Power Macintosh G3 Blue and White from 1999

A couple of years back a friend sold me a Power Macintosh G3 Blue and White from 1999.  I owned this machine back in the day.  It was my first computer that I bought coming out of College.  I had been a PC user all throughout college and I switched because my employer at the time had me using Macintosh and I had gotten used to them and was enjoying Digital Video as a hobby at the time, where Apple had a significant ease of use advantage over the PCs of the time.

But back to the present day.  As soon as I got this G3 B&W I put a HDD drive in it and installed Mac OS 8.5, the first version of software that would have shipped with this machine.  I played with the machine a bit but then put it away.  In the meantime I'd been able to collect the period correct keyboard and the horrible puck mouse to go with this machine.

A recent acquisition from a garage cleanup that I did with my friend John Bumstead gave me reason to get this machine out again, the matching Apple Studio Display 21" monitor...

I don't know that I'd ever seen one of these displays in real life, and if I did it would have been very briefly.  When I owned a G3 I had it paired with a 17" Flat Sony Trinitron CRT.  That CRT had an amazing image, but it was in a boring beige case.  This CRT is also a Trinitron, and it's an absolute beast to move because of how heavy it is.

Several recent YouTube videos have been instrumental in giving me the knowledge to get the G3 working better.   I'd had trouble getting flash storage options working with this computer and wondered why till I watched a video where Sean from Action Retro talked about getting Rhapsody running on the G3 B&W.  In this video Sean explains that the original G3 B&W machine had a buggy IDE controller chip.  I checked the part numbers on my board and sure enough this is one of the machines with the buggy IDE chip.  That being said, Sean tried and struggled with SCSI on the machine, too, so that left me with an open mind about SCSI vs. IDE on this machine.

Mr. Lurch has strongly recommended the StarTech SATA to IDE bridge for Power Macintosh machines as a reliable solution for getting flash storage into vintage computers.  I had purchased one to keep on hand which I paired with a low cost SATA SSD from Free Geek Twin Cities.  This gave me a working IDE flash storage solution for this machine for about $40 total in parts, but that was only the beginning of the fun.

Sean @ Action Retro has a video investigating all the early versions of Mac OS to see how the UI had evolved over the years.  He did this online in a browser, but as we all know doing this in hardware is more fun.  The Power Mac G3 B&W supports every OS from 8.5 to 10.4 as well as Rhaposdy versions so there is alot of scope for interesting OS explorations on this one machine.

After a great deal of experimentation with an IDE HDD, with the SATA SSD explained above, and with a SCSI HDD I was able to get the folowing OSes all installed from CD media and booting on the machine:

MacOS 8.5

MacOS 9.1

MacOS Server X (Rhapsody)

MacOS X (10.0)

MacOS X (10.2)

MacOS X (10.4)

It's been alot of fun getting this machine configured and having a look at MacOS Rhapsody for the first time.  This OS shows alot more of the elements of the OpenStep operating system from NeXT as it slowly morphed into the MacOS X that Mac users are still using today.

I hope that this machine will be part of my exhibit at VCF Midwest this year, but more to come on that topic in the very near future as VCF Midwest is only a couple of weeks away on Sept. 9&10, 2023.  If you are in Chicagoland for that event come by my booth and say Hello!