RIHAHN.COM

Category: Retro Computing

My adventures with old hardware

  • Let’s Get Dangerous

    I do complicated computer wizardry as part of my day-to-day life so I’m always elbow deep in some bit of hardware, reverse engineering the new hotness, or hacking functionality into something that was never intended to do whatever it is I want it to do… And yesterday this was making a WISP switch I use to run a bunch of external IP cameras on the building happy.

    The switch in this example is a Netonix ws-12-250-ac which handles the media conversion from fiber to copper and the POE for the external cameras.

    It needed a firmware update to handle discovery of some newer hardware, and this required talking to the switch with a computer – which should have been simple, but no…

    See, the stuff that makes the Internet end-users see isn’t exactly ‘modern’ most of the time. Hell, your average managed switch that’s making the world wide weird work usually has a command line interface that you reach via RS232. And when was the last time you saw a serial port on a computer? My point exactly.

    The Netonix is slightly more advanced in that it has a web-based GUI, but the web server in it isn’t designed for end-users so it’s not updated to the current padded-room standards of the Internet – and that’s where things broke down.

    Yesterday I discovered that every mainstream web browser is 100% incapable of talking to the web server in the Netonix because the Netonix uses TLS 1.1… And you don’t even have the choice of using an older encryption standard these days.

    Chrome, Edge, etc on Windows wouldn’t even try to talk to the Netonix – I’d get a No Valid Encryption alert and that’s where things would stop. Even digging into the internals of the browser to switch off forced HTTPS and rummaging around in Windows network security to try and re-enable TLS 1.1 was unsuccessful.

    MacOS and Safari fared slightly better in that it gave me the option of going to the scary web page, which would offer up the login, but the page after login just resulted in a blank screen – because the browser was once again trying to force TLS 1.3 on the new page… And there was no facility to stop this behavior.

    In both of these cases the failure was simply because web browsers have been coded to put training wheels on the Internet, and there’s no way to remove the training wheels because user-land cant be trusted with switches…

    Fortunately I keep a wide selection of antique hardware around; hardware from a time when the Internet wasn’t such a padded room, so there are options if you want to be a rebel.

    The hardware that finally made everything work was my old Dell XPS M1710, which runs Windows 7 for just such situations and is the reason I keep it around… Because sometimes you need to live dangerously, and modern hardware and software simply won’t let you bungie jump naked into a tank full of piranhas for the thrill of it.

    Sigh.

    Listening to "Everywhere" by Fleetwood Mac

  • iPod

    Today’s old hardware is a 4th generation iPod Touch…

    While I don’t have my original ‘click wheel’ iPod anymore, I do still have my original 2005 iPod Shuffle and this 2010 iPod Touch – and they both still work!

    The 4th generation touch came out in late 2010, and I picked this one up for Christmas that year. It’s the smaller of the offerings and only holds 8gigs – but with even high bitrate AAC that was enough space for a couple of days of music.

    I also spent quite a few hours playing some physics-based puzzler on this thing, and probably got my money’s worth from that alone. 🙂

    Like the rest of my antiques, the Touch is in great shape both mechanically and physically… For example, here’s the back of it:

    My monitor is reflected in the chrome to add some contrast…

    Apple went away from polished stainless steel eventually, because while they look great initially, they’re usually a cloudy mass of scratches in pretty short order. Mine lives in a small velvet bag when I’m not playing with it just to maintain the shiny.

    Overall the iPod still works well and sounds great! But it doesn’t work with Apple’s newer offerings such as the cloud-based subscription service that renders iTunes into a radio station where you call the shots. So the only music on this iPod is stuff I’ve purchased in past.

    It came with iOS 4.1, but currently runs iOS 6.1.6, which is the last version of the OS Apple made for it. So while you can press buttons and it will ‘do stuff’, nothing is of much use. The weather app used to connect to Yahoo – and that stopped working a few years back, and several other apps are in the same boat where they attempt to connect to services that no longer exist… But it still plays music, and that’s good enough for me.

    One last picture of the old OS, just for posterity:

    Listening to "Victoria" by Ollie Wride

  • WWDC 23

    Yesterday was the annual Apple “World Wide Developer Conference” – which is where Apple shows off all of their new and updated stuff.

    There was all of the usual stuff; iterations on current machines – like the 15″ M2 MacBook Air, which is pretty nice for anyone needing a basic, well-built, laptop.

    There was also the quick mention of the new Mac Pro… It’s basically the old Mac pro case with the CPU and logic board out of a Mac Studio, and several PCIE slots for cards. It starts at like seven grand though, which is a lot for a $4000 Mac Studio in a fancy box.

    The big news though, and the thing that they devoted half of the show to, was the Vision Pro HMD.

