Jon:

Out of curiousity, you co uld play with any Mac OS up to and including 9.x on any Performa, the Mac II and IIc series, and even the older Classic. But it is a very clunky operating system if you drive it hard at all. There was no RAM segementation for application heaps, and if one app ran over its allocated RAM, it would crash the whole system. There was no threading as we know it in Linux, so one app could lose all your work in several apps at once.

Even with these drawbacks, it was well-loved in the days when slow computers still saved all kinds of time. It just couldn't keep up with the exponential increase in memory requirements and simultaneous processes.

My wife, the Mac expert, says the earliest Mac that could run OSX was a beige G3 of November 1997, but barely. People later did well with a 512 Meg 300 MHz G3 (probably one of the blue ones). Video cards and RAM available made a big difference. I run it quite happily on a dual-processor PPC G5 with 2.5GB of RAM -- with two x 2GHz processors and a 1GHz bus, 127MB of VRAM driving an Apple Cinema HD display. I am seriously spoiled. :D



A