The other half has informed me that I gotta get my own Internet box (been using her's for over ten years) and my ancient Mac SE30 (when's the last time you heard about one of those) has a bunch of Excel and Word files that I want to move to the next machine.

I know that I can spend significant money, buy an Apple, poison the poor thing with Microsoft products and move my files, but I was thinking of making the change to Linux of some sort without further enrichening Bill Gates et al.

Well, can I do it and how would I do it? I do not have a machine yet, so I can buy appropriate equipment. I am getting advice on where buy hardware, where to find shareware, etc. The big issue is salvaging all of the writing and analysis tools I have already written that reside on the SE30. I have a SCSI port so the big trick would seem to be giving a Linux box a way to read the output, but what do I know, I just use the front end...

Advice gratefully accepted here.

Billski