Early Life

    This computer doesn’t seem retro to me.  It could run some version or other of OS X.  I don’t know which.  If you want to know, check out Low End Mac, where there is a lot of discussion of that.  I have never considered putting OS X on my Lombard, because its value to me is as a System 8 workstation.  Since the classic environment has been removed from OS X, I have a lot of documents that were created over the years that can’t be opened and used in OS X.  For some reason, Apple is very helpful if I want to boot a legacy version of Windows on my Intel Macintosh, they do not want to help run their own legacy operating system.  Of course, I use Sheepshaver in OS X, and I’ve set it up to look as much as possible like my Lombard.  Anyway, this computer doesn’t seem very old, and it isn’t.  It was purchased in 1999.  This model was available for sale for less than a year before it was replaced by the even more famous Pismo, whose main improvement was the addition of a firewire port.

As It Is Now

    I never needed to do anything to make this computer better.  It has the stock G3 processor, runs at 333 MHz, and has the 6GB hard drive.  It has 192 MB of memory.  It has a zip drive and a 24x CDROM (read only) which can be hot-swapped into the right hand bay.  The left hand bay takes the battery, which still holds a charge pretty well.  It runs version 8.6 of the operating system, and has a great set of software, some of which still has no equal on Mac OS X.