The more I interacted with the IIsi, the more I remembered what it was like to enjoy using a computer-to appreciate their capabilities as tools of business and leisure. To its credit, however, the IIsi was able to get me to where I wanted to go, whether it was a spot of writing, listening to music (kind of), checking emails, unwinding with a classic computer game, or browsing the World Wide Web. Charm and surprises agony and resentmentĪs expected, the Macintosh IIsi is, unsurprisingly, not going to replace your modern computer. When using an RGB monitor instead, their performance on the IIsi isn't stellar, although both are still playable if you don't mind single-digit frame rates. These titles fail to launch at all without a color monitor, which rules out using the Portrait Display. Things aren't so rosy with the likes of SimCity 2000 and Wolfenstein 3D-arguably some of the best examples of early 1990s computer games. Advertisementįurther Reading From Elite to Rollercoaster Tycoon: 20 years of sim games, part 2 Unlike browsing the World Wide Web, which was a lesson in extreme patience, email is surprisingly well matched to the capabilities of the IIsi and its 68030 processor. In a professional context, I was able to send drafts and receive feedback from Ars Technica editors while writing this article. Once logged in, I was able to send and receive emails much like I would on any modern email application. While it used several megabytes of RAM, performance was generally snappy. I road-tested just the one client, Mulberry, which worked well. While the above security concerns are still valid, I wouldn't be sending or receiving anything sensitive from this email address. I have an email account through my ISP, which offers either a secured or plain-text connection to their IMAP and SMTP servers. As with the Web browsers, the main problem was modern security methods. I hadn't expected to be able to access my Gmail account using the IIsi, and this turned out to be the case with all of the email clients tested.

So without another networked Macintosh handy, trusty old FTP can bridge the gap between modern and vintage hardware. Using a lightweight FTP client such as Fetch, I'm able to access anything that is stored in my Dropbox account and similarly send things to the cloud for backing up (such as this article).

By sharing my locally backed up Dropbox folder on my Windows machine over FTP, I'm able to “put” and “get” files from that folder on the Macintosh IIsi.

Wolfenstein 3d macintosh