Earlier this month, Dave Lawrence of Newton Poetry set forth a challenge:
Low end Mac users are masochists. There’s no easy way to take a classic Macintosh and do modern, enjoyable work without some pain or effort involved. Everything is a project.
[…]
I’m undertaking a bit of an experiment: spending an entire week with nothing but my low end Macs. I’m leaving my new 21.5″ iMac switched off, using my iPhone 3G for phone calls only, and relying only on Apple products that were released in the 1990s.
His original post outlines the hardware and software he is planning on using. The title of his project is a little misleading, though, as he is now looking at using OS 8 — not System 7 — as his main classic OS for the length of the experiment. That aside, it is a totally badass summer project.
During the preparation phase over the last few weeks, Lawrence ran into a major problem: iTunes. He explains the problem:
For music, I have a few options – all apps that, as the classic Mac OS period ended, paved the way for iTunes’s dominance. These are apps like SoundJam, iTunes predecessor, and Audion from Panic. I grabbed the final copy of Audion, but wondered if OS 8 could handle an early copy of iTunes.
In a roundabout way, it can. Apparently, the original version 1.0 and 1.1 are both able to run on Mac OS 8.6, with help from a certain patch. Load the patch, install iTunes 1.0 or 1.1, and enjoy the wonderfulness of Apple’s first version of its now-dominant music app.
Except when it comes to legacy software, patches, and theoretically-incompatible operating systems, failure is always an option.
Patching iTunes to work with Mac OS 8.6 ended up being a major failure, as these things often do. He ended up with this jewel of an error message at one point.
I simply love projects like this. Seeing new life breathed into old Macs is always fun.
The only downside is that now I want to install 8.6 on my original Clamshell iBook and go to town.