PM 6100
=======

There  are holidays  so  I have  been trying  to  check my  workstation
collection. I have started the R4k  SGI Indigo and I'm trying to revive
my  only Power  Macintosh (the  6100 model,  the first  Apple's PowerPC
ever).

I updated my machine in the past: there is the Crescendo G3 CPU upgrade
(~233MHz) and the  discrete graphics which can do  1204x768 in millions
of colors (so in theory it is better than the Entry graphics of the SGI
Indigo;  in practice  there are  little  difference). The  rest of  the
machine is  not that interesting: a  500MB SCSI drive and  some 40MB of
RAM (if I'm not mistaken there are some 8MB on board and 32MB in a SIMM
module; I have been unlucky in finding of compatible SIMM to expand the
memory). I run Mac OS 8.0CZ here.

The worst part of the machine is  its case. The metal parts are OK, The
plastics  are  cracked in  many  places  (fortunately they  are  mostly
inside).

The machine  is not exactly slow  (especially when the Crescendo  is in
use)  but  the bottleneck  is  RAM  size  and  HDD speed.  So  Netscape
experience is rather  terrible. On other side, it's a  nice machine for
reading of PDFs or for writing (I have little stuff here so I cannot do
here too  much) but the  Silicon Graphics  machines from that  time (or
even slightly older ones) offer much better user experience. On the Mac
OS there was  no multitasking, stability of system was  terrible and so
on. Even the old  SGI Indigo with the R4000 CPU is  faster (the 6100 is
from 1994, this Indigo is from 1993).

Anyway, I  have replaced  the timekeeper battery  so the  machine boots
once more, tested  that it boots and it starts  the Crescendo correctly
and even surfed some  gopher pages and some Czech WWW  [1] pages in the
Netscape Navigator 3.0. All of this worked well.


References:

[1] http://technomorous.eu