SDon't worry. I only have turned on my Apple PowerBook G4 (a machine
which was made when that company was named the "Apple Computers") and
I'm now writing (and reading the gopherspace) on it. I think I didn't
booted it for 6or so months!
Some things regressed - the Evernote no longer syncs (their fault -
when my current subscription will end I will no longer use thier
services nor apps). I think that some www pages are less usable now
than they used to be. But this is not a machine for WWW browsing, of
course...
The rest seems to work. In my opinion these old PowerBooks are nicer
machines than the modern *Books which are thin for the cost of user
experience (keyboards...).
After days and weeks of using the MNT Reform this thing feels...
different. The keyboard is not that good as the Reform one is but it is
way better than anything modern I have access to. The screen is huge
but I miss the trackball (I must confess that I use the Microsoft
optical mouse here - you know, Microsoft always made good mices and
this one is not an exception).
I have the OS 10.5 on the PowerBook (it was called the Mac OS X then).
After using the spartan interface of the Sway on Linux the OS X GUI is
more visually pleasant (but less effective to use).
I was a bit curious about speed of those two machines (the Reform's
default CPU is considered slow by almost everyone) so there are some
times for a finite element analysis on a very simple 3D problem (I used
a single thread code to make it more comparable):
So, in theory, 20 years old PowerPC (which wasn't a cutting edge
technology when it was made!) is not worse than 8 (or so) years old
industrial ARM CPU. In practice, there are other things which make
things more complicated...