    I’ve purposely avoided “VR” for the most part since the turn of the century. Prior to 2000 I spent quite a bit of time, money, and development effort on VR – even having a fancifully airbrushed $6000 Liquid Image MRG2 ‘back in the day’.

    Not me, but this is an MRG2

    But the whole scene hasn’t really moved forward, other than getting smaller, faster, and higher-rez, since then.

    The hardware is nice and all, but the use-cases were still lacking. VR has pretty much been a solution perpetually looking for a problem.

    I think the Vision Pro might actually have the right mix of hardware and use-case though, and when they finally make them available next year I’ll probably take the $3500 plunge and buy one – it’ll be cheap by comparison to the last HMD I owned.

    Listening to "Not Alone" by Kalax

  • SGI

    Ever wondered what a $30,000 computer looked like in the mid 90’s? Well, let me show you…

    My circa 1994 / 1995 SGI Indy

    A plethora of dead peripheral connections… The 13W3 video connector (on the left) was amazing for the time.

    The above, in 1994, came with a 150Mhz R4400SC cpu, 24-bit XL graphics board, 64MB RAM, and 1GB SCSI2 HD for the low-low price of $22,995 (equivalent to $47,000 in 2023)…

    Here’s Info World talking about it in January of ’94:

    Mine has the late ’94 200Mhz R4400 and the 256MB ram option, making it the most powerful pizza box on the planet in early 1995, and a smidgeon over $30,000 new – or about $61,000 in 2023…

    In 1996 I added the second 1GB SCSI2 HD to it.

    The usual first question is “How did you afford that in 1995?”

    The answer is I didn’t – the place I worked at bought it in the above spec for my use, and it was forgotten during the merger with Ingram Micro in 1996 – and it’s been banging around in my collection ever since.

    Currently the power supply is on the fritz and needs to be replaced. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but SGI in their infinite wisdom decided that the power, reset, volume up/down, and speaker needed to be in the power supply, and the power supply needed to be spot welded together… So, in the above photo, see that second bundle of smaller wires coming out of the PSU and going under the power wires to the main board? That’s the aforementioned buttons and speaker connections.

    Basically someone needs to re-engineer the entire power supply to build a replacement, and that’s not happened yet – so everyone with an Indy is looking for new old stock PSUs for them…

    There’s a lot of old 90’s and 00’s data locked in this thing from when I used it as a desktop – someday I’ll get a working PSU and open this particular time capsule. 🙂

    Listening to "Something Just Like This" by The Chainsmokers

  • LAN Party

    Back in the before times of the 90’s we used to drag our gaming rigs over to friends houses to play multiplayer games… And being as I was a network engineer and had money, equipment, and know-how for the best LAN experience possible – most of the time the parties were at my place.

    Imagine your house filled with a half dozen large PC cases and huge heavy CRTs, as many people, and stacks of delivery pizza and 2-liters just to play an ‘online’ game.

    It was good times.

    The network tech of the time was pretty primitive and didn’t go very fast by modern standards, but anything was better than 56k dialup. My place was all done up with ‘high speed’ 10BASE-T versus the more common 10BASE2 coax of the period, and it wasn’t uncommon to be installing and configuring PCI ethernet cards on weekends to get friends of friends onto the network.

    Mid 90’s ethernet was an astounding 10Mbit, and worked off of hubs – like my old Asante I picked up in 1994:

    That BNC connector could be used to bridge this into 10BASE2 networks, and the AUI on the bottom could connect to a transceiver for 10BASE5 networks.

    But, like technology tends to do, things got faster and around the turn of the century I upgraded to 100Mbit via a 24 port Netgear DS524 that was pretty fancy for a home user:

    Bonus Tandberg LTO-4 tape cartridge…

    And with this increased speed we all had to go to faster ethernet cards, like the venerable 3COM 3c905:

    There was never a better network card than this. Sure, they go faster now – but this was peak LAN.

    This was pretty much how things were when we LAN-partied like it was 1999…

    Speaking of, here’s one of the games we played:

    It’s hard to see in the photo, but the entire box has this rainbow holography sheen to it.

    A “gamer bundle” Mechwarrior-3 three-pack from CompUSA… They used to offer bundles like this on games so the whole family could play! Mechwarrior-3 also had some really heavy machine requirements:

    A 200Mhz Pentium, 64 Megs of RAM, a Direct3D card capable of 1024x768x16, a 4x CDROM, and 400MB free on your probably 10gig HD… Crazy!

    We really lost something when LAN parties stopped being a thing…

    Listening to "Summer Break Up" by Dana Jean Phoenix

  • DARWARS

    I was digging around in an old box of stuff here at work and came across a DVD for one of the first things I worked on when I started here in 2004…

    DARWARS Ambush! V1.0

    This is the ‘tactical simulation’ I mentioned back in August of ’04 – I figure it’s been pretty close to 20 years since this was a thing, so I can probably talk about it now. 🙂

    Listening to "Control" by Michael Oakley

  • The Golden Age of Wireless

    A package arrived today…

    A new old-stock Apple Airport card, still sealed in its 2002 cardboard tomb

    I’ve been searching for the Apple branded wifi card for my circa 2000 PowerBook G3 “Pismo” on and off for quite some time, and while they tend to be readily available, the ones that are readily available tend to be in pretty sketchy shape.

