[Chicago] Finding a good home for some ancient computers

Ted Pollari tcp at mac.com
Thu Apr 5 21:14:15 CEST 2007


On Apr 5, 2007, at 1:54 PM, Ken McIvor wrote:

> Does anyone know of organizations in the Chicago area that might be
> interested in receiving a donation of almost a dozen old Macintosh
> computers?  We'd prefer seeing them advance a good cause to having
> them recycled.
>
> About half of them are Power Macintoshes and the rest are flavors of
> the Macintosh LC.  I'm not sure how many of them have monitors and
> peripherals.  I can provide specific details if anyone has an
> interesting lead.

I'm not trying to be snarky here (I've probably owned all of the  
various models you're trying to give away) but is there really much  
that can be done, productively, with these machines?

I guess limited usage as a web-browsing environment (and even there  
they'll feel slow for complicated pages, etc. -- my old 1st gen. G4  
certainly does with some SSL protected pages, for example)... but  
they're more than worthless in the general sense because they don't  
run a modern operating system and as such they can't really be used  
as a teaching tool for too much (limited programming, I guess), but  
certainly not computer literacy in any sense -- it'd be like teaching  
someone ancient greek...good exercise and all, but not applicable in  
the general day to day sense... Moreover, the amount of effort  
required to get them running and to keep them running will not be  
insignificant and this will be more of a burden to any organization  
that might take them, given the shrinking mindshare that classic mac  
os has.
I guess, some of the linux PPC offerings might be usable for the  
power macs...

I guess I'm looking for people to tell me I'm being too cynical in my  
assessment here =)

-ted




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