Apple eMac and Microsoft XBox?
It seems a fitting day for this to happen. On the day that Apple releases the iMac – a beautiful computer, a friend of the family gave us it’s older cousin, the eMac. The eMac is really the CRT version of the iMac. It looks like something out of 2001 A Space Odyssey – I think it’s more a piece of art than a computer.
It’s a pretty swift little (big) computer, though! I’m impressed. We’re going to upgrade it to 512Mb of RAM and find a place to show it off in out house. My home is fast becoming an Apple museum – with an AppleTV, a couple of iPod Shuffles, a G3, a G4, an eMac and a MacBookPro. Yikes. (The G3 and G4 aren’t up and running yet).
One of the missing pieces to the eMac is the ability to add a Wireless Network Card. Apple sold AirPorts back then and you could connect to those via an Ethernet Cable. They still have AirPorts now, but in true Mountain Dew spirit – they are AirPort Extremes – running the latest and greatest 802.11g. I already have a great Netgear wireless network so I don’t want to upgrade yet.
What to do!? How would one without an AirPort go and get this beast up on the Internet? My son came up with an ingenious answer to that question. He went and got an XBox Wireless unit that we weren’t using and wired it up… Voila! It’s nothing but a wireless ethernet bridge for the XBox to hook up to the network – the same thing we were trying to do with the eMac.
It worked! Here’s a picture of us streaming a movie via the XBox wireless ethernet bridge.
No, we’re not going to keep things this way. Mixing Mac and Microsoft feels a little dirty to me (though I do it a lot!). My good friend, Bill, had an extra Linksys WET11 wireless ethernet bridge that I configured and got up tonight. The XBox wireless unit is going back to it’s rightful owner… the XBox.
I’m going to need a server room soon.