Congratulations on your new (old) Macintosh! Unfortuntately, there’s no button on the computer to eject the CD-ROM drive. How the heck are you supposed to get access to the CD tray?

At this stage, you remember that old Macs came with keyboards that had a nonstandard “Eject” key. But your keyboard isn’t one of those! It’s just a generic thing you had lying around in the closet. What to do?

Fortunately, there are a few ways to overcome this limitation.

OS X: Use ‘drutil’

If you’re booting into OS X, you could open the Terminal and type the following commands to open and close the optical drive. (This worked on 10.4 “Tiger” but I’m not sure if these work on 10.0 through 10.3.)

drutil tray open
drutil tray close

OS 9: Use “Eject Extras”

If you’re booting into OS 9 (and perhaps earlier versions of Classic Mac OS, too), look for the “Eject Extras.”

Macintosh HD > Apple Extras > Eject Extras

This is a collection of tiny programs whose only job is to open and close the various optical drives. The associated documentation (“About Eject Extras”) explains how you can use the Keyboard Control Panel to assign the “Eject Upper Drive” or “Eject Lower Drive” programs to a Function key. On my G4 Quicksilver, I have assigned “Eject Upper Drive” to F12.

OS 9 and/or X: Use iTunes

If you’re in a tight bind, you can also use iTunes’ access to the drive. There should be a big Eject button in the main iTunes window.