Power Macintosh G3

More beige!

Whilst the Power Macintosh 8200/120 that I've mentioned before was purchased due to an agreement that I'd honestly forgotten about due to lockdown, this machine came to me due to basically spotting it on eBay for a reasonable amount of money, and the condition in the pictures sold it to me.

This one is a Power Macintosh G3, also known in Ôvintage Apple' circles as the ÔBeige G3'. My one is the more desirable tower model, weird shaped case aside. This is the first of the G3 processor-based Power Macintoshes, replacing the PowerPC 601-604 processors that came beforehand.

I got lucky with this one. It originally left Apple as a 266MHz machine, but some kind former owner has upgraded it with a Sonnet processor upgrade, so it's now 366MHz. A gain of ~100MHz doesn't sound like much in the modern day, for the time that was a noticeable difference. It also came with 512MB of RAM, which is completely overkill for one of these, but I've dropped it back down to 256MB due to some stability issues.

This is the first computer I've ever owned with a Zip drive. Sadly I don't have any disks to test it, but it's there! It's also the only SCSI device in the machine; G3 brought a change from SCSI hard disks and CD-ROMs to IDE, which is far easier to find replacements. Speaking of which, I've swapped out the standard Apple CD-ROM drive for a Sony CD-RW unit as the original had issues with burned (non-original) disks; this one doesn't care either way.

What am I going to do to it? Absolutely nothing! Honestly I don't think I can really improve it from where it is now. So I've put Mac OS 9.2.2 on it, and I'm just going to use it as is. You'll probably see it again when I've put it to use on various projects.