"Market" for old macs?

[John Boffemmyer IV]

Well, a local FreeCycler in my area is giving up a working mac 
powerbook 5300 series (trying to find out if it is the better/more 
loaded 'ce' version). I'm thinking of picking it up since it also 
comes with power supply and spare battery that the owner says is good.
Can anyone tell me their experiences with such a machine? I believe 
it meets the 10yr rule (or is close to meeting it) as the 5300 line 
was out in 1995. Does it take standard PC (PCMCIA) cards or does it 
take mac variant PC cards? What is it's upgrade path? Can the OS be 
upped to something more recent/stable (as I've been told it started 
off with an OS 7.2.x version that was horrible)? Would Linux be a 
better choice over mac OS 9.x/10.x on it? Just looking for first hand 
experiences/knowledge.
-John Boffemmyer IV

At 02:36 PM 12/4/2005, you wrote:

>On Sun, 4 Dec 2005 10:51:57 -0800 (PST)
>Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> wrote:
>
> > > > interesting. The most collectible is the SE30.
> > >
> > > Update:  I did snag the SE/30 from work.  Thanks to all for
> > > the advice.
> >
> > I think you'll enjoy it. :)
> >
>
>I'm now enjoying the SE that I picked up yesterday.  I have a CD
>burner installed on it and am figuring out just what software will
>run on it.  It has an Ethernet card, so I plan on fetching some of
>the things suitable for the machine and burning to CD.  It came
>with OS 7.1 installed on it, and I've preserved that.  I
>'upgraded' to an Apple 250M hard drive, as I could see the 20
>megger being completely filled up almost immediately (it already
>was, as received).  It's really nice that you can just format and
>copy over entire drives on the Mac.  I plugged in an external SCSI
>drive and 'copied over' the entire 20 Meg original drive, then
>replaced the internal drive with an Apple 250, then booted from
>the external drive and copied it's contents over to the new
>internal drive.
>
>I'm right now in the process of installing a PDP-8 Simulator on it
>from a shareware CD I got years ago.
>
> > --
> > --------------------------------- personal:
> > http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ ---
> >   Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com *
> >   ckaiser at floodgap.com
> > -- FORTUNE: The moon is in Venus' house. This will make no
> > difference. --------


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