I found a working Performa 6400/180 in the garbage!

satchmosatchmo
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Okay, so it's not a G5, but it's free.



I'm jogging the other day along my usual route and I see this beige tower at curb of the sidewalk. I stop for minute and while it's bit dirty, it looked as if motherboard, and drives were intact.



I come back with the car and bring it home. To my amazement, it powers up with MacOS 8.1, 56mb(?) of RAM, and a 1.1 GB hard drive. The CD-ROM drive is shot with a kid's CD still stuck in there.

Well, I've clean it up and it looks pretty sweet.



Don't know which one to keep. I now have this to go along with an old Power Macintosh 8500/120. This one lacks A/V outputs but has a slot for a TV tuner card (which was the other thing missing).



Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    djmbdjmb Posts: 120member
    wow.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    altivec_2.0altivec_2.0 Posts: 995member
    Nice, the only bad thing about the 6400 and 6500's I think were that they could only have 128Mhz ram. kinda scimpy....
  • Reply 3 of 6
    johnqjohnq Posts: 2,763member
    How you can stand not Data Rescue X'ing that drive is beyond me...kudos for honesty....
  • Reply 4 of 6
    stoostoo Posts: 1,490member
    You get up to 136MB RAM on an 5/6400 because of 8MB of onboard RAM. My parent's 6400/180 is still going strong with 136MB of EDO RAM and a G3 upgrade. Soon to be upgraded to a 6500 (+10MHz bus speed, -8MB RAM, double the VRAM to 2MB).
  • Reply 5 of 6
    jginsbujginsbu Posts: 135member
    I scored an old working APS UPS out of the trash a while back -- too useful! I keep my 17" iMac hooked up to it just in case, although journalling makes me a lot less nervous that I used to be. I expect it to be with me for a good while. I found it next to a IIci with all the goodies, but I didn't have a use for it -- and the UPS was heavy enough to carry home!



    I once got linux (don't remember which one) running on a 6400, so it can be done if you're interested. They're quite non-standard as Macs go and weren't well supported on the linux front at the time, but it did work w/o X. Had to use an external serial connection to get to the Open Firmware to do it though...



    Have fun!
  • Reply 6 of 6
    satchmosatchmo Posts: 2,699member
    Yeah, it's certainly not a powerhouse by todays standards, but it will definitely be good for reliving some old game classics that run on 7.5 to 8.1.

    Might just give it to my parents as they babysit my nieces and nephews quite a bit...perfect for them.



    My guess was that the owner upgraded to something much more powerful and didn't want the hassle of trying to fix the CD-drive. One man's garbage is another man's treasure.
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