[NBLUG/talk] iMac question

Alan Bloom n1al at sonic.net
Tue Jul 22 20:25:04 PDT 2014


The community radio station I volunteer for has a pile (maybe 12-15) 
ancient iMac G3 computers that were given to us by a school a few years 
ago.  I'd like to sell them on Craig's List or somewhere to get a little 
money for the station.  I'm trying to figure out if they are worth 
anything and if there is any easy way to upgrade them to make them more 
useful.

I took one home, plugged in a USB keyboard and mouse and it booted up 
fine.  After a minor change to the LAN configuration it also connects to 
the Internet, but the browser is so old that many web sites don't 
display correctly.

It is an early model G3 with the tray-loading CD drive.  It has a red 
case and machine speed of 333 MHz, which I think makes it a revision 
"D".  It is running Mac OS 8.6 and has 96 Mbytes of RAM installed.  (I 
believe these units came with 32 MB.)  The hard disc is 6 GB, so that 
has not been upgraded.

Is there a reasonably-modern browser that runs on Mac OS 8.6?  Or do I 
need to upgrade the operating system?  My research seems to indicate 
that any version 9.* or the Unix-based OS X up to version 10.3.9 
(Panther) is compatible with this version of the G3.  If I buy one copy 
of the OS on CD-ROM can I load it into multiple computers or is there 
some kind of license key that limits it to one computer?

Any recommendations?  Are these things even worth bothering with?

Alan Bloom


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