[iBook] How does this work?

[charlesp at ksu.edu]

Quoting don harvey <harveyinspections at att.net>:

> Good morning,
>   In 1985, I bought the first Mac in my county.  I loved it but no
> one else knew anything about it.  Time passed.  Now, 20 years +
> later, I bought an I Book 12.1"500 MHz G3 from Gain Saver.  It is
> their "low ball" unit and has no software.  I need help!  I want to
> use it with a word type program but I don't where to start.
> Obviously, I can't "load it up" because I paid ony $200 for it.  What
> do I do?  I'm 70 and a little slow in the head.  Anything you could
> do to get me started would be of great help.  I've adobted this as a
> project I intend to finish.  Thank you so much for any advise you can
> give.
>   Don Harvey

When you say that it has no software, does that mean it has no operating
system software? If it does, then what OS is it? OS-X (10.2, 10.3,
10.4)?

If you have an operating system installed, then you need an inexpensive
word processor. You didn't mention the purpose of your word processing,
but if you're going to try to make these available in computer file
form to others, then you'll probably have to get some version of MS
Word. You may be able to find an older version of MS Office (Word,
Excel, PowerPoint) for relatively little. And I would advise an older
version because it's likely to run better on a G3.

Someone may recommend going with open-source software because it's free,
but it doesn't install as easily as commercial software, and while it
operates in a similar manner to MS Office, there's enough difference to
make it more of a hassle down the road, especially if trying to
exchange files with anyone.

Mac OS-X (any version) comes with TextEdit, which is a simple text
editing (duh) application, that can do a lot of basic word processing,
if word processing is all you want to do. You can save the file as
either .txt or .rtf and anyone should be able to open the file in any
word processor.

Hope this helps. And good luck with your project.

Charles Pearce (charlesp at ksu.edu)