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We Have to Laugh... |
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March 10th, 2020 |
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I have a collection of rapidly aging Macs in my basement. I'll say more about |
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my collection and my over 20 year fascination with the Mac, but for now I'll |
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stick to a story about one that revealed something surprising tonight. |
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A few months ago, I bought a Power Computing Power Center Pro 240 on eBay for |
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a fairly good price. It was in working condition and was in surprisingly good |
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cosmetic condition considering this is a machine that last sold over 20 years |
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ago. I had a thing for these machines back in the day, because at the time |
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Power Computing built cheaper, better, faster Macs than Apple, and did so |
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with an irreverent style and hyped-up marketing. |
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The Power Center Pro was a beast in its day - built to compete with Apple's |
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PowerMac 8000 and 9000 series - and the one I picked up on eBay allowed me |
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to check off my list another Mac I wish I could have owned way back when. |
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Needless to say, I was excited to get at it. |
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The first night, I set it up and quickly determined that the 9 GB IBM SCSI |
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hard drive inside was a door-stop. Since 50-pin SCSI drives go for more than |
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I paid for this machine and the Power Center Pro has no onboard IDE connection, |
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I decided to drop in my prized Sonnet Tempo IDE card and the only IDE drive I |
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had available, one I had removed from another machine. That drive lasted about |
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4 hours before it gave up the ghost. Back to the drawing board... |
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I then tried to setup a CD-IDE card adaptor on the Tempo card - try as I might |
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for hours, I had no luck getting the Power Center to recognize the adaptor or |
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the CF card sitting in it. Tonight, I rummaged around my parts collection |
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and found another drive which, much to my delight, fired up and took on an |
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installation of the Mac System 7.6 without issue. While I had the machine |
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open, I was even able to replace the ludicrously noisy CPU fan with a larger, |
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quieter one I had in the same parts bin - BONUS! |
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For the next few hours, I wrestled with getting a few key pieces of software |
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installed that would allow this old beast to connect to another Mac on my |
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home network. It was a pickle - there were two software updates that were |
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sitting on an external Firewire hard drive that would do the trick... but |
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the Power Center doesn't have USB or Firewire. After a number of hacks, I |
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figured out a way to get what I needed moved over to the Power Center, and |
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I thought I was home free. Just as I was making the last file transfer I |
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would need, the Power Center froze up. One reboot was all it took to |
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show that, you guessed it, yet another hard drive had quit. |
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I titled this post, "We Have to Laugh". My aunt likes to follow that lead, |
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with "or else we'll cry." Tonight was a night like that. Normally, after |
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a night like tonight, I'd be angry, annoyed, disheartened. Tonight, I |
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could only laugh, and wonder if maybe something inside had changed. |
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Gophered by Gophernicus/3.0.1 on Ubuntu/22.04 x86_64 |
