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Claude Code on a 2005 Power Mac G5
A developer ported Claude Code to a 2005 dual-2GHz Power Mac G5 running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Node.js has no PowerPC build, so they built a custom runtime, node-ppc, and a CLI on top of it.
The full story
A developer spent a month getting Claude Code to run natively on a 2005 dual-2GHz Power Mac G5 running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It talks directly to Anthropic's API over TLS 1.2, with no proxy and no modern machine doing the work behind the scenes.
This was meant to be impossible: Claude Code needs Node.js, which hasn't supported PowerPC for years, and modern encryption libraries won't build on the old system. So the author wrote node-ppc, a small JavaScript runtime built from QuickJS and mbedTLS that provides just enough of Node to run a command-line agent. On top of it sits claude-code-ppc, which has the real tool loop (read, write, edit, shell commands, file search) and slash commands. It can chain up to 25 tool calls in a row.
Single developer's project; the repo is linked in the post.
How it was done
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Sources
From the maker's own write-up or code. We summarise what they report; we haven't tested it ourselves.
- DEV: The PowerBook doesn't know it's retired: Claude Code on a 2005 Power Mac G5
The author's write-up of building node-ppc and claude-code-ppc, with the repository link.