Retro computing (ii)

Like I said, I found a cd drive for the old wall street g3 powerbook I'd acquired, which was pretty cool. Borrowed an old Jaguar (os x 10.2) install set and hey presto! forty minutes later I had an old, slow g3 running an old version of os x.

and there's the rub. jaguar really doesn't cut it. Most of the obvious common freeware doesn't work, eg no text wrangler, no neo office, no journier, not even aquaemacs, so I'm kind of stuck for a basic set of tools.

What did install was:

• Camino 1.04 (means I can use google docs etc)
• abiword 2.4 (loathsome, but hey it's a word processor)
• nvu ( a bit touch and go but it runs)
• mac emacs ( the old version, no sexy interface)
• vim ( the old version for 6.2)

so I've got a writing/blogging machine out of it, which is a lot of what I do. I've got an old version of acrobat and ie, not to mention applemail, and I can always ssh from the terminal to another machine. What I am lacking is a spreadsheet (but google docs or zoho could perhaps provide that functionality) and a presentation tool (zoho probably).

So really what I've got is something that's kind of like a web 2.0 thin client. Put that way, it might be an interesting experiment using it ...