Help with a imac g3 found in attic.?

I am from a ridiculously poor family and my first computer is a mac that I found in the attic of my aunts new house.

It starts up and runs fairly okay but it looks like someone deleted alot of the system files and it often refers to a missing alias. I only have access to a pc in university with windows xp and have never owned a mac before.

I have the some system information.
it has a slot cd-rom drive,
runs on a mac os z1-8.6,
capacity is 6.3gb available is 5gb.
processor- powerpc g3
machine speed- 350 mhz
virtual memory 150mb
built memory 64mb
backside cache 512k.

No disks with it no idea if I can create back ups and web showed to be very little help think due to age of the machine.

it has a matching keyboard and what I have found out to be called a puck mouse?

to the point!
I want to update the operating system and connect to the web. I also have a friend that has windows student teacher edition office with word excel and all that will this handle it.

Need as much advice as possible as the entire machine is very alien to me but as it is all I have for home use and not really wanting a pc as I love the mac adverts I want to keep this cool looking machine.

http://www.info.apple.com/support/olders...

might be of help for older mac software.. u say the os is z1-8.6?

you mean its os 8 ? or system 7? if its system 7 then yes its very old.. maybe i guess 10-12 years old..

is it a all in one unit? e.g. the montior is with the cpu?

you might try looking for "abandware" on the web for mac..

stuff thats obsolutle and not supported any more..

perhaps you can hire it for film usage.. the computer they use in the tv show lost is an apple 2 ;-)

i think some1 somewhere will wnat it and give u good money for it believe me...ebay is your solution and with that, u will make money and then u can get a PC laptop with tha money :) oh and ring Apple, they might wnat to look at it or want it....how old is it? i knw the imac G5 is out last yr or 2 yrs ago.http://www.apple.com/imac/

have you tried talking to apple there really quite kool.
I've been on mac 3years now and found it hot...I'm good with programmes Archicad photoshop illustrator etc but will see what i can do...
when it comes to the system preferences and updating its all done through your apple icon in top left corner...this is where you may find how to clear the alias glitch
I'm doing a bachelor of landscape architecture designing cities and urban scape's we use big files we started 3 years ago on g3 not good but not bad. sweet for the home.
this is not a PC but PC compatible. you need Microsoft word.
mac is pretty much widows free... you need micro or adobe programs...once you get using it you will never go back to a PC...even with a g3...were using g4- g5 with Pentium processors and there super computers

hey what you need to know is that pre g5&4 apple use classic programes. what you will find in updating is that your computer cant run and is not supported for the new stuff, ie photoshop cs2 ver. 9.0.2, word mac microsft ver. 11.3 etc u need to go online for the older classic programes
u might be able to upgrade to osx.10 which is the new version of the classic system but you need 256mb of physical RAM