I have an old imac ruby..What can I do with it?

Turn it into Apple under their recycle program

Allan

I'm sure it will be capable of connecting to the Internet, but what it will be able to do there will be modest by today's standards. The web will be a particularly disappointing experience. Of course there were reams and reams of educational games produced specifically for the Mac... if you stick to the time period (pre-2003) and OS9. Just don't expect the experience to be like plugging in a contemporary iMac.

If you have a router and 10T ethernet it would work on the internet. If I recall it runs pretty good on OS 9.2.2 and can be bumped up to OSX 10.3 which might run slowly on it depending on how much ram it has.

If it's complete with the ruby red keyboard and mouse and box then it's actually something a hard core Mac collector would want or a new collector.

There were loads of games produced back then for those iMacs and seems to me that one of the one's in my collection came with a plastic folder full of CD's with games and other programs on them so it certainly is viable still.

All of the collectors watch eBay. It would be bad form to simply show up on a forum (of which there are several) and announce you have hardware to sell. Just take good pictures, describe it completely, and you'll get what the market will bear at that moment.

I think you are a little pessemistic about this machine.

The best approach would be playing lots of games and running educational software.

With more workd and dollars...

You can get on the Internet with this machine will be slow with modern site, but will work find. Will not do video on the web.

You could max out the memory to 1gig. Could install 10.4 and use TenFourFox as your web browser.

Be sure to update the firmware before installing Mac OS X.

You could buy an external DVD drive. It needs to be firewire and bootable by Mac OS. If you have another PPC with firewire, you could try target Disk mode and installed tiger that way.

You need to figure out the level of your firmware before installing 10.2 or greater. ( The PC name for firmware is BIOS. ) Installing 10.2 with a down level firmware will most likely make your iMac unusable and difficult to fix.

What is Open Firmware?

The firmware on a PPC is called Open Firmware. Open Firmware software receives control when you poweron your machine. It does some hardware testing and some hardware configuration then passes control to your version of Mac OS. It reside on a PROM ( program read only memory ) chip on the logic board.

Figuring out what level of Open Firmware you have?

1) Mac OS 9.x or 8.x, you need to use the Apple System Profiler.

Apple -> Apple System Profiler

Restore Tiger 10.4 & Leopard 10.5 DVDs are available from Apple by calling 800-767-2775 as of January 20, 2013.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4720126?tstart=0

I totally agree with rccharles' assessment.

This is a later G3 DV iMac.

With this iMac finally updated to 1 Gb of RAM running OS X 10.4.11 Tiger with the TenFourFox web browser, this iMac is a capable iMac.

It won't deal with streaming video content well, if at all, but it should be adequate and handle most non-video websites and basic tasks like email, word processing and such and perhaps running older OS X software and games if you can find them.

My mother's eMac ran OS X 10.4.11 Tiger very well with only 1 GB of RAM.

Would make a great show & tell project. 😁