Yesterday I had a lot of fun reviving two older Macs I got a couple of months ago — PowerMac 7500/100 and Power Mac G3.

Both were turning on but refusing to boot. Turns out, in the PM7500, both hard drives had damaged OS installations, but hardware-wise, they were OK. Weirdly, the drives affected the system even when booting from a floppy, so I disconnected both drives and booted from BlueSCSI (the amazing thing emulating all kinds of connected devices). After connecting the drives in a different order, I was able to reinstall Mac OS 8 on one of them, and it went back to normal.

In PowerMac G3, the internal drive was fully disconnected for some reason. But even when connected and booting with BlueSCSI, the drive would not appear. I managed to hook it up to another PowerMac G3 tower I have instead of a zip drive, and it appeared, although required initialization. Using BlueSCSI again, I installed a fresh Mac OS install on it and popped it back into the G3 desktop, and it booted perfectly. So now I have a working G3 Desktop, G3 beige mini-tower, and a blue G3 tower, which is great.

I really enjoyed tinkering with these old machines and enjoyed the fact that it is possible to actually do things, compared to the modern machines where everything is just one PCB.

As I was working on these computers, I did some reading, and it reminded me that there was also an All-in-One G3 Mac — the Molar (not my pictures):

A face only a mom could love.

Is it ugly? Very much so. But now I really want to add this to my collection.