My Beige G3 (added to my collection in 2003)

• PowerPC G3 CPU @ 333Mhz (overclocked from 266Mhz)
• 768MB RAM (maximum)
• 73GB 15k RPM U320 (on PCI SCSI)
• Iomega Zip-100 (onboard SCSI)
• Iomega JAZ-2G (onboard SCSI)
• DVD/CD-RW (onboard ATAPI)
• PCI USB 2.0 Card (pretty sure OS9 only sees it as USB 1.1)
• 10Base-T (onboard)
• LocalTalk network connectivity (used as a file server for old Mac’s and IIgs)
• MacOS 9.1 (OSX Drops internal floppy support, and no externals will do 400/800K)

I use this G3 as a go-between (tweener) for getting software and data to and from my vintage Mac’s and Apple II’s since it can read the 400/800K GCR formatted Mac/ProDOS disks, and it can speak LocalTalk on its serial ports to network with my other LocalTalk Macs and Apple IIgs.  Everyone who collects vintage Macs should probably have a Beige G3 as a “tweener” Mac 😉

It should be noted if you plan on reading from and writing to 400k MFS disks, you should probably stick to OS8, as OS9 drops MFS support, however if you just need to make a boot disk, OS9 can still write MFS images via diskcopy, just not native finder file access.

I am using this Beige G3 with an IBM PS2 keyboard with track-point mouse via a PS2 to USB adapter to save some space, one thing to keep in mind when using USB peripherals on a Beige machine is that they wont work at boot time, so if I need to boot from CD or without extensions I need to hook up an ADB keyboard to perform those tasks.