At the Vintage Computer Festival this year, I was purchasing a Power Mac 8500 (as one does), and the person managing the checkout process handed me a business card to promote his business: Vintage Computer Rental. He told me this was an opportunity to monetize my collection (and purchase new items, of course).

I signed up and pretty quickly received my first opportunity to rent out a computer. The 30th anniversary of the launch of gap.com was approaching, and the company wanted to build a display at its San Francisco headquarters representing that era. An iMac G3 would be perfect.

The project required configuring a looping video on the iMac which was challenging considering the iMac runs Mac OS 9. I had to re-encode Gap’s video to use an old codec, and figure out how to “upgrade” QuickTime to QuickTime Pro to enable full-screen viewing. During this process of downloading and installing files, my Blueberry iMac’s hard drive died (click, click, click… silence), forcing me to swap to the Ruby model.

Once I got the iMac working, I dropped it off at Gap’s headquarters and said goodbye for three weeks. I heard from the team that people couldn’t stop photographing and admiring it. The best part? I made some money to help fund a gorgeous Snow iMac and a new M5 Pro MacBook Pro.