Apple Macintosh Classic running System 7.5.3

You know, to the uninitiated, installing an operating system in your computer is a daunting and complex task, full of the great unknown and the fear you may cause permanent damage to your beloved and expensive computer. To those of us who remember two floppy Linux installs and alpha-quality partitioning tools, installing an OS is easy; bung in the CD, press ‘Agree’ then ‘Next’ until it starts installing.

Are you feeling bored? Is the challenge of reinstalling Ubuntu or XP not hitting your tech g-spot any more? Then try a new one - get a Mac Classic running System 7.0.0 and attempt to install System 7.5.3 on it using nothing more than two floppy disks and another computer with a USB floppy drive and the Internet.

Those of you who owned a Mac back in the 90s will probably look at Apple’s site and go “ahh sea.bin files, righto I’ll just put Stuffit Expander on my Mac and away we go”. Then you’ll realise you need a system 7.0.1 or higher boot disk in order to mount the install image. Those of us who were messing around with Atari STs and low spec PCs at the time (being fascinated by Windows 3.0 on our 286s, even though all it did was play Solitaire) will take several hours to even work out what a sea.bin file is, and even longer to work out how to get the sodding thing into our old Mac. Thank you Google, you made the job only take a day.

I’ll write up the process later, along with a separate doc explaining how to diagnose and fix RAM faults since one of those cropped up too. Old hardware is ace stuff, it’s so knackered and liable to stop working at any moment. You want to see the corrosion on my Mac’s motherboard. In fact the whole inside of a Mac Classic is verging on a work of art.