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We Have to Laugh...
March 10th, 2020
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I have a collection of rapidly aging Macs in my basement. I'll say more about
my collection and my over 20 year fascination with the Mac, but for now I'll
stick to a story about one that revealed something surprising tonight.
A few months ago, I bought a Power Computing Power Center Pro 240 on eBay for
a fairly good price. It was in working condition and was in surprisingly good
cosmetic condition considering this is a machine that last sold over 20 years
ago. I had a thing for these machines back in the day, because at the time
Power Computing built cheaper, better, faster Macs than Apple, and did so
with an irreverent style and hyped-up marketing.
The Power Center Pro was a beast in its day - built to compete with Apple's
PowerMac 8000 and 9000 series - and the one I picked up on eBay allowed me
to check off my list another Mac I wish I could have owned way back when.
Needless to say, I was excited to get at it.
The first night, I set it up and quickly determined that the 9 GB IBM SCSI
hard drive inside was a door-stop. Since 50-pin SCSI drives go for more than
I paid for this machine and the Power Center Pro has no onboard IDE connection,
I decided to drop in my prized Sonnet Tempo IDE card and the only IDE drive I
had available, one I had removed from another machine. That drive lasted about
4 hours before it gave up the ghost. Back to the drawing board...
I then tried to setup a CD-IDE card adaptor on the Tempo card - try as I might
for hours, I had no luck getting the Power Center to recognize the adaptor or
the CF card sitting in it. Tonight, I rummaged around my parts collection
and found another drive which, much to my delight, fired up and took on an
installation of the Mac System 7.6 without issue. While I had the machine
open, I was even able to replace the ludicrously noisy CPU fan with a larger,
quieter one I had in the same parts bin - BONUS!
For the next few hours, I wrestled with getting a few key pieces of software
installed that would allow this old beast to connect to another Mac on my
home network. It was a pickle - there were two software updates that were
sitting on an external Firewire hard drive that would do the trick... but
the Power Center doesn't have USB or Firewire. After a number of hacks, I
figured out a way to get what I needed moved over to the Power Center, and
I thought I was home free. Just as I was making the last file transfer I
would need, the Power Center froze up. One reboot was all it took to
show that, you guessed it, yet another hard drive had quit.
I titled this post, "We Have to Laugh". My aunt likes to follow that lead,
with "or else we'll cry." Tonight was a night like that. Normally, after
a night like tonight, I'd be angry, annoyed, disheartened. Tonight, I
could only laugh, and wonder if maybe something inside had changed.
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