Glad others chimed in. I got some good clues, too.

Of course, you may not have access to many of the things we take for 
granted here, like external SCSI CD drives, or even Mac SCSI cables.

Thinking of which, the people who gave you these Macs may have hung on 
to peripherals and cables, thinking to be able to use them with their 
MSDOS/MSWindows or *nix systems. You might want to ask them to throw 
your way anything they decide they can't use after all, like the old 
Mac SCSI cables, and maybe even external SCSI drives with Mac ROMS in 
them.

In fact, you may, with a little help, be able to use some of the 
non-Mac SCSI devices they might decide to get rid of.

Are you aware of these:

     http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=8970
     http://www.info.apple.com/support/applespec.legacy/index.html

Apple has quite a wealth of information on their site still, which can 
often be a lot of help. There are also other sites, perhaps the most 
well-known is

     http://www.lowendmac.com/

which is a very good starting point for all sorts of questions. 
Assignments to search these sites for answers could be very good 
training in fundamental IT skills.

I really shouldn't indulge in the off-topic, but, ...

On 2004/03/08, at 22:38, Charles The Hawk wrote:

>
> --- Joel Rees <joel_rees@sannet.ne.jp> wrote:
>> On 2004/03/08, at 1:44, Charles The Hawk wrote:
>>
>>> I help with an orphanage in Zambia which was
>>> given several old Mac IIci's and a Quadra 950.  We
>>> would like to use them to teach the orphans basic
>>> computing skills.
>> How old are these orphans? And what do you mean by
>> "basic"?
> 6-18.

Nice range.

>  Typing, introductory word processing,
> spreadsheet, programming,

Up to this point the real skills are common to any platform. I'd go 
further, but this really is not the forum to rant in.

> O/S configuration, etc.

I think many of the important skills are common to any platform here, 
as well.

> I don't recall seeing many jobs available for MacOS
> administrators, but there is some demand for Unix-
> like systems administrators.

This is something else that may surprise you, but I've seen people move 
from Macs to other systems with far fewer problems than coming to Mac 
from other platforms. Again, that's a topic for another forum.

>> netBSD may not be appropriate. Mac OS 7 probably is
>> okay, really.
> I haven't seen much practical "freeware" software
> available in my searches.  That's a major problem.

There's some out there. Some of it has been disappearing lately, but 
the essential stuff is still available. What you can't find, ask me or 
someone else here about, off-list if it isn't topical.

Of course, part of the surprise is how much freeware isn't necessary on 
the old Mac systems. For example, under the old Mac OS, you could hook 
two Macs up with one of those weird Mac serial cables and set up basic 
networking without requiring any 3rd party stuff at all. Slow (in 
modern terms), and I don't remember ever booting across one of those 
cables, but file sharing worked well that way.

Back in System 6 days, there were freeware and shareware gadgets to 
read and write MS-DOS disks, but in System 7 Apple supplied the basic 
functionality with optional-install extensions.

>>>  For security reasons, all the
>>> IIci's had the hard drives erased, so we've been
>>> installing the O/S on them.
>> Pretty straightforward, isn't it? Especially when
>> compared to, say, pre-1996 MSWxx. ;-) Hey,
>> installing the Mac OS could actually be a good
>> assignment for some of your beginners, don't you
>> think?
> Heh, i guess that would be my own children.  They
> are the ones installing the OS to see which machines
> work and which don't.

I would think the experience would be useful to your students, but that 
may just be me.

>>>   I'd really prefer to
>>> teach them using something not so proprietary,
>> Well, I don't particularly consider the old Mac OS
>> any more proprietary
>> than the usual option. It's a lot easier to use at
>> the beginner's level, too.
> I doubt there are any Macs being used commercially
> in Zambia.  We are trying to help them get jobs.
> Perhaps i'm wrong, but i think someone familiar with
> a Unix-like system can more easily pick up other
> systems.

It's good theory, but the real world is in the direction of GUI. They 
need both of course, because even a graphics artist can benefit by 
understanding the concept that he can write his own filters, macros, 
and scripts. And any sys-ad who thinks GUI is beneath his/her dignity 
is likely to spend his/her entire (short) sys-ad career making life 
miserable for the very users he/she is supposed to be supporting.

And, of course, you are familiar with the fact that Mac OS X is doing 
reasonably well for a supposed niche-player. (Yeah! Mach+BSD+Mac. Gotta 
drag this back, well, almost on topic. ;)

>   If you can drive a tractor/trailer, you
> can probably drive a car,

(But not on the freeways. :)

>  but the reverse isn't
> necessarily true.  I think my own children who have
> grown up with Linux, are far more proficient with
> computers than their friends who have only known the
> "Start" button.

Well, one nice thing about the old Macs is there is no task bar, and 
there is no accursed "Start Everything Here!!!!" button. ;->

(I know that some people blame the Apple menu for the Start button, and 
Apple did have to remind developers not to encourage users who wanted 
to put the kitchen sink under the Apple menu, but there is a 
fundamental difference.)

>>> However, when i run the Booter, i
>>> get the message "Bye-bye [blah, blah]" and the
>>> machine freezes.  Heh, it certainly *shouldn't*
>>> be done like that.
>> Which Linux are you using, and which utilities? And,
>> incidentally, there's supposedly a useable Mac68k
>> Debian build. Looking at that may help.
> I eventually got the mkfs copied and initialized the
> partition, but the booter still locks up.  I'm not
> having much success with Debian either.  It doesn't
> seem to work very well with 8MB RAM.  My son is
> working on a stripped down root.bin to see if we
> can get that to work.

