Performa 6360 software

I have had a Performa 6200 that I upgraded with the Performa 6360 motherboard sitting around my house for quite a few years now. It has been doing nothing more productive then collecting dust. Due to the year of neglect I had assumed it wouldn't be functional anymore. I was mistaken, it worked quite nicely. I decided to throw in a 3.8 gig harddrive from an old PC that turned out to be compatable with the Performa. During the course of the harddrive swap I also installed Mac OS 8.6.

After doing that work I came to the conclusion that I had no need for the computer in terms of my intended purposes. I meant to just use it as a backup web browsing computer. I came to terms with reality and realized how superflous the computer was. I decided it needed to go. I didn't want to just see it go to waste so I offered it to an old high school friend of mine who hasn't made out as well as me. Not to go into specifics but he wound up with a wife and kids in place of college, and is struggling to make ends meet. He can't even begin to think about saving money for a computer right now. So I decided to give him the Performa, it being better than nothing.

I still have the computer in my possesion now. I am going to drop it off to him in the next few days. The problem is that it is basically barren in terms of software. When I wiped the harddrive and installed 8.6 I lost everything that I had accumulated over the years for the Performa. RIght now it only has Simpletext, Internet Explorer 5, Netscape 4.6, Yahoo Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger. Basically things I downloaded really quickly just to use on it incase one of my three main computers fails. I am feel sort of bad giving someone who is computer illiterate a computer that has basically nothing on it. I am trying to find some different places to download a few basic freeware applications to give the computer some functionality. It has a stylewriter 1200 and full ink cartriage going out along with it. No word processing program though. I am also intereted in finding some older educational games for his kids who are 3 and 4. Just something to flush out the computer and give them a reason to use it and not to let it rot in their house as it has in mine.

BTW....the person I am giving the computer too does not have internet access for right now. That is why the software situation is sort of dire. They only know of the computer as an internet appliance. I hope to teach them otherwise. Hopefully they should have internet at some point, even if the legality of it is questionable legal. They are in an apartment and the downstairs neighbor has a cable modem and router with 4 ports. Only two of which are being used. The guy seemed really friendly and willing to help with tech issues. I am going to see if his kindness would extend to letting me run an ethernet cable up the heating duct into Fred's apartment. Or else I am going to have to find a comm port modem for the Performa since it only has a ethernet card installed now.



Help me set up a decent computer for a friend in dire poverty who could really use a computer. Links to some freeware would be greatly appreciated. Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Games, Educational Games, Any other type of interesting software.



Thank you guys so much in advance! You don't know how much this could help someone. I am just coming up on empty in terms of finding software. The P2P networks seem to deal almost soely in PC software and older shareware or freeware for OS 8 is getting rarer by the day.



Lee Randolph Keller