My first Mac! (A classic).

[Daedalus]

I think that with things advancing much more slowly in the Amiga world, retro Amigas are more useful than the equivalent Mac. I have one of those machines, with OS8 and it's so slow it's unbearable, especially running 68k stuff, whereas my A1200/060/Voodoo3 feels an order of magnitude faster in everyday use. The Mac just feels so much more antiquated...

I recently picked up an iBook G4 1.33GHz for *nothing*. Granted, it wasn't working due to spilled coffee, but I cleaned it out and treated it to a new keyboard (€23 on eBay) and it's perfect now running Tiger. Not bad!!

[Daedalus]

I wouldn't think you were really had - it's only £40, and I've paid much more than that just to try certain unusual gear out... As for the monitor, do you have another monitor you can try? The cable on those Apple monitors actually takes a standard SVGA-in, but the output of the machine is the custom Apple connector. A simple SVGA cable will let you try the monitor on a PC or any other machine with a standard video out.

[Daedalus]

It's a while since I powered my one on, but it might not be called "System Profiler"... I think mine just has "About this Mac..." in the Apple menu, and from there you can click more info or something along those lines.

[Daedalus]

Even if you do have post-OS9 hardware, if it has OSX on it you can still boot classic mode, and many machines from that time will have it seeing as most of the software already available was for classic.