As you can see from the responses, stripping down the kernel isn't 
necessarily the direction to go. If I understand what Kazu said, you'll 
need a donation of RAM from somewhere.

>  However, from searching the
> mailing lists, it looks like netBSD might work a
> bit better than Linux on slow, small RAM machines.

I just find myself looking both places for clues sometimes.

>>> I'm booting the Mac with no extensions, virtual
>>> memory disabled, 32 bit memory on, video set to
>>> 1-bit.
>> How big are your disks? (I suggest > 300MB.) How
>> much RAM in the machines? (I suggest > 16MB.) If you
>> don't have FPUs, are you using the marvelous soft
>> floating point builds that have been getting so much
>
>> attention on the list lately?
> Most have 230MB HDs and 8MB RAM.  The ones with 80MB
> drives and the IIsi's with only 4MB RAM we were going
> to use MacOS on for the introductory stuff. I
> was hoping to use the others for more advanced
> training.  No way to increase the memory as there
> are only 1MB SIMMs.

And probably not even a spare USD 15 to get any bigger RAMs on eBay or 
whatever. The thing that's slowing me down about getting a couple of 
FPUs for my Performas is that I just don't like to use plastic money, 
and postal money orders are something of a hassle.

>>> Perhaps i should just give up the idea and try to
>>> find a good typing tutor or something what will
>>> run under MacOS?
>> A GUI text editor and some other sundry tools are
>> included in the system install disks. You can
>> download Macintosh Programmers Workbench (CLI,
>> assembler/compiler) and various debuggers from
>> Apple for free. (Mac OS 7.5 can also be downloaded
>> for free.) Last I looked, MacPerl was still
>> available.
> Yeah, i've downloaded 7.5.3.

I don't remember the specifics, but for most of the 68K hardware, 7.5.5 
was the most stable/useable. (Well, actually, 8.1 works even better on 
the '040 boxes, but it isn't a free download at this point, and it 
requires over 100MB disk space to do anything useful.) 7.5.5 is a 
two-step process, since you have to apply the updater to 7.5.3. One 
problem with 7.5 vs. 7.1, of course, is that 7.1 will run somewhat 
comfortably in 80MB of HD, but 7.5 won't, unless all you are using is 
ClarisWorks 1.0, and saving all data off to floppies.

(Hmm. I had trouble booting netBSD from an external drive last year on 
a Performa 550. If I still have trouble with the soft-float builds, 
maybe I should try putting netBSD on the internal drive and booting Mac 
OS on the external drive.)

>   I'll look into the
> programmers stuff.  That may be the route we end up
> going.  There were a few PC's we're installing
> Debian on,

Great!

>  but we have to buy monitors, keyboards and
> mice for them, which we're unable to do at this time.

Have your tried headless, using a Mac as a console?

> The Macs came with everything.

Well, enough to run the Mac OS, at any rate, and almost enough for 
netBSD or Debian, it looks like.

>> You might want to ask the people who
>> unloaded the old Macs on you if they'd be willing
>> to unload a copy of ClarisWorks (word processing,
>> spreadsheet, simple drawing) your direction as well.
> I don't think that's a possiblity.  I think the
> computers changed hands several times looking for
> someone who could put them to use.

That's too bad. Maybe if you knew the software titles, it could jog 
some memories? Googling around a bit will turn up a lot of the old 
titles.

I will admit that it is hard to get hold of the old shareware/freeware 
titles. Stairways, for instance, used to produce some shareware 
internet stuff under a very liberal license, including a basic web 
server, an ftp client, and some network diagnostics tools. The Stuffit 
compression utilities used to have a lite version with a liberal 
license, as well. All gone very commercial these days, and the old 
versions compatible with the older systems are hard to find.

Well, I just checked Stairways, and they are still making the older 
versions of their ftp client available:

     http://www.interarchy.com/main/download

But it is shareware, not free. The network diagnostics are part of 
Anarchy starting just before they changed the name to interarchy. They 
sold their webserver, NetPresenz, to digitalriver, and digitalriver is 
asking USD 70 for the current version.

Apple supplied a personal web server in Mac OS 8, but I'm sure you want 
to dedicate those Quadra 950s to netBSD anyway.

>> With a little determination, you might get MRJ to
>> run some simple Java Applets for you. Plenty of
>> other stuff still floating around, too.
> Don't know what MRJ is, but if anything Java can
> run in an 8MB system, i'll be amazed. :)

Macintosh Release Java.

Some simple Java applets did run in an 8MB system. Many caused that old 
browser-has-unexpectedly-quit-please-reboot message, of course.

Speaking of which, I don't suppose anyone is working on Java for 68K 
*nix?

>> I think I'd probably use the Mac OS for the
>> beginning and non-technical
>> stuff, reserve netBSD for the kids who want to learn
>> the technical side of things.
> Yep.  That was the plan.

So I guess I'm preaching to the choir? 8-)

>  If only i could get
> NetBSD working.  It locks up after the "Bye-bye"
> message.  The only reference i've found to this in
> the archives suggested it might be going to serial
> console, but there was no followup nor hints on what
> to do if that were the case.

I've used the ClarisWorks terminal app as a console for netBSD, worked 
quite well. At least, I think it did. I was having problems with 
netBSD, so I can't be sure. There have been freeware terminal emulators 
around, including several telnet apps with built-in terminal emulator 
and at least some ssh-type functionality. Haven't looked at it for a 
while.

  I have a couple of 72 pin 4MB RAM I'd be willing to part with, but I 
see that those won't do you any good.

I hope some of that helps.

Joel Rees