Retro-Computing

For fifty bucks, I got myself a time machine. Ray — the older gentleman who sold it to me — was equal parts amused and confused that someone like me still existed. For the price of a dinner out, I walked away with a brushed-aluminum tower that once symbolized Apple’s peak desktop performance. Now it sits proudly next to my daily driver (“Study”), humming away like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. I hit the power button, braced for the famous chime… and there it was: Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard, dual 1.8 GHz G5 CPUs, 4 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB Maxtor spinning drive that sounds like a diesel generator. Inside? Comcast invoices from 2012 and a still-configured iChat account. The ghost of broadband past. ...

The Dream Back in the early 2000s, teenage me was obsessed with the iBook G4. That sleek white clamshell with its PowerPC CPU and AltiVec engine felt like the future. I couldn’t afford one then — but now, two decades later, I finally scored one: a 1.33GHz model for $67 on eBay, original box and all. Reality hit hard. The 60GB hard drive was dying The RAM was maxed at 1.5GB (after some firmware trickery) I destroyed the power button during an SSD upgrade This is the story of how I brought it back to life — and turned it into a (surprisingly capable) development machine in 2025. ...