Many years useful service

Mac users can often be heard to remark how reliable their Macs can be, and how much longer a Mac can last doing useful work compared to a PC. Certainly I see a significant number of clients that are quite happy with their older hardware. Mostly this translates into G4 towers, which are the Abrams tanks of the Mac world; heavy but basically indestructible. They may not set the world alight but they get the job ( mostly dtp in publishing) done. As well as G4 towers I see plenty of G4 laptops as well as a smattering of G3's including a couple of clamshell iBooks that their owners wouldn't swap for anything else.

Software seems to get upgraded more regularly, well it does cost less than a new Mac. It's rare that I see anything older than 10.4, and on the rare occasions I come across machines running 10.3, we soon get that sorted.

Sometimes however somethng comes along out of the blue. On Friday I got a call from a local engineering company whose Mac was playing up. Expecting to find an office iMac I was surprised to be ushered into the main workshop and pointed towards a large sheet metal machine (a Strippet to be exact). Next to the machine was a control station, and upon opening it up, the Mac controlling it was revealed. A Mac IIcx, running System 6. Happy in it's isolated existance this Mac had been controlling the Strippet every day for over 20 years before finally sucumbing to a logic board fault that caused it to shut down after 5 minutes.

The control software for the Strippet was written specifically for System 6, so no upgrade is possible. As a result the hunt is on for a replacement IIcx.



While diagnosing the fault it became apparent that System 6, while ancient, exhibited one major advantage over OS X. From pressing the power key to the Strippet software being up and running was less than 10 seconds. With multiple restarts, testing under OS X would have been tedious in the extreme. OK so the whole OS was contained within 2Mb of RAM (the Mac had 5Mb in total), but the black and white icons of System 6 were a real trip down memory lane.



Next time I'm tempted to wish my current MacBook Pro into an early grave I will remember all those tired old IIcx's around the world, still giving excellent serice as they approach 25 years of age.