    Anyway, last week I found someone selling one still in the box for $20 – so I jumped on it.

    What $99 purchased back in 2000

    Once I’d deflowered the virgin seal on the box and extricated the card, manual, and CD, it was time to install it in the laptop…

    The PowerBook “Pismo” was the last truly user upgradable laptop Apple ever made, so it’s a simple matter of pulling the two keyboard release clips with a fingernail, flipping the keyboard back, and exposing the guts of the machine.

    In the above picture you can get a glimpse of an alternate timeline Apple Computer where the customer wasn’t assumed to be an idiot and was allowed to do things with the hardware they purchased.

    The upper left is the new airport card in its new home above the PCMCIA card slot and the CPU heat pipe and heat sink is right under it. The cover in the middle that is held down with two plain old Phillips screws is the CPU daughter card which also has the two ram slots on it – and has a pull-tab because it just clips into place, and on the right is the 2.5″ drive bay with another pull tab to make it easy to remove.

    The battery and DVD-rom are under the palm rest and are removable by simply moving a lever on either side of the palm rest to eject them from the body of the laptop – this was so that you could decide what peripherals you needed… Want a second battery for ten hours of portable runtime? Go for it! Want a zip dive instead of a DVD? No problem!

    There’s a reason this laptop is viewed by many as peak Apple hardware design…

    Back in 2000, when this laptop came out, it was the undisputed king of portable power; it could computationally annihilate every other laptop on the market and sported two 400Mbit Firewire ports that were insanely fast for an era where bleeding edge USB was a whopping 12Mbit.

    The machine above has the top of the line 500Mhz PowerPC G3 CPU on a 100Mhz bus and a gig of PC-100 ram – the most it will address. And the old mechanical ultra-ATA HD has been replaced with a 128G SSD – also the most it will address.

    All told, this is probably my favorite bit of Apple hardware I’ve owned over the years just because it’s so different from modern Apple ideals.

    Anyway, card installed and the antenna connected it was time to fire up the laptop and make sure it all worked…

    Looks like everything is working just fine.

    It took a bit more work to pull this off though. See, retail wifi in general was only about six months old when the Pismo was introduced, so it’s a really primitive implementation of 802.11b and simply won’t talk to modern security-conscious wifi…

    Luckily I have an old “Airport Express” that can talk to the Airport card in the laptop, but I can’t run any security on the connection – so the Airport Express is MAC locked to the card in the laptop. But it does work!

    After all of this I spent the remainder of the afternoon cruising old websites on my old laptop and pretending I was back in the early 2000’s when the Internet was still cool…

    Listening to "Beta Girl Lost in Forever" by SelloRekt LA Dreams

  • Sun-Shine

    I rarely talk about work because almost everything I do is NDA, trade secret, classified, or otherwise controlled information – so it’s easier to just avoid the topic entirely.

    But, I’ve also been doing what I do for a really long time – and there are companies I’ve done things for that have literally ceased to exist over the last few decades, so I figure I can talk about some general things now.

    Ages ago, in the mid-90’s, I ran administration on SPARC-based Solaris 2 systems for Intelligent Electronics / Ingram Micro. This was in addition to more mundane things like X86 Novell systems and more obtuse things like IBM AS/400 systems, so I had some deep exposure to high-end (for the time) business systems.

    And this eventually led to working with Sun Microsystems for a while… I was involved in testing for the SWUP (Software Update Platform) portion of Solaris 10 – back when Solaris 10 became a thing in January of 2005.

    Solaris 10 was both interesting and rather cursed from the get-go; Sun was really proud of Solaris because they made it and it ran really well on their own SPARC hardware, so it was their baby – but they were also getting heavily beat up by commodity X86 systems running Linux…

    So, to maintain relevance, they went open source. And with that Solaris 10 was created.

    The problem was Sun, as a company, was mired in their extravagant past and wasn’t lean or nimble enough for the post-tech bubble world they found themselves in.

    I worked at the Broomfield campus during my time there in 2005, and even then several of the buildings were vacant. But in the engineering building the extravagance was still in effect; there were employee kitchens everywhere, lots of free food, and everyone worked in ‘cubes’ that were about 15 feet square with floor to ceiling walls – one of which was all glass and had a sliding door. The more prima-donna personalities were allowed to outfit their office however they wanted, so a few were pretty eclectic.

