[Chicago] Finding a good home for some ancient computers

[Carl Karsten]

Ted Pollari wrote:
> 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 =)
> 

In general, I agree.

I'll bet they run basic CUI python.  seems that would be of some value somewhere.



Carl K