on 6/27/03 6:34 PM, Gary Montcalm at garym@shreve.net wrote:

> actually have no idea what the "ultimate" 68k Mac would be. I'm
> guessing one of the Quadras, but LowEndMac has some negative comments
> about the case design of the later models. I would love to have a
> minitower that I could run headless and use telnet to talk to, but I
> don't know what to look for on eBay.

the sturdiest 24/7 macs were at first the MacII "large" series (original, x,
fx). Those are remarkably well built. Then the quadras 9x0 are just the
ultimate big, sturdy box. You can run a server on a quadra 950 and it will
never break, 300W supply, 32 SIIMM slots, IOP processors. Only one caveat: I
can't get it booting with NetBSD. The same is for the IIfx. Other computers
boot well, are stable, but no SCSI dma is used so... the fastest mac68k box
ever, the quadra840, is for some kind of jobs just piggy slow.

other "workstation" macs are of course good too: my IIci is reliable as is
my QUadra 610. They give no problems. the q610 using 1.6 acts strangely
though: sometimes it doesn't boot properly netBSD, with 1.5 it never
happened. Strange.

In any case YMMV: it depends on the disk, on your luck, the cables you
use...

cheers,
ric