    But organizationally the place had problems… Engineering was a cost center model, so it was countless small teams fighting for their very existence against other small teams, everyone ‘worked from home’ several days a week and relied on internal communications tools that were sketchy at best to maintain project timelines, and the project I was on wasn’t even sure who was in charge until about two weeks before the project’s end…

    And all of the project documentation was basic at best because in those days at Sun, if it was hard to create it should be hard to understand! And if there was documentation, it was squirreled away on partitions you probably didn’t have access to for a week or two after you discovered it…

    Then there were the more mechanical aspects that were problematic, like the weeks it took to provision test hardware and get credentials for them – even though the servers were on the other side of the wall from my office.

    It wasn’t all bad though. I really enjoyed the remote desktop systems they had where any machine, anywhere, could be used as “your” machine with all of “your” stuff just by sticking your badge in the reader. I applied a lot of this to the systems I run at work, which worked amazingly well when the mysterious virus of unknown origin made the entire company ‘work from home’ for the last few years.

    All in all, my time at Sun Microsystems was an interesting view into how ‘Silicon Valley Big Tech’ operates, and kinda dissuaded me from accepting the various headhunter interviews over the years.

    Sure, I make less than industry average for someone with my experience and resume – but I also don’t have to deal with a lot of the B.S. that plagues my position. So it works for me. 🙂

    Listening to "Tech Noir" by Gunship

  • High-end server

    Back in 1999, when we started the company, we bought some really high-end servers for performance testing – and I still have a few for ‘old times sake’.

    Here, for your viewing pleasure, the HP Netserver LP 1000r:

    These were really potent machines back when they were purchased: dual Pentium III processors (1Ghz @ 133Mhz), 2 gigs of ram (512M ECC PC-133), and three 9.1G 10K RPM Ultra3 SCSI drives – which made them about $4000 each.

    I clearly need to repaste the solid copper heatsinks, but everything in these machines is “HP Original” – and they still work…

    Old-school performance HDs have weird (by modern standards) connectors… But this drive could do 160Mbit and has a 6.9ms seek time – which for the day was pretty impressive.

    But, 20 years on, this server can pretty much be replaced with a Raspberry Pi…

    Listening to "Early Summer" by Miami Nights 1984

  • Livin’ in the future

    The floppy emulator I ordered a few days ago arrived yesterday afternoon, so I spent the latter half of the day puttering about with antique computers…

    The emulator came as a box of parts, but was pretty easy to assemble overall and I had it up and running on the latest firmware in no time.

    The emulator itself, and the 20-pin cable to D-SUB 19-pin Apple external drive adapter

    What this doohickey does is read drive images off of an SD card and presents that information in track/sector format to the computer. Basically a modern computer to 1980’s computer time machine.

    The method I used to make said drive images was a bit convoluted and required two virtual machines and a handful of OSs…

    The important piece was a bit of software called HFVExplorer; an old Windows app that can create and manage HFS file systems as images. This obviously needed to be run in Windows, and I happen to have an arm-based Win11 image in Parallels (a virtual machine system for Macs) for just such situations.

    The second VM is Basilisk II, a 68k Mac emulation that will run on pretty much anything. This was used to decompress old archived disk images and application installers that used Aladdin’s “Stuffit” – a data compression tool used by Mac folks in the before times.

    With this I was able to download images of the original MacOS 6.0 and MacOS 7.1 floppy sets, and create installable media.

    Back over on the Mac Plus I discovered that it wouldn’t boot off of the 7.1 installer and insisted on the 6.0.8 installer. So after booting off of 6.0.8 I was able to format the 20meg HD and install 6.0.8…

    Finishing the fresh 6.0.8 install

    Back in the old days this would have been an Olympic-level feat of floppy swapping as the OS came on 8 disks and the installer liked to bounce around a bit between disks, so it was about 12 swaps in total.

    Once 6.0.8 was installed and the system rebooted it was time to do an in-place upgrade of 6.0.8. to 7.1. This is pretty easy; boot off the HD, mount the 7.1 installer image, and install…

    The most worrisome part of the whole process is waiting the 5-7 minutes while the installer tells you it’s deleting old out of date stuff from the HD, without any real feedback such as a file list or even a progress bar. You can tell by the drive noises that something is going on though, so there’s that at least.

    Eventually though 7.1 will start installing and you are rewarded with more floppy swapping – and about a half an hour and a reboot later…

    Ahh, that new OS smell…

    So now I have a proper, clean install of 7.1 to base my future entertainment with this machine off of. Unlike the state the machine was in when I got it, this install includes all of the networking extensions and control panels… So my next effort will be getting an old Asante scsi-to-ethernet adapter working and getting the antique onto my local network here at the house.

