The Faster Mac in the World, Part III

If you’ve found your way here from John Martellaro’s Mac Observer article, welcome, and my apologies for the idiotic observation in the comments that my 8600 had a “metal case.” Mental case is more like it! But sometimes in the night, old passions and recollections become transformed in the loosened sphere of moonlight and fatigue…

It always felt like it was metal: solid, weighty, and cool to the touch. With its silent multiple hard drives, sharp-as-razors Finder actions, and utter dependability, the PowerMac 8600 was like a mysterious chromium steel clockwork mechanism from the planet Apple. And now that I had dragged it from the storage unit, plugged it in after at least two years of sitting cold and unappreciated, and discovered not only that everything worked but worked so well, how could I ever consider parting with it? Had I not earned every penny of the entry price to professional Mac userdom and proudly clasped it to my chest? Was the mere thrill of possessing such a marvel not enough to make me hoard it in my storage unit, long after I’d been seduced by OS X?

Oh, I tried the hack all right, to run Panther on the old beige box. But there were video card incompatibilities, or recalcitrant electrons in the resistors. It wouldn’t take the upgrade, no matter what, and I moved on. But now I’d had it out, and fired it up, and GREED was in the air! Conflict! Guilt! And the challenge of making up for it all by getting an old Performa to work again. Egad!

* * *

So meanwhile, my small shop owner client was still saddled with her old machine, the ancient but lowly, optimistically-named Performa. Yes, she’d bought a MacBook, but for perfectly understandable reasons didn’t want her new assistant walking it over to the other side of the store to do the label printing chores. Besides, neither one of them knew any way to create the labels that they needed except in Clarisworks in OS 9! Astounding but true, and this was the busy season for selling the little blue bottles of essential oils and other items. They were depending on me, in other words, so all right, I’d get the Performa running, I decided. And to make a long story somewhat shorter, I did — but friends, it was horrible…

First I booted up from an old Norton Utilities CD, by luck having grabbed a compatible version from my stash of OS 9 software discs. After running Disk Doctor and trashing everything with evil resource folks (remember those?), I defragmented the hard drive and rebooted. IT TOOK ALMOST 10 MINUTES to get a workable desktop back. I then proceeded to turn off every extension I could think of that wasn’t necessary and rebooted again. Aha, only five minutes (!) this time… every 90 seconds or so, the Performa’s hard drive would emit a dull click or two, raising my hopes, then dashing them… and finally the Launcher launched, or tried to. The damn thing was stuck! Or was it? I gave the Mac the infamous “three-fingered-salute” and restarted, several times, until it finally dawned on me that the Launcher just needed a nice long rest before I could close its window. And then I tried to kill the bloody thing, but the Launcher would not die.

I turned it off in the Startup Items list. I unchecked its Control Panel. I even pulled all its little bits and pieces into the Trash and zapped them, but every time I rebooted, the Launcher was still there! And by the time I finally surrendered, there were TWO OF THEM in the Extensions Manager, I kid you not. (Perhaps the people who designed this went on to make electronic voting machines, you never know.) But at least the Performa booted now, and one could even print. No more than one page at a time, however, and printing took an eternity.

I was not a hero, however. I’d wasted several hours of the client’s time just waiting for the godforsaken Performa to reboot and felt guilty as hell for billing her. I advised her that she should invest in a nice Mac mini, which she could network wirelessly with her MacBook, and she was good with that, say sometime in the third quarter of ’07.

So you know how this ends: this very morning, as soon as I finish typing this, in fact, I’ll fire up the Fastest Mac in the World one more time in my very own home and trash all the personal files, then cart it down to the little store on the street that runs by Wal-Mart and set it up in its new home. My client and her assistant will have the use of every software app that ever ran on OS 9, a brand-new unused SCSI CD burner, and they will think they’ve died and gone to heaven.

I will have the benefit of a lightened heart (no guilt!) and more space in my life. I’ll also be completely Classic-free for the first time ever, and it’s about time. I haven’t used OS 9 in at least three years and never want to see it again. The Fastest Mac in the World will ease my client’s burdens, get me off the moral hook, and I can read the 24-inch iMac ads again.

People just don’t feel this way about PCs, and they never, ever will.