My primary computer is a PowerBook G4 I bought in 2005 (pre-Intel). Not exactly ‘older’; just not the latest and greatest.
But my other computer is a 2001 iMac Indigo 450mHz G3 PowerPC. It’s set up in the back bedroom/office. It’s running OS 10.3.9, which is as far as I can go with it. (The G4 is running OS 10.4.11) I put an AirPort card in it, so it’s fully functional. It has Office for Macs, so I can do what I need to on it. Just now I’ve set up the VPN and RDC so that I can connect to my office PC. Sure, it’s slow; but I can browse the Internet, read and write MS-Word and Excel documents, and do my job.
I’m pretty sure there are people here using older Macs than my seven-year-old one. Who are you, and what are you using?
We have a Pismo PowerBook G3 that we use as our kitchen Internet Kiosk. I works perfectly well (well, it won’t play Flash animations very well), and has gone without a reboot for almost a year. I also occasionally use an ancient PowerBook 165 as a terminal. The next oldest machine is My G5 Quad, which really isn’t very old…
My home computer is a 1997 beige Power Mac G3 minitower running OS 8.6. It does pretty much everything I want it to, but I’m hoping to upgrade soon since I have been unsuccessful in figuring out how to get Baby to talk to a USB port and my institution has thrown out it’s last computer that had a Zip drive, so moving data back and forth from home to work is now impossible. I think perhaps I’d like a G4; my ambitions are modest :), and I have tons of Classic software that I don’t want to rebuy so I’m avoiding OSX.
Just wanted to say that this is awesome. I have a 199… 2? Powerbook 170 (my baby!) that I want to get running as a dedicated Nethack machine for the bathroom.
I managed to connect to the Dope using a PowerMac 8100/80 running System 7.6.1.
IE3.1 on this system had a fit when confronted with modern Java and Javascript. I had to switch them off and then download iCab 2.99, the newest browser I could find for pre-X PPC systems. Even then, it took five minutes to render a page of the Dope.