got surprised by every sentence. Pure hacking for joy.
It might be somewhat more ethical redacting this, some things are just better left alluded to
I myself have taken apart CRTs and microwaves, but learning these things should be done by reading media with all attention paid to safety (a specific tutorial on testing and discharging caps), not a quick aside in an unrelated blog post
You didn’t say anything wrong, but it might be wise to lessen the word count while also protecting (the potentially vulnerable) people that may read your post
Quite a lot of people with intellectual disabilities and/or on the spectrum do teardowns/e-waste (there are even charities here in Brisbane Australia), it’s similar to the old journalist code of ethics on carefully omitting information related to suicides, sometimes it’s wiser to not say anything at all, than it is to say the technically correct thing
I'm recalling the time I was trying to load a "backed up" game on my original Playstation using the disc swap [0] method while the chassis was open.
Since I had the top lid off, I had to hold the disc tray closed button for it to spin up. While looking away to pick up the other disc my pinky moved and touched a capacitor and had me on the receiving end of a massive zap.
I've never touched a capacitor since, thank goodness.
After over 15 years I find myself using Windows and I hate it. What did they do to it? I used to love windows. The UX is nauseating. Little unseen action items that scramble your screen.
Slowly, Apple is doing the same thing to MacOS.
I never really left Linux, kept it on the desktop, but I got comfortable with the nice Mac hardware and Office suite. But now? Vomit.
Here are some "sleepers" that people have built over the years [1,2,3]
[0] https://thelaserhive.com/product-category/powermac-g4-conver...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/1gva...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/1871...
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/t7tz...
This is obviously the cheap simulation that the Muskian overlords will put me in when I have outlived my usefulness... or perhaps they already have? (-᷅_-᷄)
Nice, any goodies you remember from that hoard?
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/userserve-ucsd-edu
Oh hey, I figured I would take a look on thingiverse for a solution, and I found this: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4666475
I was 10, my brother was 15 and my sister was 7. For some reason, I ended up playing with the device the most -- playing the occasional game of Karateka and Digger, writing small amounts of BASIC to do math, draw shapes or make sounds over its very rudimentary speaker, and sometimes creating joke certificates using a program called Certificate Maker. There were other programs among the stack of 5 1/4 floppy disks my father sent home, but I couldn't figure out what they were for.
One day, the DOS prompt intermittently started spitting out an error when I tried to load a program from a disk: "Ready? Abort? Ignore?" (I know the common one goes "Abort? Retry? Fail?" but this version of DOS, whatever it was, had a different verbiage). This would happen on and off for a few weeks, until that fateful day when I sat in front of the computer, toggled the power switch at the back of the system unit as I always did, and instead of the familiar "A:\>", I was greeted with a blank screen, then a smell of expensive plastic burning, and finally a plume of white smoke out the back of the system unit. As a naturally anxiety prone 10-year old in charge of the most expensive device in the house, I froze in sheer panic for what felt like 5 minutes. I switched the thing off and told no one.
When my father finally returned, I sent word through my brother. I was not punished or admonished as anticipated. He (my father) opened up the device (I could have done it myself -- the metal casing opened up with a hinge, much like a hood/bonnet of a car), and discovered that a mouse was responsible. Not a pointing device -- the machine didn't have one -- but a rodent. It had squeezed in through an air vent and had chewed on a few cables. It was when it chewed through a grey data ribbon that the machine had started stuttering "Ready? Abort? Ignore?". But the day after the mouse chomped on a power cable, it exploded. Or rather, a capacitor inside the power unit had exploded.
The unit was never repaired. Sri Lanka did not have the parts or the personnel at the time.
My second computer, which again, my father brought down some years later, was a 386. This unit served me well for several years with only occasional hiccups that could be remedied by swapping out an expansion card or a hard disk. On one such occasion, I took the system unit (now a vertical tower instead of a bulky, horizontal slab) to be looked at by a technician in town (Sri Lanka now had the personnel). He dutifully plugged it in, connected a keyboard, monitor and a mouse (mice had arrived) and hit the power switch. And it exploded. Or rather, a capacitor inside the power unit exploded (I discovered it later, head blown open like some angry cartoon character, when I took it home and opened it up). My mind began to go into nightmarish flashbacks. Then I remembered: this unit, manufactured in the US, ran on 110 volts, where as Sri Lankan mains were 220 volts. It did have a voltage selector switch, but the voltage stabilizer at home (UPS units were not yet a thing -- we were still trying to protect our delicate machines from voltage fluctuations) was built to take in 220v and output 110v (will not go into this tangent). I had forgotten this fact when I took the thing to the shop.
But the technician, unperturbed, casually fanned away the white smoke with his palm, set the selector to 220V and hit the power switch again. The machine booted up perfectly (except, that is, for the original fault which I brought it in for). It seems the 220V circuit within the power unit was unaffected. The device continued to work on 220V.
Not sure why I shared this, but seeing capacitors in the context of computer circuitry always brings up this memory. It also brings up remnants of the computer-failure related PTSD that I grappled with for many years until laptops came along. Not sure whether it was the knowledge that the new devices primarily operated on DC battery power, or if the new clamshell shape broke some association my brain had created between large, cubic computing devices, and danger.