Quadra 605 Applications & Uses

All of these are mere suggestions - a computer, unlike most tools, is a multi-purpose instrument capable of virtually anything. Some applications have limits due to hardware speed & abilities, while others are limited by software. 68k Macs have -plenty- of software about - and anything here is only a suggestion. Play, experiment, and just enjoy using your 605. If there's no permanent use you find for it - it won't be an expensive failure :)

• General office machine - wordprocessing, spreadsheets, accounts - the bread & butter of computing, and for a household there's no reason you can't use a 605 to do most all of what you need.
  
• Desktop Publishing - not everyone has a need for the more designed documents than those a word processer gives, but an older copy of Pagemaker and a B&W printer picked up cheaply can help if you need to continually produce small volume newsletters. Quark XPress 3, one of the most commonly used desktop publishing programs will run on a 68k Macintosh - if you're ever going to send anything to print via a professional print house, it can be done on a Quadra.
• Student donation machine - this is where I first became re-acquainted with 68k macs. One of my friends was Course Coordinator at our local University, and also organised loan-out computers for students who didn't have their own computers to type/print assignments on. A Q605, monitor and stylewriter is cheap, portable, and does the job just fine.
• Servers!. Whether you're a Mac hobbyist into running a network for the sake of it, or truly have the need for any of dozens of server types, having a cheap dedicated machine running makes sense. Perhaps you need a router to connect your many obsessively collected Macs to a dialup connection. A proxy, DHCP or mail server will also run well on 68k hardware - even running mailing lists isn't out of the question. If you want a more outgoing purpose, try a web server. Fileserving is a nice common one, and adding a good sized hard drive gives access to both documents and archived files from anywhere on your network - store your MP3s also, and have your other machines play them directly from the server. Saves duplication and keeps everyone happy. If you have several newer macs without DIN-8 serial ports or floppy drives, they can use a 605 as a bridge to LocalTalk via ethernet, or floppy disks.
• Learn Linux - This one worked for me, and opened up a completely different computing world. Some people will never want nor need to move away from the standard MacOS, but some of us are born geeks and just want to do a bit of everything. If that's you, pull up a 605...