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Best Mac for Mac OS 9?
- Thread starter davidg4781
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Thank you...
I'd pretty much figured out the 'OW' part, but the 'R' had me puzzled.
There is a technical difference which relates to the ROM size, but there's also a practical way to tell.
Old World Rom Macs have "traditional" Mac peripheral connections like ADB, RS-422 serial ports, and SCSI. They DO NOT have onboard USB. NWR Macs ALWAYS have built-in USB and generally lack the legacy ports, although there are exceptions to the legacy port issue.
Or, put another way, if it's colored plastic, titanium, or aluminum it's NWR. If it's beige plastic, it's OWR. The iMac G3, B&W G3, Lombard(bronze keyboard) Powerbook, and clamshell iBook were the first NWR systems(at least in each of the "four box" categories that Steve Jobs introduced).
original imacs actually still had a floppy connection on the motherboard ready to add the port. I have one I want to add the floppy too as that would be great.
Hmm, I've never noticed this-I need to open my Rev. B Bondi to add RAM, so will look for it when I have it open.
Another interesting point on the Rev. A and B machines is that they have an RS-422 port. It is connected directly to IrDA sensor, but none the less the sensor can be disconnected and-with some creative routing-be used with a printer, Localtalk box, or whatever(with the usual caveats). Up through the G5, StealthPort and GeoPort made small cards that would plug into the modem port on the logic board and had a mini-DIN-8 connector that fit the hole for the RJ-11 cable.
Although the legacy stuff was "hidden", a lot of it did linger. As I mentioned, the serial port protocol was used through the G5 era for modems. ADB was used internally for Powerbooks up to some of the very late models(I suspect this is why ADB "just works" in Leopard even when you have to do some crazy hacks to make other stuff work in Leopard with PCI based computers running processor upgrades). I have a couple of computers-including a dual 1ghz Quicksilver that came BTO with an Adaptec 2930CU card. This is a firmware compatible(bootable) SCSI card with an internal 50 pin port and an external HD-50 Centronix.
Unfortunately, as software progressed, a lot of the stuff became unusable. Internal floppy drives are completely non-functional in OS X even using officially supported software combinations(i.e. Jaguar on a beige G3). As far as I know, serial port support is pretty limited under OS X-I don't think Localtalk works at all, and printers aren't exactly plug and play like they are pre-OSX. I've yet to find a parallel SCSI card that works at all in Leopard, including the Apple shipping ones(yet strangely both PCI ATA and SATA cards tend to show up as SCSI cards in system profiler).
That's why I mentioned internal floppies. I have a bunch of externals from the G3/G4 era including a couple of LS-120 drives and several USB bus-powered floppies with pinstripes and interchangeable "skins" to match your iMac. These will read and write both PC and Mac formatted 1.44mb floppies just fine. What they do lack is the ability to read and write 400 and 800K floppies, something which the internal drives on Beige computers could do.
Back in the '80s, Apple used some "tricks" to squeeze more data on a floppy disk than their PC competitors that required a variable speed drive in the disk drive-I'm not aware of any external that supports this.
