I have come to own two Macintosh LC's. Through no fault of their own, the owners abandoned them thinking they'd be of no use in their slow and plodding way. After all, their creator didn't endow them with exceptional speed. They only run at 20 Mhz. With a 68020 chipset. But, there IS something about these flat, pizza boxes that holds an appeal to people.

I prized these two new arrivals enough to do something very special with them. One of them is now serving as a unique and stylish external hard drive. Visit the web site to see how it turned out: http://www.sisp.net/~sulement/elegant.htm

It sits under the monitor of my latest Mac. It is an excellent solution for a one gigabyte external hard drive fitting almost invisibly in cramped quarters on a small desk. And it sets the monitor at a better viewing angle, too.

The second LC was given a heart transplant. I removed the 40 MB hard drive running System 7.1, and popped in an 80 MB drive, loaded System 6.0.8 and a big helping of the CDEV's and INIT's I discovered while pouring over the System 6 Heaven web site and others.

It's basic contents are: 6 megs of RAM on the motherboard, and Virtual 3.0 from Connectix, a RAM-adding program for 68020 and 68030 Macs. Virtual runs on System 6 machines pretty well. It boosted my RAM to 13 MB.

To be productive with, I have a couple word processing programs, spreadsheet program, drawing, painting and graphics programs, games, system and hard drive utilities.

In the System Folder, there's a big bunch of CDEVs and INITs that give my LC a look reminiscent of more modern Macs, but with a boot time of under 30 seconds.

To start with, I use DeskPict so I boot to a desktop picture instead of a plain pattern. A change in VRAM chip upped the colors available to thousands, instead of the standard 256 colors the machine came with.

I have ClickChange, which allows me to customize my window frames, headers, colors and cursors. Right now, I'm using the "Windows" PC-look to make it amusing. The cursor is a rainbow
that constantly changes color in use.

In the Apple Menu, I have HierDA, a DA for hierarchical menus like those used in newer OSes. Windowshade 1.1 is in use here so I can "roll up" windows to view the Desktop when I need to.
I have MultiCache, a disk caching utility for floppies and the hard drive.

For fun, I have BigFoot, a CDEV that sends two bare feet tromping across your desktop at their own will. MacTalker, which speaks a paragraph I create in its text-box. I have it saying the Lewis Carroll short from Alice Through the Looking Glass, " 'twas brillig, and the slithey toves."

Adding to its business functionality, I have ValueFax, a fax machine program for transmitting documents I created in a word processing program.

Regular backups of changes in programs are handled by FastBack II, version 2.00. I also have Stuffit 1.5, Copy II Mac and Shrink To Fit on there , too.

Keeping the hard drive healthy is a job for Spirit Utilities, along with Disk Doctor v1.0. Should I ever see signs of dying sectors, I have two other hard drives standing by. One is a direct copy of the one in use, so I can do a "nuke-and-pave", reformat the in-use drive in hopes of saving it for reuse.

There's not much that's lacking here in this Mac despite its age. And despite using a so-called OLD System version. I can't copy and paste icons, so I'm stuck with 2 dimensional ones, unless I can hack into it with ResEdit, something I haven't tried yet.

The programs are old, but I'll never say they're useless. And. I could get along well in this modern world with the setup I have in this LC, this so-called cast-off. Considering that a large portion of these CDEVS and INITS were freeware, as was the System software, this whole project is a testament to low-resource computing.

Did I mention I also have the Apple II card, cable and software? These goodies allow me to use a 5-1/4 inch floppy drive, joystick and the old Apple II software and games.

So, honestly, do you really think these old fellows deserve to be cast off as just so much junk and nonsense? I don't. These LC's of mine more than justify the little work I've put into them. They're an astounding resource for daily home and home-office tasks, MORE than able to pull their weight. And a shining example of the usefulness of System 6 even to this day.

Adding them to a small desk along with a printer and a 12 inch monitor STILL gives lots of elbowroom. These old machines are hard working, useful machines for a mere pittance, made
even MORE astounding when used with System 6 goodies you can HAVE for the price of a download.

Jeff Garrison
"Finding New Uses For Old Macs is What I'm All About."

There is also a page with some pictures of screenshots so you can get a better idea of how Jeff's Mac looks like.