I have a lot of old computers laying about the house (much to my roommate's chagrin I'm sure). The most recent acquisition was a CCTV system which, when booted up, greeted me with countless hours of footage an Hassidic bagel shop from four (4) stunning angles. Perhaps you will be disappointed to discover that, after sitting on this priceless data for two years, I decided to wipe the drive in order to experiment with various Linux distros designed for old and/or low-powered hardware. (Originally, I thought I might do some sort of strange conceptual video/data art installation with it, or give it to somebody who would… so it goes.)
So when my analog/digital hybrid photography flow was interrupted by the untimely death of my G4 MDD PowerMac (aka "Windtunnel" and given to me by my dear friend and filmmaker Alan Roth, who explained that it could do HD video in one of those well-known and unfortunately common Apple blunders where somebody forgets to flip the right switch somewhere in the manufacturing process) after several (and sometimes successful) attempts at revivification by resetting the PMU and replacing the battery and so forth, I was bereft. Not a single print has come out of my beloved Epson 2200 for months (IRS forms notwithstanding).
But! I have a G4 Mac Mini (on indefinite loan with ambiguous terms) formerly reserved exclusively for backing up a VPS some friends and I used in an ill-fated business adventure (freelance website development, can you go any lower?) in order to allow my roommate some modicum of web connectivity at home (his free, secondhand Toshiba laptop went berserk, presumably from a virus or viruses, since it's running Windows 7…). It still dutifully performs its backups with varying success using the incredibly arcane but apparently well-regarded AMANDA system (which took me probably a whole month to set up, honestly — I was, and probably still am, totes a n00b…). We browse the web on it in a herky-jerky manner using the inestimable TenFour Fox, a fork of Firefox compiled for G3 and G4 processors. It occurred to me that I may as well try using it for rehabilitating my languishing photographic practice.
On the Windtunnel, I had used Adobe's CS2 software to do everything I needed to do for my rather straighforward printmaking process. So I thought, OK, I wonder how much a copy of CS2 runs these days. If you want a boxed copy from Amazon, be prepared to shell out like, $600. But even the most casual, or accidental Googling will reveal the extraordinary fact that Adobe is now offering it up for FREE, supposedly due to some kind of problem with their authentication servers.
Who cares, as I type this, it's installing to the mini (which I named "Petsounds" on a hellishly humid summer day in 2012) and if I have the time or energy, I'll report back on how well it plays with my film scanners.