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February 25, 2007
40 Pounds of Lime.
Adding to my Macs I Didn't Pay For Collection (which is currently hovering around 15 machines), I found an old iMac G3 on Broadway a couple weeks ago (make that 16 machines).
It was snowing when I first walked past the iMac, which at the time was flanked by two blue and white G3 towers. I walked back past the same spot about an hour later, only to find the towers were gone (insert 9/11 joke here), and the iMac all by its lonesome. Similar to how many (read: "normal") people feel the need to bring home stray animals and nurse them back to health, I feel the same way with wayward Macs.
With my apartment only a few blocks away, I brushed the snow off as best I could, and lugged the beast home with me.
(I assume that whoever took the blue and white G3 towers thought the iMac was shot since it was filling with snow through the vents on top. This is a common misconception of anything electronical: if it gets wet, it fries. Notsomuch. Only if there's electricity running through the electronics when it gets wet will something bad happen. That's why if you have a dirty keyboard you can put it in the dishwasher to clean it, so long as you let it completely dry before you plug it back in.)
A few days later, having acquired a keyboard, mouse and '99 appropriate translucent power cord, I decided it was as dry as it was going to get, and plugged it in. No sparks. Good sign. Power button. Boing. Good sign. Semi dithered beach ball. Uhh. Splash screen. Mac OS X Server? WTF? It's an old server. That was unexpected. Login prompt. Ah crap.
First thing I did when I brought the iMac home was to open the i/o panel on the side to check the specs of the machine. (333MHz 64MB RAM iMac Rev. D, if you were wondering) (oh, yeah, it's green too) (I mean, uh, Lime?) What else do I find in the i/o slot? A piece of masking tape with "root" and a password written on it. Bingo bango. So I typed that in... hmmm. Again. Hmmm. Wait, is that a "r" or a "n?" That might be a 4... I think. Maybe it's supposed to be a capital "k."
20 minutes later, and some consulting with the roommates yielded no results on the password front. Ah crap. Well, I'll just pop in my Tiger disc and run password reset. Oh, wait, no DVD drive. Balls. Oh, well, I'll just download that Panther disk image from Bear's FTP that I keep around for just such an occasion. Oh, wait, neither Toast nor Disk Utility will burn it? Weird.
So flash forward a couple days, and I've acquired some Jaguar upgrade discs. I figure the earlier older the cat the better, since this is clearly from either the 10.0 or 10.1 days (or possibly the Public Beta... although that would have probably expired by 2007). So I fire up Password Reset, and lo and behold... nothing. Huh. Maybe Jaguar wasn't old enough? Possibly, but I wasn't going to find anything older than Jaguar.
Single User Mode, here I come.
Single User Mode works... oddly. It comes up in quasi GUI mode, with a full screened terminal window. Weird. After some digging around on the interweb, I find some commands for resetting the root password in the netinfo database. As I soon find out though, there is no netinfo database on this machine. So bizarre. There's another account called "Administrator" though, which I figure might be easier to reset than root. Sure enough, after some more googling, I stumble upon this page at your favorite Mac hacking wiki and mine, MacShadows. And guess what... it worked!
So, finally... two weeks after I dragged the machine in from the cold, I can see what it was all for. Drumroll please...
(click image for largeness)
Umm... what? It's not quite OS X, it's not quite OS9, it's not quite NEXTSTEP... it's Mac OS X Server 1.0! (I'm particularly fond of the Sticky note, and the "Expiring Beta" notice on OmniWeb... that's putting it lightly)
Now I consider myself quite the nerd, especially in the world of Apple, but I had never even heard of Mac OS X Server 1.0. According to Wikipedia page, it was the first fruits of Apple's NeXT acquisition. Madness. Anyway, so obviously this was too cool to reformat right away, I had to play around.
First thing's first, let's get it online. This was, uh, interesting. Since it's not really OS9, there's no Control Panels, and since it's not really OS X, there's no System Preferences. So where does one modify TCP/IP settings? Yeah, good luck with that. Eventually I found a setup assistant (it took a while just to find the Applications folder) (there's actually several), and I was up and running. It couldn't pull DHCP off the router in the apartment, so I had to set up everything manually, but it worked.
Secondly, what was this thing serving, anyway? In addition to the masking tape with the root password on it, the only other distinguishing feature on the machine was another piece of tape (blue painter's tape this time) with some IP addresses on it. The IPs were registered to Flat.com. iTools.app, which seemed to be an early port of Apache to Darwin, was set to run on start up... so as best I can figure, this iMac was the old flat.com web server.
(Incidentally, Flat is located at 391 Broadway, directly in front of where I found the iMac.)
So yes. There it is. No really, there it is. It's sitting there on my desk staring me in the face as I type this. Thing is huge. And loud. And slow. And it hates its life. "Please... kill me..." it says. I would too, given the circumstances. As stated on the Wikipedia page, it is indeed running two OSs, both Server 1.0 and Mac OS 8.5 under an emulation layer. Unlike Classic under Mac OS X, once you boot up 8.5, you're stuck there until you shut it down. It's weird. Non Parallels weird, but weird.
p < .001 indeed.
Posted by pat at February 25, 2007 09:15 PM
Comments
So, did you play Chess?
Posted by: megan at February 26, 2007 06:29 PM