Cube + old FireWire 400 Companion Iomega Drive + OWC SATA enclosure chained with FW400-FW800 cable.
Only role of the the Iomega so far is to make the OWC enclosure +SSD work reliably on the Cube. It provides sufficient FireWire power I guess.
Now can boot Sorbet Leopard from FireWire SSD and Classic Mac OS 9.22 from internal IDE drive (fast enough really).
Also discovering hotline which I never used back in the days. Is it archeology or piracy ?
@santiago
> from internal IDE drive (fast enough really)
When I boot an old Mac from its internal "spinning rust" drive, I get the vibes that it has an SSD — simply because having bazillion things running in the background simply wasn't common back in the days, so starting them up didn't take forever 😂
@m0xee Same. I was running OS 9 on this (very fast) Cube yesterday and really everything responds well from the internal IDE. Different times. Booting OSX 10.5 (Sorbet) really needs an SSD not to feel sluggish.
Of course the dream stops when you need a modern browser on the modern web. It simply is much faster to launch Virtual PC and run windows (98!) apps emulated than try reading the news on a “normal” 2024 site.
@santiago
Yes, and TenFourFox was never exactly stellar in terms of performance, it feels sluggish even on my PowerMac G5 Dual.
I used to be able to make music — including recording a couple of instruments at 48 kHz applying effects in real-time on my PowerPC Mac Mini, now I doubt I would be able to even read the news using a more or less modern browser on that machine.
The Web is one of the worst offenders when it comes to making machines obsolete.
@santiago
I have an old ThinkPad T43 from about the same era (early to mid 2000s) and I can use Matrix chats, I can read emails, I can browse Gemini and even the Web (without all the fluff, using w3m), listen to music and watch videos at 720p and even low-complexity 1080p ones, I can code using vim, it even runs Quake3 more or less well…
Just start Firefox, open 4-5 tabs of "modern" web — and the machine becomes unusable 😂
@m0xee Even on Haiku I like to use NetSurf. Launches instantly and the websites that don’t render in there I probably just shouldn’t visit. Yes that’s most of them.
It doesn’t feel perfectly native to me though. Who knows one day I’ll build a better UI for it ( note #INeverDoAnything )