One exception is: play System 6 and early System 7 games. Some of them won't run except at 640 x 480 x 8-bit color, won't run under MacOS 9 (& therefore won't run under Classic), don't work properly under Basilisk (lacking sound, for example, or the clock timing being all shot to hell), can't run under vMac (because of the color requirement), and so the only way to play them is on an older Mac like the IIcx.
Another exception is: true black-and-white display. Under MacOS X, you're always in color mode, minimum 256 colors (8-bit). Even MacOS 9 won't do black-and-white, although it will do 256 greys. I know some people like to have access to the crispness of black-and-white for extensive text work.
Let's see...OK, if you've got any old 32-bit-"dirty" programs that won't run in 32-bit mode, you can run them in 24-bit mode on older Macs like the IIcx under System 7 (or System 6 for that matter). You could also run them in vMac, but only if they run in black-and-white (and some 24-bit-only programs required color).
And any program that is set up to run properly only when booted from the application's floppy disk. (Again, games...some of them were distributed on copy-protected bootable floppies).
What else? Well, if you can get your hands on a copy of A/UX, you can run that, and you sure can't run it on an iMac. The A/UX operating system was Apple's first Unix, and, like MacOS X, it runs standard Mac applications (of its era, of course) as well as Unix apps. It still has a dedicated following, and you can still get compiled binaries for A/UX.
Read Macintosh floppy disks, including the old 800K ones and the really old 400K ones. Read MS-DOS floppy disks. Read Apple II floppy disks.
Print to a classic serial-port printer, hook up an ADB artist's tablet, hook up an old DaynaFile drive to your IIcx's SCSI port and be able to read any old 5 1/4" floppy disks from the era before PCs switched to the 3.5" diskette. Use a LocalTalk-dependent Laser Printer. Use an ImageWriter to print triplicate carbon-copy forms that come on tractor-feed paper. And use it as a scanner: install ThunderScan!
At 5:13 PM -0400 5/4/05, Glenn Emery wrote:
...
So now I'm wondering, what do I do with this little machine now that it's running again? It got about 10 years of solid use as a word processor back in the day, but the iMac handles all of that now, plus all the other normal computer stuff like e-mail and Internet. The 16Mhz processor and 40meg hard drive don't seem big enough to do much other than be a glorified typewriter.
...
I just don't know what to do with this little IIcx now that it's running again. I hate to trash it. Are there any practical uses for it, or is it too obsolete to bother? I figure if anybody knows, it will be someone here.
Glenn
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