Mon Jun 3 03:43:41 2002

I did some quick spec-searching and found that its sytem bus runs at either 40 or a whopping 50Mhz.  That's quite underwhelming, but  it made me think of OW (aka 9600man) and how some have said that this model was the last "power user" Mac.

So, would this be a system worth picking up just to fuck around with?  I understand that it won't run OS X as-is (at least, not acceptably) and I don't have any intention of buying a G4 expansion because that's more pricey than an Athlon 2000+.

Damn, the machine's 4-5 years old.  That's kinda pushing it for me (for a Mac).  I was more interested in it this afternoon, but after getting home and doing some speccing, I'm not so enthusiastic.  I do have a number of older SCSI drives I could use with it.

Anyone familiar with the 9600 have any thoughts about this?  I have to call him back Monday evening to tell him whether or not I'll take it.  If not, it goes to ebay.

Mon Jun 3 05:03:26 2002

I heard tha the 9600s were prefered by pros when the G3s came out because they were more expandable.

If it's a high end machine, buy it.  I just got a 6500.  It's going to plug into my TV and stereo, my own little Xserve.  I'm sure you can find a good use for a 9600.

Tue Jun 4 03:02:42 2002

Tue Jun 4 03:19:59 2002

I'd probably feel stupid and ripped off handing him $150 for that machine.

Tue Jun 4 04:03:11 2002

Don't bother with the 9600 if i were you. They were great machines but for messing around with, its not worth it really.

The 9600 were great because of what you could do with it in terms of expansion. I had 12 DIMM slots which is nice as you can add more memory over time(back then) as mem. prices dropped. The memory was interleaved which actually improved performance especially for grahpics work.

Ironically the only flaw for the 9600 was the tsunami i/o controller or n-bridge or whatever you call it. For whatever reason it had a slight crippling effect on video/graphics performance.

But the love for the 9600 was getting it tricked out. My 9600 at one time had 2 scsi harddrives, 2 ultrawide scsi harddrives connected to a pci UW scsi card. I had two scsi cd drives (one was cd-rw). I had two graphics cards. I could have added an internal zip drive but i lost my scsi internal zip drive somewhere. SO i had an external scsi zip drive. Original ixmicro twinturbo and the rage 128 pro. And i still had space to spare and power to give.
I can't do any of that shit with the new powermac cases. It fucking annoys the shit out of me. I have an internal ide zip drive. Can i install it? No. WHy? because i need a fucking front plate and some additional shit.
Can i install a cd-rw and leave my stock cd drive in my powermac. No because apple in their fucking infinite lack of wisdom decided people only wanted ONE fucking cd drive. So the choice i have is the saw the metal plate and the front metal cage to allow the cd drive to fit. And then i have to make my self a face plate.

Grrrr!!!!!!!

My 9600 is a fucking sweet machine. It was a monster on the mac world. The space inside is still better the some of the big pc towercases i've seen now a days. It was well designed.

Plus i had the top of the line 604e 350 mhz chip which i overclocked to 400mhz. Yeah the bus is a crappy 50mhz. But the performance was still blazzing fast for its time.

Add to that the time i spent tweaking that machine because during those days as a freq. xlr8yourmac nut, we were into hardcore pushing our computers to the max and getting every single cycle out of it.

mmmm... the good old days.

i can't explain it, but the feeling i get with my 9600 is just one of "here is a machine that will not fail on me. never." till the harddrives started to get really old. ANd now it just sits behind me doing nothing.

I got a g4/350mhz sonnet card in there as I oc'ed my 604e to 500mhz and blew the chip. :D

So i can run OS X on it. I just need to get some UW scsi drives and some scsi master drive as well. Plus i'll need to find some old school DIMMS for my mac.

damn the lickable candy colored macs. Grrr...

anyway i've been saying that once my dual powermac is EOL i'm getting a pc. Either way my 9600 will stay with me i guess. No other computer that i have used, pc or mac, has been reliable and could take everything that i put it through. its just one of those things i can't explain but only 9600powermac owners only know. Ask Mike Breeden at xlr8yourmac and the guys at macguru's. They have tricked out 9600's too. :D

its like an old easy to mod car. its slow as hell ain't impressive, but the time and effort you spent just messing around and learning from the process its significant.

however, don't get the 9600 if i were you. Unless you can get your hands on the 300-350mhz versions. then maybe go for it.

