I haven’t forgotten my weblog. It’s just that if you have lots of stuff to blog about, you don’t really have time to do it. At least that’s the case here.

On monday for example, I booted my very first computer. I was kind of late though so its a pretty decent machine compared to what most of my friends had. It’s a Apple Macintosh Performa 6200 with a stunning, Pentium smoking 75 MHz PowerPC, 24MB Ram and 500 MB HDD. I got this thing 1995 I believe, so it’s 13 years old and it was running almost every day since because my dad was still using it after I got a new computer. He used Filmaker 3.0 for writing bills and keeping track of customers. He ran it until last monday when I was at my parents and thought that it might be a good idea to finally transfer all his sensible data to another machine. The HDD would fail some day and I wanted to prevent an emergency call. But there was a problem. This machine had almost no useful interfaces to retrieve the data. There’s no USB, no Firewire, no Ethernet – nothing! It has a SCSI connector but I don’t have any SCSI capable machines anymore. So I took my computer to the CCCB in order to remove the HDD and plug it into a new machine. The Performa 6200 was one of the first Macs which got an IDE HDD instead of SCSI. I was hoping that I could simply put it into an old G4 desktop in order to copy the files. It turned out though, that at the time they shipped the Performa, Apple was formatting the HDDs in their factory in a special way. This was changed late but appearently my disk was special because no modern computer I connected it to was able or willing to show me the files. Meanwhile I was thinking that I might destroyed the filesystem by putting it in the G4.

I didn’t bring the 15″ screen, the ADB Mouse and Keyboard with me, so I couldn’t boot it. After I got the missing pieces from my parents I connected everything and my Mac booted as it used to be:

It was like christmas. Or my birthday when I got my Mac. I went through all my files, played F/A 18 Hornet 2.0, Cyclone II and Rescue and was smiling all over my face.

Then I connected my old Syquest EZ 135 Drive with 135 MB cartriges via the SCSI port to backup my dads files. A friend then retrieved the files via his old mac which had a 10 MBit ethernet port. Now Filemaker 9 Pro was even able to convert the 3.0 database files and everything went through successfully. Now I can keep my first computer and play F/A 18 Hornet with it.

By the way, if someone out there really wants to make me happy – buy me this game: http://www.graphsim.com/games-fa18-oif.html

After all these emotions I have to say that this computer still looks nice on my desktop. Imagine a 13 years old PC box! The Performa case is well designed. Doesn’t look like it is that old. I can even connect a TFT display so everything looks real crisp.

The machine never had any problems. The battery faded out but it can be replaced. It was really worth the money.