Imagesource: https://erichelgeson.github.io/

You know how it is. Some manufacturer every other day launches a new CPU on the market. Then you buy a new computer with exactly that thing, because you hope to finally get rid of the lag. The thing is at least 4.58 million times faster than the previous generation from ... yesterday … so you had to buy it.

You also double the RAM and off you go. At the beginning it all looks good, but I can already see the days coming, when even on a Mac Studio equipped with a M1 Ultra the start of Chrome takes 12 seconds and opening a "modern SPA" takes another 10. 🐌

Somehow this has become the norm and a disease of the digital civilization, where software is no longer optimized, but you just throw more transistors at it at the level below.

Eric Helgeson goes exactly in the opposite direction. He suggests the use of a Mac Plus or early PowerPC and uses Macintosh System 7.1 on them.

The extremely small memory footprint and the good availability of software for 7 make the system quite attractive for many tasks, even today. 

And Eric has compiled a wonderful article, inside you find everything worth knowing as well as resources needed to give the thing legs, and teach it missing skills.

Feel like tinkering? Your'e welcome!