"Market" for old macs?

[Sridhar Ayengar]

John Boffemmyer IV wrote:
> 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.

I don't believe this machine will run OS 10.  I don't think it'll run 
9.2 either.  It's 9.1 or before.  Also, bear in mind that this machine 
will have a hard drive with about 500MB so you might need to upgrade. 
My suggestion would be to try a newish version of OS 8.  Anything better 
than OS 8.6 should allow you use ~8 GB drives.  Another thing to know is 
that it maxes out at 64MB RAM, so don't try to run Mozilla on it.  8-)

I wouldn't bother taking it if it's not a color model, but that's just me.

NetBSD won't run on it since it's NuBus, and I don't know too much about 
NuBus Linux.  Maybe someone else can comment.

Peace...  Sridhar