G3 memory

It does not seem like that install was successful. Conventional wisdom is that some old stuff is preventing the new stuff from getting installed properly. If you can, I suggest you do an "Erase and Install".

I am certain you did not damage it, unless it shot sparks, belched smoke, or smelled like a burning transformer. To get its attention again, I suggest you reset the PRAM through 4 sets of chimes (by holding down Command Option P R at startup until four sets of chimes have been heard) or press the CUDA Reset button deliberately for about 1/4 minute. The button is shown on this diagram:

http://www.macgurus.com/products/motherboards/mbppcg3desk.php

Either of these procedures will reset the PRAM and NVRAM to their factory defaults and allow you to get control of it again.

Bummer. I am sure you can bring it back to life with a little help. So you can still boot from a CD, right? Then you haven't killed it, yet.

If you have any personal files on the disk, they are probably still there even though the booting system files might be corrupted. You should be able to access the other computer over the LAN to back up any important files.

I'd recommend making any backups you need, and then using the Disk Utility from the Installer to reformat, or make a single partition on the disk to completely erase it, and then do the OS install, go ahead and start with 10.2, you don't have to upgrade a 10.1 installation to install 10.2.

You didn't mention how much free disk space you had on your 6GB disk, and if you were doing an archive or upgrade installation from 10.1 to 10.2. I am curious if somehow during the installation you might be filling up the disk with both the old archived OS and the newly installed OS and any temporary files, and that might be why it failed. Once that happens, you really have to do a clean install, reformatting the disk might not be totally necessary, but it sounds like you now have parts of 10.1 and parts of 10.2 and the computer can't make sense of what is on the disk to boot, and that would definitely rule that out by starting from scratch. Again, you can still access files on that disk when you are booted from a CD OS 9 or X and should be able to access your other computer via the router/LAN you have set up to back up stuff to the other computer.

My personal experience with installing OS 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 has always been to use a newly formatted disk and perform a clean install, and I haven't had any major installation problems. And I also kept my existing bootable system untouched on another disk, so I could revert to that if I had any problems.

(The only problems I remember ever having were when I had been using Norton System Works Disk Utilities, but that's another story.)

It says:
panic(CPU 0): unable to find driver for this platform: "AAPL, Gossamer".

That message specifically refers to a compatibility issue with the installation on a beige G3. Are you using Apple's retail (universal) installer CDs for this OS X installation, or the OS X restore CDs for another model Mac?

Are you getting that error when you boot from the 10.1 CD, by holding down C during the startup? Do you have an OS 8 or 9 CD you can boot from?

ahhh sounds like it was formatted wrong

glad its up and running again