It can be fun to run Unix on an old Mac, if you're into that sort of thing. I am. My first exposure to Unix was installing and attempting to administer NetBSD on a Mac IIci.

One of the complexities of running Unix on a 68K Mac is that the boot sequence is hardcoded in the ROM, and rather poorly documented. Of course, this didn't matter at the time, because anyone who bought a Mac was going to run Mac OS (an appellation conceived much later). But it matters now, because as a consequence, anyone trying to get Unix to run an old Mac has extra work to do: partition an already undersized hard disk, install a minimal System 7, and get a few weird programs to set up the NetBSD partition, install the base tarballs, and boot the result. Unix can be confusing enough for the novice, but on an old Mac, getting it installed is downright wacky.

So I thought it was fairly awesome when I read that some dude managed to make his SE/30 load a NetBSD kernel directly from floppy disk without booting Mac OS first.

There's a chance I'm a huge dork and will never recover.