    Who knows, maybe I’ll even get the old 68K onto the Information Superhighway – and cruise really slow in the right-hand lane with my blinkers on. 😀

    Listening to "Tell Me It's Over" by New Arcades

  • Modulate Demodulate

    The first thing one should do with any old computer hardware is work out how to get it to connect to the local BBS.

    The Mac Plus needed some OS level help to get a modem working… The MacOS 7.1 install ‘works’, but it’s in pretty rough shape from the previous owner. It looks like someone was running out of room on the 20meg HDD for the various apps they were using, so they started pulling things out of the system folder.

    Most of the ‘personal’ stuff was removed from the HDD, so there’s space now – but the OS is a bit messed up. I’ll reload it once the 80’s floppy to 20’s digital media adapter arrives.

    Anyway, getting to the BBS involved copying extensions and control panels off of my 165c via 800k floppy, and then a lot of fiddling to get LocalTalk and AppleShare working. This let me connect the two machines together via serial to get Black Night (An old 68K BBS terminal app) onto the Mac Plus.

    See, Black Night’s executable is bigger than an 800k floppy will hold, so 80’s networking was the only real solution. Way back in the mid-to-late 80’s, AppleTalk was the most used computer network standard on the planet – which is when I got involved with it – and it was a lot of fun to wring all of that 40 year old network knowledge out of my antique brain.

    Once I got Black Night running and got the System 7 modem tool to work again, it was pretty easy to get my serial-to-wifi modem emulator to connect to EOTD via telnet. And once connected I checked my messages, replied to a couple of folks, and then logged off to return to the 21st century…

    Good times.

    Listening to "Fading Memory" by Morgan Willis

  • Mac+

    Today we set the wayback machine to 1987…

    In early 1987 my duty station had changed from a TDU at the Groton Subbase to the USS Pennsylvania (SSBN 735), which was being built down the road at General Dynamics Electric Boat (E.B.). Over the previous Christmas I’d gone back home and returned with my Atari 800xl, and then sold my 800xl when I moved into the barracks at E.B. – so for the first time in a long time I was computerless.

    Fortunately, one of the guys who arrived at the barracks a month later had an Apple Macintosh Plus, and he had set it up on the counter in the rec-room as that was the only place to really put it. And after some discussion I got his blessing to mess with the thing, so it became the system I used for about a year.

    That was my first real exposure to the Macintosh platform, as well as access to a 68000 CPU that wasn’t being used for science stuff where my father worked – and it always stuck with me, even as I got into the Amiga platform in 1988…

    Today I gathered up a bunch of old Apple computers and peripherals at work and ran them over to Apple Rescue of Denver – a recycler / restorer of old Apple stuff – to offload them on someone who could use / part them out. And while I was there spotted this old Mac Plus looking for a new home…

    And I decided to give it one.

    The Apple M0001A in all of its beige glory

    This particular Mac Plus came with a keyboard, mouse, Mac Saver fan, and a Macintosh HD20 external drive. And this unit has been upgraded to 4megs of ram from the original 1meg and the 9 inch diagonal screen and its whopping 512×342 resolution looks great and has no issues.

    The above unit would have run about $5000 in 1987 dollars ($2600 for the computer, keyboard, and mouse, $800 for the 3megs of ram, and $1500 for the HD) – this would be $13,000 in today’s monopoly money.

    Something to think about when pondering $4000 for the latest Apple Silicon powered laptop…

    Overall the Mac and its peripherals are in amazing shape, and the ‘clunk’ of the keyboard as I was using it immediately sent me back in time.

    Now to bodge a method to get software from the Internet onto the 37 year old computer. 🙂

    A few hours later…

    ClarisWorks, go!

    Fortunately I have a floppy drive for my G3 laptop, which will format / write 800k disks, so I have some basic ability to install things. But, that said, I have a Floppy Emu (model C) on the way – which adds the ability to use 21st century technology with 80’s computers.

    Listening to "Magic Power" by Triumph

  • And a few years later…

    I don’t normally keep my old Windows machines because, well, they’re just old Windows machines. There’s nothing really special about most old Windows machines as they tend to be either as cheap as possible, or life support for some video card that cost as much as the rest of the system…

    But there is one more that I’ve held on to since I purchased it in February of 2007…

    This is a Dell XPS M1710, and while I purchased it for work as a development machine, it mostly did duty as my World of Warcraft LAN party rig for a couple of years.

    This was pretty spendy – around $3000 if I recall; it was the top-end configuration with a 2Ghz Core2Duo CPU, a gig of RAM, a Geforce Go 7950 GTX, a 17-inch 1920×1200 display, and Windows Vista Ultimate.

    By the time it was retired in 2017 it was maxed out on RAM (4 gigs), had a 7200 RPM 500G HD in it, and Windows 7 ultimate… And had a dead battery…

    One of the reasons I used this machine at work for a decade was the number of ports; it’s loaded with pretty much every port you can imagine… 6 USB2, Dual PCMCIA card, SD card, Firewire, VGA, DVI, gigabit ethernet, modem, A/B/G Wifi… And all of these are without dongles! The ports are all useful in various ways to an IT professional, so I continued to use the machine for work whenever Windows was needed for a long time.

