Hardware/software you have that no one talks about.

[Arbystpossum]

I've got an OrangePC 620 myself in a 7300, bumped up to a 400MHz K6-II. It's a little wacky with the G4 upgrade, though.

Mine also has a K6-II at 450Mhz. It's neat, but I'm tempted to slot in something less powerful. The GPU on it isn't the best, and a I don't want to be tempted to use software mode because of the beefy CPU. I'm also worries about the weight of the heatsink and the stress on the board. It's probably ok. Probably.

 

[splorp]

Ok, I have another one … Transoft SCSI-Net.

This was a SCSI hub that allowed up to six Macs to share a single SCSI device, usually a hard drive. In the configuration we had at Image Club Graphics (circa 1994 to 1996), each Mac ran client software and had an accelerated SCSI card (something Nubus, like an ATTO Silicon Express) that connect to the SCSI-Net hub via 15 or 20 foot SCSI cables. The hard drive attached to the hub was partitioned into different volumes, primary so out creative team could access different projects saved on each volume.

Using the shared volumes was a bit like version control, where a user would “check out” a volume when working on a given project, giving them read-write access. That volume would be read-only to the other users, until it was “checked in”.

It was way faster than file sharing over ethernet, as it was essentially connecting another SCSI drive to your machine.

There’s a blurb about it in this August 1993 issue of Macworld.

I still have the hub, the comically huge cables, and the master install CD in the collection.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

What a fascinating idea. I assume they were implemented as LUNs or something.