Day: October 24, 2008

Using a Macintosh to Share Wireless Internet

My wireless router was faulty and it was the middle of the month. Pay day was still two weeks away. Instead of buying a new airport base station, I decided to use an iBook G3 clamshell to share the internet connection.

Almost all new macs come with an airport card. Even older hardware like G3 iBooks and iMacs are able to accept the original 802.11b airport card with a transfer speed of 11 mbps. Most broadband connections today average 2 mbps to 12 mbps. There are providers offering up to 100mbps but home users will never fully utilise it.

I tried to do a clean install of OS X Panther 10.3 but the CD-Rom drive was a little fussy and refused to read the disk properly. Not willing to give up, I decided to push on. The iBook G3 I had was the non firewire model. Thus it was impossible to reinstall the OS from another mac.  I took the iBook apart to extract the hard drive. A copy of OS X Tiger 10.4 was installed and the hard drive replaced.

After putting everything back together, the iBook booted up with that familiar sounding chime. In system preferences, there is an icon for sharing. Once in that preference pane, select share my connection from ethernet to airport. Click on the options to create a name for the wireless network and set a password. Next, start the interet sharing service and you will be surfing online from all the other computers around the house or office.

The iBook may be old but it is still serving a useful purpose acting as a wireless base station.

Macintosh SE/30 Profile

Launched on 19th January 1989, it was the most powerful of all the Compact Macintosh models. Inside the case was a 9 inch black and white screen with a 16 mhz 68030 processor, 1mb of ram, 40 mb hard drive and a 1.44mb floppy drive.

In those days, floppy disks came in SD (Single Sided), DS (Double Sided) and HS (High Density) formats. The storage size are 400 kb, 800kb and 1.44 mb respectively. The SE/30 had a Superdrive and could read all formats. It’s a great machine to copy data and troubleshoot older macs.

Internal hard drives came standard at 40 mb but there was an option to upgrade it to 80 mb. To replace or upgrade the drives, you will need to find one with a SCSI interface. The Macintosh SE/30 can take up to a large 3.5 inch half height SCSI drive. 

There were 8 ram slots allowing it to be upgraded to a gigantic 128 mb through 16 mb 30 pin SIMMs. For the system to access more than 8 mb of ram, you will need to install a software patch from Apple called Mode32. The reason for this was that the ROMs in the SE/30 contained 24-bit code thus rendering it impossible to run 32-bit applications.

Although this computer had a black and white screen, there was an expansion slot. The PDS slot had 120 pins allowing the option of adding a network card or colour graphics card. This expansion slot is different from that found in the Macintosh SE.

As one of the most upgradeble and powerful compact Macintosh, many were used as servers or workstations. It’s usability sure makes it a must have for every Mac collector.