    These days it still gets pulled out on occasion when I need Windows 7 for something, like turning some old ISO into a bootable USB or opening some old archive. But otherwise it’s just another conversation piece from a bygone computing era.

    Listening to "College Dreams" by Marvel83'

  • Y2K Laptops

    Not all of my interesting antique computers are Apples; I have a few other things that I used back in the day, usually for work, that are pretty interesting…

    For instance, back in the late 90’s “The Internet” wasn’t just a communications medium – it was also an aesthetic!

    The Compaq Presario 1400 (14XL345)

    Check out the groovy “4 way Internet Scroll Button” under the touch pad, and right under the display is the “Internet Zone” with dedicated buttons for ‘instant internet access’, ‘instant email’, and ‘retail central’ – an “Instant connection to your favorite computer store and a variety of popular retail sites at the touch of a button”.

    Oh, and MP3s were still a big deal, so this has a dedicated MP3 player that works even if the laptop is off. And it actually sounds pretty good for a y2k laptop…

    I picked this up in July of 2000 for something like $2000 at CompUSA because I needed a Windows PC to develop the DirectX stuff I was working on, but I was living on a fifty foot yacht and space was a premium. The big reason I bought this laptop, other than it was ‘rad’ looking, is it had a DVD drive, a Trident “CyberBlade” AGP video card, and USB 2.0 (!) in it – all of which were useful for the digital video stuff I was working on.

    This came with a Pentium III at 650mhz, a 13.3″ TFT display (that still looks pretty good), 64 megs of PC100 RAM, a 6 gig IDE HD, a 56k Modem / Ethernet card, and Windows ME (Millennium Edition).

    As you can see by the photo, I added a 256M SODIMM to it, which is the most it’ll take (the video uses 8 megs of system ram, which is why the ram count looks weird), and it got an upgrade to a 20G HD some time in the past.

    The only real issue this laptop has is the battery crapped out about a decade ago. And while I can get a replacement for about $50, it’s just not been that big of a deal for what amounts to a conversation piece.

    Listening to "The Comeback Kid" by The Midnight

  • Work

    It’s a cold, grey, and somewhat snowy day outside and things are a bit slow here at the office, so I figured I’d show off my work setup while waiting for the first emergency…

    My desk, where I run everything for the company…

    There’s my workhorse M1 Max 16″ MacBook Pro, hooked to a Satechi USB-C hub, which runs my circa 2003 Microsoft IntelliEye mouse and Apple A1048 keyboard – both of which I’ve been using, yes, since 2003…

    Back in 2003, the IntelliEye was the pinnacle pointing device and even us Mac people grudgingly used them… Even today the mouse holds up to newer, higher-tech offerings well – and as an added bonus is from a time when people had big hands, so I find it comfortable to use.

    After 20 years, I’m just used to how it tracks and it’s almost an extension of my arm at this point.

    The A1048 is a really nice keyboard to use, and again after 20 years I’m just used to it. It’s got a very unique switch profile where it’s kind of like a rubber dome mixed with something linear; I like it, but others have made weird faces when typing on it.

    I like this keyboard so much in fact that it gets a yearly tear-down for cleaning – which is its major design flaw… The clear plastic ‘tray’ the keyboard sits in, as well as the aluminum switch plate under the keys, collect grime and show it to you. So once a year my neat freak gets triggered and I disassemble the thing and clean it.

    Oh, and all of the keycaps were replaced about five years ago with new-old stock – which is why it still looks brand new.

    Listening to "Any Way You Want It" by Journey

  • Old Code

    I was rummaging around in a box of old stuff, and came across a typed-out bit of BASIC I wrote for my ZX-81. I know it was the ZX-81 because of the code structure…

    See, BASIC on the ZX-81 was pretty primitive. For example, while it understood arrays there was no ‘data’, ‘read’, or ‘restore’ functionality. So you had to do things the hard way and line-by-line define the array on runtime:

    10 DIM A$(2,10)
20 LET A$(1)="data"
30 LET A$(2)="more data"

    It also had a hard time chaining commands, so while an IF / THEN could do a mathematical operation

    10 IF A=B THEN LET C=C+1

    it generally couldn’t run a second command based on the evaluation. So you needed to:

    10 IF A=B THEN GOSUB 100

100 PRINT "I did a thing!"
110 RETURN

    Anyway, back to the ancient typed code. What this bit of code apparently does (I don’t have a ZX-81, and the tokenized input method of keyboard modifiers is nightmarish – and they preserved that in the emulators) is display “TRON” in the movie font on the screen in the low-res 64×43 mode.

