Looking back to only a few months ago I laugh at my own stupidity. I have been a Mac user for 5 or 6 years. I always say if the second computer I every used was *not* a Macintosh that I doubt I would every have used another computer every again; so awful was my first experience of a Wintel box. But in all that time, including working as a support in the well know Mac based multimedia arts project called backspace.org, I never stopped to presume that there was a Mac OS prior to system 7. Mac OS just was 7.

I guess that I have Luddite tendencies and avoided the whole of PC world, including Macs, until I discovered that you could do really funky underground things with them. Prior to this they had just been office machines or exclusively unaffordable. Initially poverty limited me to found or recycled machines but these prove to be the best to stretch your creativity with and great places to break your teeth learning all the dumb things you can and cannot do to computers.

A desperate necessity for basic support brought me to Dan Knight's excellent lowendmac.com for a source of tech advice on all these rescued puppies I was finding and fixing up for folks. Later, subsequent to some good natured jousting on one of Dan's email lists, a sense of mastery over the basic tech skills and a need of a new challenge lead me to Marten's intriguing System 6 Heaven.

Hosting a Xmas party for UK based Classic Mac fans, where a collection of 12 different Compacts Macs models appeared from all over southern England including Stuart Bell's incredible Color Classic customs, inspired me to get to grips with a tight little minimalist mailer. An SE/30 was set up especially for just journalism and email. It was Marten's boasts about how fast "Sister Six" was and how suitable it was as a creative writing machine that spiked my curiosity. Surely not I thought, as much suckered into the newer is better mentality that we are sold by the companies making a profit out of it.

OS6 it had to be and, as such, I was so surprised. It did everything I wanted. Took seconds to boot. Even had a neat little "mono" finder to match the compact's monochrome display. One app at a time, this is just what I wanted, not all that bloat that they were selling me to do something that I would never use. I write professionally. I mail. What more do need?

How many times had a brilliant idea descended upon me in the middle of the night only to have dissapated back into the ether by the time the morning came just because it was too cold to crawl out of bed, sit and wait for minutes as the G3 booted, screen warm up, wait again for a DTP app to launch only to have to switch off in as many minutes later. I must be the only writer to suffer from RSI [ Repetitive Strain Injury ] from having to get up out of bed. In fact, I wanted something that could sit on the side of my bed, launch in seconds, get the work done and let me get back to the serious work of sleep. Much to my surprise, going back with 6 and a 16 MHz chip - not forwards and upwards with a 500 MHz chip - did just this.

Sitting at my desk with a pile of bits in front of me one day, I wondered what 6 looked like in colour. Something Marten said about it running millions of colours made me think, for so long had it been synonymous with black and white. So I took the HD out of the SE/30 and stuck it in a IIci I had open. What I forgot was that I had previously fitted the IIci with 68040 Daystar Turbo 40 MHz upgrade card. A card that fits in a proprietary processor slot on the IIci motherboard.

As the system booted I was amazed at the speed of it but even more by a customisation of The Happy Mac icon. The Daystar customises this to look as though it is wearing a little t-shirt saying " Turbo 040 ". I was doubly surprised because I never loaded any extensions into the system to run it. A few restarts and the odd flip of an application confirmed to me that we were "cooking with gas", the Turbo was kicking in and performance maxing out. The system booted in under 5 seconds. Application slapped so hard on the inside of the CRT that I thought they were going to crack the glass. It was all instant acceleration, foot to the floor stuff.

I switched it off and wondered what next to do. These were uncharted waters and I had no manuals to guide me. But yet I took a floppy of the Daystar Quad Control v 2.3 and installed it into the System Folder. The next reboot revealed that it was totally at home. Not just the Happy Mac shirted sign showed but also the large Daystar logo appeared during extension boot. The Control Panel sat happily amongst the perfunctory OS 6 panels and allowed control over processor and maths co-processor. The Turbo-ed IIci was ripping up the drag strip.

I ran some test in Speedometer to confirm. The Mac was performing 4 times faster than STD and with figures very closely comparable to the top of the range Quadra 840 AV - but faster - and with an amazing ten times better maths co-processor speed than STD. This must have been quite a card when it was new.

Figures relative to a 605. Higher is faster.

What makes this even more interesting to me is that this card is also suitable for use in an SE/30 with the right SE/30 PDS Adapter Card, unfortunately not readily available any more though, the thought of being able to add a Turbo to my SE/30 drove me to look into this further. There is a Japanese company offering similar cards but for a premium of $170 or more. Way too much to conscience. And yet a conversation with another UK based Mac tech and collector, Ka-Wei Lo, made me realize that it would be very easy to rig an adapter up out of spare parts *if* an original could be found to tested.

At present we are looking for a owner of one to let us borrow it to run the multimeter on it to analyse the pin outs. If anyone has one and could let us do this I and many others would appreciate it a lot.

In another life, I used to be a biker, a motorcyclist. In fact, I only got into computers because they were cheaper and marginally less painful to crash. What ever type of biker one is, there are two different types of motorcycle to which one aspires; the chopper or the cafe racer. Traditionally, both adhered to the same principles. Take an old redundant machine, "chop off" all the extraneous crap, strip the equipment down to absolute minimum, stick the most powerful engine one can find in the frame and then go get it dirty doing work.

I never found this sort of raw utilitarian pleasure in modern operating systems which seemed too intent on making too many people too happy. Quickly they have become soft, heavy, 'Billet Barges" as they are known in biker circles; over-weight, over-sized, over-priced and ridiculous looking. Parodies of what they once were. Stuffed to the gills with extras you don't need like some fat touring Honda Goldwing insultating you from the experience of the road or environment. Anonymous and yet unnecessarily intrusive at the same times. So what if you can play games on them.

I still use the twelve year old SE/30 and OS6 on the internet daily. It can boot up, download mail and dial off *quicker* even than the G3 on 9.1 takes to load is extensions. And with a 040 Daystar Turbo 40 MHz card, I have proven that I could be doing it even faster. Even under 6.

An OS is is not simply an old or a new one. Each one is still contemporary, they just do a different job and OS6 still does an excellent job. 6, probably the last OS to be hand written in Assembly Code, has gone out of date no more so than a fine wine, single malt whiskey or a Chippendale chair would do. This is a radical concept that needs to be grasped and I wish would lead to the development of more stripped to the bone operating systems, alternatives or the continued development of this fine platform. I wished a similar hotrod OS was available for PPC chips and may be Linux or BSD will provide this where OS X has gone off to out bloat Windows.

Donors of an SE/30 PDS adapters gratefully welcome. You can have it back after, just do the patriotic thing and let us back engineer it. Thanks.

please mail me if you can help