Old Computer Challenge 2024 - Day 0 #
Yesterday while hanging out on #macgarden I had a nice chat with someone that goes by the name of Headcrash. They were talking about an ongoing challenge that felt as the right thing for me to join. It's called the Old Computer Challenge, it's in its 4th iteration, and I guess that, by the name, it's pretty self-explanatory what the challenge is about.
Since today, as I'm writing this (12:23 GMT), I've officially sent the last emails for work and I will now enter a 2 week long holiday break, finally having some personal time to work on my hobbies. This means it's the perfect timing to have some fun on a challenge such as this.
As the announcement post says:
There is a single rule, do it for fun! Do not impede yourself for weird reasons, it is here for fun, and doing the whole week is as good as failing and writing about the why you failed. It is not a contest, just try and see how it goes, and tell us your story :)
With this spirit of simply having as much fun as possible, I've decided that I won't be using a single machine during the challenge, but instead I will have a main machine, and a couple of secondary ones that will be used depending on what I want to work on during the week.
Primary machine: PowerBook G4 12"
The primary machine I'll be using is a classic PowerBook G4 12" running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. It's a lovely machine, in such a great form-factor, with a lot of power. Its main purpose along the challenge will be to finish the design of this website, since it still need a ton of work, and also to completely redesign the website and brand identity of my consulting company, meaning I'll be spending a lot of time in Illustrator CS2 and BBEdit 8.6.
There is only one problem with this machine... The last time I used it was in 2023 because it developed what I can only describe as a memory issue in one of the soldered-on memory chips. It started randomly crashing and when I tried reinstalling the operating system it would randomly crash at different points during the installation with a kernel panic and some times would crash with weird linking and memory allocation errors.
Because of this I'll have to transplant the motherboard of a parts machine I bought on eBay right after this one died. Hopefully this will fix the issues. While I'm at it I'll also take the time to upgrade the RAM and the hard drive so I can have a bit better performance and a much more enjoyable experience during the challenge.
My first day of the challenge will mostly be comprised of machine repairs, operating system setup, and software installations. Although I'll try to skip the software part and migrate the data from the old hard drive to the new SSD, since I'm not looking forward to spending 4 days compilling the GNU toolchain again.
Secondary machine: Power Mac G5 2.3 Dual
The secondary machine I'll most likely be using will be my amazing Power Mac G5 with dual processors. It's a dream machine of mine ever since I saw one at the Apple Store back in 2005. Even today, having a machine with two physical processors, that isn't a server, still amazes me.
My machine was a bargain I found on Facebook Marketplace last year, where an employee of a multi-national marketing firm was selling them for 15 euros (they had 5 of them). I went to their offices to pick mine up and after talking a bit to the manager and some negociation I was able to score the machine with its keyboard and mouse for 20 euros. I did refrain from buying all of them so that others could also have chance to score one. Having to walk 1km with the machine to the car may have also had an impact in this decision.
This machine will be included since it's currently running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard with everything installed and ready to go, also it's a lot more powerful than the PowerBook could ever hope to be.
Auxiliary machines
I do love old Macs, specially PowerPC ones, due to their ability to run fairly modern UNIX software thanks to the help of MacPorts, but I may to use Windows during the week, for this I'll probably use my Compaq Armada E500, running Windows 2000, or setup Windows 7 on old Eee PC 1005PE if I need "modern" Windows.
Conclusions
I'm glad I randomly stumbled upon this community and this challenge. I hope I'm able to finish it without failling, although I'm sure I'll have a ton of fun nonetheless. I should start disassembling PowerBooks and get to swapping motherboards...