    Based on this I’m guessing this was written in 1982 after I saw TRON in the theater, which means I was 13.

    It’s interesting to me to see the thought process of 13 year old me; the machine had 1K of RAM, so I was doing tricks to maximize that space.

    The ZX-81 has a PLOT X,Y function which will put a dot on the screen in that spot, and while it would have been totally acceptable in the early 80’s to write a ton of PLOT commands, it would be too large for the 1K of RAM – so what I did was:

    10 DIM D$(13,64)

    And then did 13 variations of

    20 LET D$(1)="111111111111100111111111100000000111100000010000000011111"

    Each of these is stepped through and each position of the string was evaluated to plot a point in that position for each of the 13 lines that made up the logo on the screen.

    100 FOR I=1 TO 13
110 FOR P=1 TO 64
120 IF D$(I,P)="1" THEN GOSUB 1000
130 NEXT P
140 NEXT I

1000 PLOT P,I+13
1010 RETURN

    I’m guessing as the code doesn’t define “fast” mode, that this whole display process would have taken like 10-15 seconds. The ZX-81 was so primitive that that process for both the screen draws and processing reduced the Z80 CPU’s processing speed by two thirds – so you could put it into “fast” mode where it stopped worrying about the screen and just did work, and then updated the screen at the end.

    This would have been before I had a cassette deck that I could use to record programs on, so this would have been written out on green-bar printer paper, typed in, debugged, and then the final version typed out on my IBM Selectric typewriter for later readability.

    Interestingly, because of the limited space, nothing I wrote for the ZX-81 is commented – a major faux pas in the modern day. I just have to analyze the code and “figure it out” when I stumble over something from this era. 🙂

    Listening to "Joyride" by Dream Fiend

  • Digital Art

    My first ‘art’ on a computer was a code-based graphic of a pegasus, done on my ZX-81 – which was 64×46 pixels. It was basically digital needlepoint, where I’d made a grid on paper, filled in blocks where the pegasus would be, and then coded the whole array to display on the TV I used as a monitor… This would have been about 1982.

    My first exposure to a ‘digital art tool’ was the KoalaPads they had on some Apple IIs at school in 1984. These were really primitive low-resolution pointing devices essentially, and I never did anything truly artistic with them, but they did serve to get me interested in alternative input mechanisms.

    My first actual ‘digital art’ was via the mouse on a shipmate’s Macintosh he had in the barracks at Electric Boat, which would have been about 1987. Prior to this all I had really used was a keyboard, and it was actually tricky to retrain myself to move my right hand while watching a monitor. My best effort on the Macintosh was a helicopter flying over some mountains – but it was good enough to impress the guys in the barracks. 🙂

    In 1988 I acquired an Amiga 500, and with that a copy of Deluxe Paint III – and this is where I really cut my teeth on digital art. Everything I did on the Amiga was done via a mouse, but the tools available were really similar to modern software with pallets of tools and colors, and the ability to use them in fairly high resolution.

    The next digital art milestone came in 1996 when I acquired a Summagraphics Summagrid digitizer, which I used on my PowerMac 8100/100.

    Digital cameras were pretty wimpy in 1997 – the coffee table looking thing on the right is the digitizer.

    The problem with the digitizer it was designed for CAD work and while very precise, didn’t make a very good freehand device… And it was HUGE – so didn’t make the move to Virginia in 1997.

    In 1999 I acquired my first Wacom – an Intuos 9×12. This was a bleeding-edge tablet that used the brand new USB connector, so I had to get a CardBus USB card for my PowerBook G3 to use it… The problem was that CardBus USB cards for Macs were rare, so I wound up using some sketchy Apple development driver that made PC CardBus cards work on the Mac…

    During this time I did most of my artwork on paper, inked it, scanned it, and did the coloring in the laptop with the Wacom.

    The Intuos was given to a friend when I moved back to Virginia in 2004, and when I picked up the PowerBook G4 after the move I also picked up a new Wacom Graphire 3 to go with it…

    The Wacom Graphire 3 (CTE-430) – it still works, if your OS is old enough.

    I chose the Graphire 3 because it was small and fit into the laptop bag. In hindsight it was a bit too small, but I made due with it for several years.

    Which leads to my current Wacom, the Intuos4 ‘medium’ that I’ve been using since 2009…

    My faithful workhorse, the Intuos4 (PTK-640)

    As you can see by the picture, my current Wacom has about a million miles on it – I’ve just about worn through the active area on it in fact.

    I figure I’d still be using this in 2030 if Wacom wasn’t playing games with the drivers to create some planned obsolescence to sell new tablets… There is no actual driver for the last two versions of MacOS for this tablet, but the old driver still (mostly) works so I keep using it.

