# iMac

Al of DECSystem10 here. And yes that is our system's name.

So we got an iMac for our birthday (two months ahead of time but
still) and it is easily the best present we've ever gotten.

It seems to be kinda unusual as far as iMacs go. The case is
definitely Bondi Blue and yet it seems to have the specs of an iMac
from 1999, as it has a 333 MHz processor and a 6 GB hard drive.

When I got it, it seemed to work perfectly well. Only real bad
thing is that getting burned CDs to work with it was a coin toss
due to the CD-ROM's laser dying over time. Thankfully I was able
to get everything to work reasonably well.

It came with Mac OS 9.2.1 installed. I figured that something Mac
OS 9 was the best fit for this computer, so I installed the Mac OS
9 Lives community edition of Mac OS 9.2.2.[0]

I was able to get some pieces of Adobe (Illustrator, Photoshop,
PageReady) and Macromedia (Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Director)
installed as well as Microsoft Office. However, I had enough with
CDs becoming coasters. I decided to buy the original keyboard off
of eBay to free up my precious USB ports and be able to use a USB
drive to transfer files. I also decided to try and get it on the
Internet.

However, Internet was going to be a huge challenge, and I knew
there was a real possibility of this thing never going online. I
unfortunately am forced to use Wi-Fi, so connection options were
limited. I do have a bunch of USB Wi-Fi adapters that work with
the BSDs, but it seems they require Mac OS X Tiger, so OS 9 was
just not going to cut it. I decided to get a cheap Wi-Fi repeater
and that did the trick once I was able to set it up.

It works even better than the travel routers I have used in the
past. It puts it directly on my network rather than a NAT like the
travel routers I use. It's perfect for my usecase, and I wish I
knew of it beforehand. Probably would help get BSD on more things
I own.

I enjoy working within Mac OS 9. I think it has earned a spot among
my favorite operating systems. It's more that it's an OS that I
can sit down at and do creative things with without a lot of thought
and prepration.

While I do enjoy UNIX-like OSes, it's easy to get distracted by
configuration. Now, I do enjoy my configurable environments and I
think I found the perfect workflow for me between Void Linux and
Niri, it is nice to not have to think so hard. Mac OS 9 just lets
me work and not worry because it's good enough.

It also doesn't want to vacuum up your data, even when online.
That's certainly a bonus.

---

[0]: http://macos9lives.com/downloads