The Homeless Arts Project (http://www.floaters.org) has a collection of four nice old Macs now. The Project focuses on helping homeless/formerly homeless people gain computer skills. Our Macs are lent out to individuals and agencies. Motivated people with a place to live are allowed to keep their Macs indefinitely, if it becomes obvious that they will truly benefit from and use the Mac.

I "inherited" 1 meg Plus w/ a 20 meg hard drive from my uncle when he upgraded (to a Quadra 610!). After bumping it up to 2.5 meg RAM, I installed it in the sanctuary at Church, where I'm staff keyboardist (parttime). I'm running EZVision sequencing software under system 6.0.8, doing sequencing for the services each Sunday.

[Here's an interesting one!] Version 1.2 of the "Electric Emperor" CD-ROM had old machines specifically in mind. The Electric Emperor is the CD-ROM version of Jack Herer's underground classic "The Emperor Wears No Clothes", the book that explained the many uses of hemp (cloth, paper, fuel, nutrition, medicine, etc.) and the historical account of how hemp got outlawed in the first place. The Electric Emperor is designed primarily for activist groups, making it possible for them to prepare newsletters, fliers, reports, and other documents, drawing on the pictures and text from the original paper book. Because most re-legalization organizations are extremely cash poor, the program will run on an old B&W Macintosh with less than 1 MB of RAM and a 1x CD-ROM, which can be purchased used for under $150 or donated from the back of someone's closet.