My increasingly adequate website
In 2014 I spent $50 USD for an iMac G3 (aka the iMac,1). This is the iconic model that restored Apple's fortunes in the late 1990s. Since the iMac G3 can still boot Mac OSes 8 and 9, I intend to use the machine to relive schooldays spent poking at the operating system and playing Escape Velocity. But before I got around to that, I decided to try out the software that the previous owner had left on the machine. Even the antiquated OSX 10.2 install and 12 year old versions of Safari and Internet Explorer were too slow and old to use for anything.
But this got me thinking: could this machine even be used, really used, nowadays? I decided to try the most recent OpenBSD release. Below are the results of this experiment (plus a working xorg.conf file) and a few background notes.
This iMac is a Revision D iMac G3 in grape. It's part of the iMac,1 family of computers. This family includes all tray-loading iMac G3s. (Later iMac G3s had a slot-loading CD drive and different components.) Save for having a slightly faster processor, a dedicated graphics card, and cosmetic tweaks to the case, my iMac is identical to the prior year's line-launching Bondi Blue iMac My machine has had its memory upgraded from 32 MB to 320 MB. Thank goodness.
