I'm Porting Node.js 22 to a 20-Year-Old Power Mac G5. It's Going About as Well as You'd Expect.

The Machine Somewhere in my lab in Louisiana, a Power Mac G5 Dual sits on a shelf. Dual 2.0 GHz PowerPC 970 processors, 8 GB of RAM, running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5. It was the fastest Mac you could buy in 2005. Apple called it "the world's fastest personal computer." Then they switched to Intel and never looked back. Twenty years later, I'm trying to build Node.js 22 on it. Why Would Anyone Do This? Two reasons. First : I run a blockchain called RustChain that uses Proof-of-Antiquity consensus. Vintage hardware earns higher mining rewards. The G5 gets a 2.0x antiquity multiplier on its RTC token earnings. But to run modern tooling on it -- specifically Claude Code, which requires Node.js -- I need a working Node runtime. Second : Because it's there. The G5 is a beautiful piece of engineering. Dual 64-bit PowerPC cores, big-endian byte order, AltiVec SIMD. It represents a road not taken in computing history. If we want an agent internet that runs everywhere, "everywhere" should include h