System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS 9.2.2.

I had fun with hypercard on MacOS 9. At work, even. The boss was into rapid prototyping, and I cooked up some damn productive stacks in a hurry.

It runs on the Cube and under OS 9 emulation on the new stuff.

Hypercard scripters did cool things that most users don't do today. And without those monster data centers.

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65a an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

StarMax series (and the 4400) seemed to be about as close to CHRP as we got. My off-brand StarMax clone (PowerCity) had a PS/2 and an ISA port. Ran BeOS well, and had a quirk that I could hear a tight loop on the speaker.

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rogerrogerr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Misread as “Mac mini M4” and was going to be _very_ impressed.

	▲	leoh 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Honestly this is still pretty insane.

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gnerd00 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yes, multiple Macs within arms reach right now!

++ BBEdit

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mrcwinn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

One of my early Macs was a Performa 638CD with no dedicated FPU. I had upgraded to a Performa 6400 (which felt like an absolute dog despite its size) but finally had an opportunity to move to the PowerComputing PowerTower Pro 225. What a beast! I hate to say it, but it was probably my favorite Mac I'd ever owned before the first iMac.

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E39M5S62 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I have a PowerCenter Pro 210 in my basement right now! It's not quite as nice as the newer architecture in the PowerTower Pro machines, but it runs MacOS 7.6.1 wonderfully. It is more than enough for classic Mac games of that era - and a joy to use.

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kev009 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The Megahertz wars in the 1990s made it really difficult to understand relative performance across even the same ISA like this, and I think computers with the 603 CPU were a bit of a wrench in people's perception of the Mac.

The 180 or 200MHz 603e with 16k L1 cache in that Performa 6400 wasn't slow by any stretch, but it probably didn't have L2 cache. Coupled with the gradual transition to PPC native code of the OS and apps, these machines were often a little mismatched to expectations and realities of the code.

Meanwhile that PowerTower had a 604e with 32/32k L1 and 1MB L2 cache. That was a fast flier with a superscalar and out of order pipeline more comparable to the Pentium Pro and PII.

	▲	mrcwinn 27 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Oh believe me. I owned it. It felt slow even at the time.
	▲	burnt-resistor an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yup. Recall the far better cycle efficiency of the 100 MHz hyperSPARC. Consumers didn't grok cycle efficiency, pipeline depth, or branch prediction miss pipeline stall latency.