I had to come back to this thread with an update.
Last week, a friend gave me a Mac IBook G4. It appeared that everything was working, but because of the password protection, I couldn't log in. I spent last night searching around and found that the machine had OS-X Server 10.4 on it. Apple posted disc images on Archive.org, so I pulled the installation discs down. Today, while watching the college bowl games, I piddled around, found how to update the settings and passwords and PRESTO, I'm logged in and browsing around.
The Airpod networking logged into my router. The machine is kind of slow, considering its a 1.2GHz Power PC G4 with a 60GB hard drive. Then comes the fun part.... the OS doesn't support any current browsers, and that means you can't access HTTPS sites since the machine triggers a security violation. I managed to get a copy of TenFourFox v32 for G3 to run and it sort of works for about 50 of the websites. Don't bother trying to use Youtube!
The thing that strikes me is that I remember people telling me how wonderful a Mac would be for music way back in the day. This thing would be a pig to work with. I don't know if a Windows machine would be a lot better, but my Yamaha AW16G would have been MASSIVELY better to record with back in 2004. I did do a bit of audio work with my P4 system under Win2000 but not much. I had an early version of Cubase SE to play with but I didn't have the hardware interfacing to do it at the time. I had to export tracks from the Yamaha via CD which was slow, so I didn't bother.
It just showed me again how much progress has been made with computer technology and music recording in general. This IBook was an $1400 purchase in 2004. 256MB of memory, Firewire 400, USB. DVD drive, 32MB Radeon video in a 6 lb "laptop". The OS tops out at Leopard 10.5 if you upgrade the memory to 512MB, but that's it. Talk about a dead end purchase. By 2007 you were done with updates. The last file I found on it was dated 2010 so it lasted 6 years. I imagine it's been sitting for 13 years.
Consider that my Dell PhenomX6 based desktop that I bought in 2010 is still running with Win 10 22H2, 8GB, has all the updates, current browsers, does the current tax software, email, DVD software, runs Reaper and plays DVD and MPeg4 movies just fine, I guess I can't complain about it being close to the end of life (2 years to go). If I remember correctly, I paid about $6-700 for it, and I've added an extra drive and a SSD boot disc.