osprey.retro

Nameless iMac

Note: I don't have a name for her yet, but when I do, I'll insert it.

This machine is one of the first machines of such vintage I got my hands on. It was handed down to my family by my grandparents after they replaced it, in a time where we were lacking a family computer. You can tell that it was a long time ago, given that having a family computer was still a desirable thing. Back then, this '06 iMac was definitely old, but now that it's nearing 20, it's definitely approaching retro.

I don't have a specific story to tell here. I've experimented with this machine a lot, trying to get different Linux distros and Windows and Mac OS X versions to run. Infuriatingly though, these machines only support 32-bit EFIs despite having 64-bit processors. It takes a lot of work to get Linux booting on these (lest you do an MBR install off of a DVD), let alone versions of OS X newer than Lion.

Once you get past those hurdles, you can theoretically run up to El Capitan, but the experience is not great as the drivers for the ATI cards in those iMacs are not present in those newer versions. You can, however, run Mavericks with functional graphics acceleration, which I did manage to do.

I don't use her much these days, but I'd like to more. Maybe I'll hook her up to CGHMN soon.

Model	17" Apple iMac 5,1 (Late 2006)
CPU	Intel Core 2 Duo T7400
GPU	ATI Radeon X1600
RAM	3GB DDR2 ???MHz
OS	Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard)
Photos	Coming Soon!

Mildred

Mildred was an interesting find. Definitely not my first foray into older hardware but definitely my favorite so far. I spotted her on eBay for pretty cheap, and what caught my eye about her was that she came with:

• Windows Vista;
• a fucking floppy drive;
• a Linksys Wireless-G card; and
• a 52K Modem card.

Such a fascinating combination of hardware I could not turn down, so I made what turned out to be a questionable but fun impulse purchase.

When I got it, it was a little banged up, but not badly enough to warrant acting on it. I tried to power it on, and while the lights came on for a second, the power supply soon failed (fortunately, not in a kaboom way).

I replaced it with the exact same supply rather than a modern one, both because having period-accurate parts was a big goal for me at the time (more on that in a bit) and because it was really cheap on eBay. I waited a few excruciatingly long days (you know how it is), installed it, and it booted up just fine.

Not only, however, was the factory Dell OEM install of Windows Vista still present on the machine, but the previous owner's data was still on it, untouched. Curious, I poked around a bit and quickly found not only viruses (worry not, I did not hook it up to my network until after a full wipe) but low-quality screencaps of pornography. Yikes.

After being my indecisive self and installing several OSes, I opted to dual-boot 32-Bit Windows XP and 64-Bit Windows Vista. I mostly use the former, as Mildred is hooked into my server on the ethernet port forwarded to my CGHMN router VM, and it feels more era-appropriate. Also, I think I broke the Vista install trying to get extended kernel working lol.

Model	Dell Dimension E521
CPU	AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ (Brisbane, 1.9GHz)
GPU	AMD Radeon R7 250
RAM	4x1GB DDR2 800MHz
OS	Windows XP/Vista (Dual-Boot)
Photos	Coming Soon!

Larry

Larry was gifted to me by a good friend of mine. He unfortunately once belonged to an indoor smoker, so he reeked to high hell when I first got him. I still haven't given him a proper cleaning as of May 2026, but I'll get around to it eventually :>

Expecting him to do nothing and for me to have to spend an egregious amount of time troubleshooting, but he booted right up.

Much like Mildred, Larry came with the previous owner's junk. Thankfully, there was no actual pornography, but there was an internet shortcut to a defunct website for tattoo fetishists, so that's fun.

Now, for the actually interesting stuff.

When I got ahold of him, both Larry's DVD-ROM drive and floppy drive were broken. Or, so I thought.

The DVD drive was definitely broken. It had a busted tray mechanism. I tore it apart and found a small gear rattling around inside, so I slid it back into its proper place, which allowed the tray to open and close again. However, it was very fragile, and if you pushed or pulled on the tray at all, it would send the gear flying again. Even so, the drive refused to read discs, so I just decided to order a new one, which arrived with an alarming lack of packing material but nonetheless works just fine.

The floppy drive, on the other hand, is a lot more interesting. I was first confronted with the need to use it when I tried to install a fresh copy of Windows 98 SE, as it'd be a lot easier than manually de-gunking the previous owner's old install, and in order to do so, you need to boot from floppy. (Note: I know you can boot from CD with the OEM version, but I didn't find this out until *after* I went through all this trouble.)

Anyways, Larry's BIOS refused to recognize the FDD, let alone boot from it. Feeling defeated, I booted back into the old 98 (First Edition ;v;) install, and saw that the drive was indeed functioning, and was able to read from and write to disks! This left me with more questions than answers, but for brevity's sake, I'll skip my haphazard investigation and just tell you what I found.

Not only was Larry's FDD functional, it was also not a regular floppy drive at all. It was an LS-120 drive, and was connected over PATA rather than the standard floppy interface. If you don't know what LS-120 is, that's okay, because neither did I until I went through this process.

In short, LS-120 was intended as a successor to floppy that could hold, as the name suggests, 120 megabytes of data. Its big selling point was that it was backwards compatible with normal floppy drives, so you could theoretically use an LS-120 drive in place of a regular floppy drive, provided your BIOS supports booting from that drive. Ultimately the format did not end up being very successful, both because of the much higher adoption fo the

The most frustrating, most mysterious part of this whole ordeal is that Larry's BIOS makes explicit mention of the ability to boot from an LS-120 drive! I have zero idea why it wouldn't work. The drive and motherboard were presumably ripped from the same Gateway PC, as the former had a Gateway part number on it, and the latter is the Intel WS440BX, a Slot 1 board used exclusively(?) in Gateway PCs.

I again retired from struggle against this decades-old hardware. Thankfully, Mildred was graciously willing to donate her floppy drive to help old Larry become a functioning member of my collection.

Model	Custom (formerly some Gateway prebuilt of unknown model)
CPU	450MHz Pentium III
GPU	NVIDIA RIVA TNT
RAM	96MB PC-100 SDRAM
OS	Windows 98 SE
Photos	Coming Soon!