In my ongoing expose of all of the old Apple stuff I’ve acquired over the years, here’s my “PowerMac8,1” iMac G5.
Back in 2001/2002 I was teaching CompSci at Marianapolis Prep in northern Connecticut.
Among my duties as the CompSci teacher was bringing the school’s technology into the 21st century… I upgraded the school with this new Internet thing and a full suite of Mac-based stuff; including frame relay internet, bleeding edge campus-wide WiFi, Xserve machines, and about thirty Apple eMacs.
I came to really like the iMacs that the students were using and decided I’d get one some day…
After I started where I currently work, in 2004, I needed a PC for what I was doing there so I grudgingly sold my 17″ G4 laptop to pay for it. And a couple of months later, for Christmas 2004, I bought this iMac to have a Mac around.
This is the 1.8Ghz G5 (PPC970FX) and has 2Gigs of ram, a 160G HD, and an AGP 8x GeForce FX go5200 video card. It does 10/100 ethernet, 802.11 B/G wireless, bluetooth 1.1, and even has a 56k v.92 modem built in. And there’s also a DVD burner, which was pretty fancy in the early 2000’s.
All in all this was a pretty stellar bit of kit in late 2004.
These days the G5 runs Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS for PowerPC and is pretty much a conversation piece. But it’ll still get on the Internet and do basic Internet things – at 1.2Ghz Celeron M speeds. 🙂
Listening to "High On You" by Survivor