    I really need to upgrade, it’s just hundreds of dollars to do so and the economy is still kinda crap. Maybe for my birthday. 🙂

    Listening to "Hangin' On" by LeBrock

  • MiniDisc

    Today we set the wayback machine for February of 1998…

    In late ’97 I had moved to a forty acre farm in the backwoods of Rhoadesville Virginia and was working on some very high-tech stuff in D.C. – which is a pretty good drive…

    For a while now MP3s had been a thing, as were burnable CDs, and making CDs full of MP3s to play on the computer was also a thing. But the car was still limited to audio CDs, and while you could make them yourself the storage was limited to 10-11 tracks at best. And I-95 wasn’t in the best repair so even the high-end CD player in my car would skip quite a bit.

    Portable MP3 players were being experimented with, but weren’t a reality just yet, so the solution for me was MiniDisc.

    For my birthday in 1998 I bought what was the best portable MiniDisc player / recorder on the market at the time, with the intention of using it on my daily drive back and forth to D.C… The Sharp MD-MS702.

    I still have the original box and all of the stuff the unit came with…

    The contents of the box. The only thing missing is the original headphones, and while the original battery is there, it’s dead and is just there for the model number.

    Fortunately you can still buy replacement rechargeable batteries – so here’s the unit playing a MD I recorded in 1998.

    And the size of a minidisc. The player / recorder is only slightly bigger than this and about a half an inch thick.

    What really sold me on the Sharp was that it was essentially a recording studio in your pocket. I could connect it to my home hi-fi setup optically, so ripping a track on a CD to a track on the MD was easy, as well as being able to title the track and see the info on the LCD screen.

    The MD player allowed for all-digital mixtapes, essentially – and it didn’t skip no matter how bad I-95 got.

    I still use the MD player pretty often; I take it with me on evening walks, play MDs I recorded before the turn of the century, and remember how cool everything was in the before times. 🙂

    Listening to "Hollow" by LeBrock

  • Photoshop

    I bought my first copy of Photoshop about thirty years ago this month… Which seems like an insanely long time ago.

    Photoshop 2.5.1 from 1992… Was about $500 back then.

    I ran Photoshop 2.5 on my Powerbook 165C back in the day. It was remarkably similar to Deluxe Paint IV, which I ran on my Amiga during the same time period, so for me it was just learning the tools of the trade on a different hardware platform.

    For the most part my early Photoshop expenses were just ‘the cost of doing business’; I needed to learn the software, and the software was expensive… I wouldn’t really make any money off of Photoshop until 1996, and Photoshop 4.0, where I started making spare cash designing web sites and UIs for various software projects.

    Photoshop 4.0.1 from 1996… This was also about $500.

    The above screen shot is from the installed version of 4.0.1 on my Powerbook G3 Pismo, which dual-boots MacOS 9.2.2 and OSX public beta.

    By the time Y2K rolled around I started running Photoshop on PC hardware, so most of the newer versions in my collection are for Windows…

    Photoshop 6 was 2000, Photoshop 7 was 2002, and CS3 was 2007…

    I used PS7 for like five years before moving to CS3, and then used CS3 up until CS6 in 2012 – which is when Adobe went to the subscription model. I have a license for CS6, which was the last non-subscription version to be offered, but for the most part I’ve been on the yearly plan since CC (Creative Cloud) in 2013.

    Another long, strange trip I guess. 🙂

    Listening to "Secrets of Hiroshi" by Futurecop!

  • More old iPhones

    It has been a while since my last Old Apple Crap post, so here’s a new one.

    After my original iPhone, I migrated to a 3GS. Unfortunately the 3GS, being made of plastic, didn’t fare very well and I no longer have it… But I still have my iPhone 4 and 5, and like my first iPhone they still function…

    The CDMA version of the iPhone 4 – from 12 years ago
    Like all of my stuff, the phone is in excellent shape

    The interesting bit about the above iPhone 4 is that it’s the phone that broke the AT&T strangle hold on iPhones… It’s the first CDMA version, and was a Verizon phone.

    It has an integrated SIM, so it still shows network connectivity, but the service has been turned down for voice calls – so this phone, like my original iPhone, is only really useful as a collectible now.

    The CDMA version of the iPhone 5 – The best iPhone ever made and a decade old a this point.
    Pristine – just how I like my collectables. It’s still bright white; the sunlight in the room is making it look yellow in the photo.

    My iPhone 5 was another CDMA model on Verizon, but this time in white to break my long history of black iPhones.

    The iPhone 5 was peak iPhone in my opinion; retina screens in a proper wide-screen ratio, lightning connector, LTE connectivity, good battery, good performance… It was the total package, and still fit in the average human hand.

    In theory I could put a SIM in this phone and it would still work… Probably not worth the expense of another carrier service though, so it too is just a collectable at this point.

    Listening to "Late Night Calls" by At 1980