Tue Jun 4 04:55:50 2002

from OscarWilde posted at 11:03 pm on June 3, 2002

sorry, i forgot that pegasus3d even existed.

Tue Jun 4 11:24:44 2002

I might be going to the US this coming weekend and i'll be gone for a week and a half. During that time i will rarely get the chance to involve my self in the homoerotic orgy fest that is OSY.

Ah pegasus oh pegasus,
how your lovely unicorn ass is so delicious.
Oh es why, oh is why,
smoked a joint and got really high.
ah oh and eeh,
aybabtu likes to pee.
oh ah and ah?
come again, say wha?
and quite indeed instead,
for i am the glorious poopy head.
Ah pegasus oh pegasus,
how your lovely unicorn ass is so delicious.

:D

muahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!! /0.02cents credited to madan's account

Tue Jun 4 11:25:49 2002

400 Mhz G3
620 MB ram
12.5 GB HDD
MacOS X 1.1.4

Make me an offer.

Tue Jun 4 13:44:05 2002

Sadly, I would be interested in purchasing that box on the cheap, but sadly, the finances say "no." Oh well. I'll have to play with OSX and NetBSD on another Mac, another time.

Tue Jun 4 13:57:44 2002

Tue Jun 4 17:02:14 2002

I do long for the day of almost realtime silliness that we used to participate in here on OSY. :)

Wed Jun 5 13:46:10 2002

I have one, and intend to maybe aquire others when I can in order to run BeOS (powercurve won't) and for other fun things.

They really are getting cheap now. :)

Thu Jun 6 06:28:58 2002

With the data transfer rate of these machines, they are impressive.  I'm not sure if they are chipset limited like the beige, to 75 mb/sec.  I think you could get around this by using two scsi cards.  

Anyway, OW nailed it.  The guys that love and know macs have this machine at the top of the list, except for DayStars...

gs

Thu Jun 6 13:31:39 2002

Plus the cost of adding a Sonnet card if I even wanted to attempt to run OSX.  And the guy also offered to sell me a SCSI card to go with it for $100 or so; drives not included. :rolleyes:

Thu Jun 6 13:33:17 2002

what is he basing his pricing off of?

stupidity?

Thu Jun 6 14:28:18 2002

from AllYorBaseRBelong2Us posted at 8:33 am on June 6, 2002

heh,

what is he basing his pricing off of?

stupidity?

Fri Jun 7 14:51:58 2002

from AllYorBaseRBelong2Us posted at 9:33 am on June 6, 2002

heh,

what is he basing his pricing off of?

stupidity?

Well, when I did meet him (at a friend's house), we all started discussing computers.  I played my normal ambivalent self, and eventually he started talking about how the Macs were "the only way" to record music.  "Whole albums come out of Pro Toolz!" he says repeatedly, and he goes on to talk about how many problems he had with a PC doing the same thing.  Mostly he talked about latency in recording sound on the PC, and spoke of how he had to explicitly specify how many milliseconds to delay each recording input so that it sounded "close" on the PC.  Sadly, he couldn't tell me what audio recording app this was.

I had to cock an eyebrow at this, since my bud's been recording musicians on his Windows-based PC since 1996-7.  Considering that I build all his PCs and he asks me about anything technical wrt software, the subject of "latency" has oddly never been mentioned.  I'll have to tell him that he's obviously been doing everything wrong all these years.

I'm not dissing Pro Tools.  I've never used it, but I know it's a supa high-end app (and hardware) for professional audio recording.  Our recording gear is definitely on the "budget" side, but nevertheless we seem to have made a few CDs along the way.

Fri Jun 7 16:37:34 2002

Well, when I did meet him (at a friend's house), we all started discussing computers.  I played my normal ambivalent self, and eventually he started talking about how the Macs were "the only way" to record music.  "Whole albums come out of Pro Toolz!" he says repeatedly, and he goes on to talk about how many problems he had with a PC doing the same thing.

Pebcak? :)

Sat Jun 8 02:38:00 2002

from AllYorBaseRBelong2Us posted at 12:37 pm on June 7, 2002

Pebcak? :)

Well, he was rather evasive about it.  He was most vehement in asserting that because of all the problems that *he* encountered using this supposed PC, the Mac was the "only" way to go.

To each his own, I suppose.

I mean, everyone's got to have their own delusions, right? ;)