Can you believe I scored this 1995 PowerMac 5200/75 LC for only $5 bucks! I can’t believe it either. A guy threw it up on eBay for local pickup only. He’s 20 minutes from where I work. I guess no one in the area was in the market for it. I put in my bid and won. I paid via PayPal and swung by the guy’s place on the way home from work. Awesome.

It was just the Mac for sale. The peripherals are all mine. Anyway, let’s have a look.

The front panel is a little discolored and will need a dip.



The side has a crack in it and a small piece of plastic is broken off.



There’s a little more discoloration on the I/O panel than anywhere else.



Another little chip along the top seam.



Another crack on the top, a little off center.



It’s a little beat up, I agree. But a $5 Mac is a $5 Mac! This thing is so heavy I guess it’s hard moving it around without banging the hell out of it. The guy had it down in the basement, so who knows how long he’s been kicking it around.

Let’s hook up some peripherals and see what it does.



It works! It boots into OS 8. It took a while to get to a desktop. You think it has something to do with the 60+ INITs installed? Jeez.



OS 8.0 with 24MB of RAM and a 800 MB hard drive.



I was curious to see how the speakers sounded, so I popped in some “period music” and let ‘er rip.



The internal speakers sound pretty crappy. I guess bass wasn’t an option back in the mid 90s. I plugged in the AppleDesign speakers and gave them a go. Much better! I know the recording doesn’t do it justice, but here’s a little “Countdown to Extinction” for your listening pleasure.



You could rock out to it. OK, enough playing. Let’s dig around and see what’s on this monster.

The 5200 was only sold to the educational market. This is confirmed by the overabundance of educational software on the machine in conjunction with the “HOPE LEARNING HD” hard drive name.

Sweet! There’s 104 disk images sitting in a folder on the desktop. Free software! I’ll trash the school stuff and keep the images. There’s some cool stuff in there as well as some games.



I connected my SCSI Zip 100 drive and formatted a disk.



I then copied over all the disk images and software that I wanted to keep.



Once that was complete, I rebooted with my OS 8.5 CD.



I wiped the drive and ran the 8.5 installer.



Once the installer was complete and the machine rebooted. I inserted my 8.6 update CD and ran that.



There we go. A fresh install of 8.6.



The machine is definitely more “zippier” than before.



Once last touch: change the wallpaper picture. My boys playing in the sprinkler should do the trick.



All that’s left to do is clean it up and dip it, but that’s for another day. I might try my hand at networking this one too. Maybe even beef the RAM up to the max of 64 Megs and install OS 9.1. Who knows?