Punked out.

So I unhooked the TAM from where it's been sitting in the corner of the dining room and parked it away. I schlepped a 14" Apple monitor, and an old keyboard and mouse down from the attic. I went back upstairs, dug out the massive Quadra 950, dragged it to the head of the stairs, and...

...punked out.

I realized that this beast didn't have a CD-ROM drive. I had never booted it up, and had no clue what OS was already on it. I have no OS floppies well, except for system 6.0.7 for my SE; fat lot of good that does me if something's pooched. There's a SCSI external CD burner around here someplace, but hey, look! A Power Macintosh 7100/66! It has a CD drive! And I've played with plenty of Power Macs lately. I'll just work up to tackling the '040 tower gradually by getting my feet wet with a much more familiar old Mac.

I turned the 7100 on for the first time and it chimed to life without a hiccup. It sported 40MB of RAM and (whoah!) a brace of 1.5GB hard drives. That's pretty sexy specs for 1994; I think at the time I was using a 486DX/66 with... 8? 16? MB of memory and a 250MB HDD and there wasn't a game it wouldn't run.

The 7100 was running OS 8.0; I immediately threw in my 8.6 upgrade CD, and while it was crunching away, I went to find my 9.1 CD.

Which was in my TAM. Which was all powered down. Thank $DEITY for paperclips...

Unfortunately, to upgrade from 8.6 to 9.1, you have to boot from the CD, which this 7100 resolutely refuses to do, no matter how I prod it. More later...