The Power Macintosh 7500: Let's Start to Re-Create My Power Mac from 2003 (Computerized Start™ Live)

2003 was a year of changes, both for the industry and for myself: Apple released the first Power Mac G5 computers, I bought my first brand-new Apple computer, and I switched to the Mac.

I stared 2003 with my PC from college, which was running Gentoo Linux at the time. (Not knocking Gentoo today, but this was the era of having to install from a Stage 1 installer, which I didn't find sustainable.) And while I had ideas for upgrading my PC with a recently-announced (or at least recently-affordable) 800MHz FSB Pentium 4 processor, I also remember reading about the up-and-coming Mac OS X, which was based on BSD Unix.

That's one way to appeal to a Linux user, one having good memories of using Macs in middle and high school.

And being 2003, Power Mac 7500/7600 computers were available on eBay for rock-bottom prices. So I bought one so that I could run Mac OS. And to get the most out of this Mac, I even spent less than $40 (in 2003 dollars) for a G3 upgrade for that 7500/7600. But according to my email records, it wasn't long before I sold the 7500/7600 and the G3 upgrade, and with the proceeds bought a beige G3 tower.

I recently bought a Power Mac 7200 from a Facebook Marketplace seller for about $20, and it turned out to be a Power Mac 7500/7600 with a 7200's lid. And after that, I found a G3 upgrade card on eBay for about $100... it's looking like I have the components needed to rebuild the Power Mac I had for a few short months in 2003.

And better yet, I demonstrated in a livestream last week that the 233MHz G3 card I bought seems to run at 266MHz, which is the actual clock speed of the upgrade card I had back in 2003. Nostalgia!

Will I find an appropriate version of Mac OS to run on my 7500/7600? Will I find a compatible extension to enable the backside cache? Will this 233MHz card run stable at 266MHz? You'll have to watch to find out!

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