For the sheer Back-To-The-Future-Ness of it, I’ve spent some time over the last few days working out how to get 20th century analog to work with 21st century digital.
See, back in the 80’s and 90’s pretty much everything was analog – especially the way we talked to other people. Radio, TV, the telephone, and even our computer modems used analog signals. But these days there’s pretty much no such thing as analog anything, let alone a phone line, which makes using a 90’s modem a bit of an exercise in haxx0ring reality…
For example, here at work my phone system uses a VOIP-based digital PBX to route calls around internally, and both the phones and the voice transport are digital. If someone places a call outside the building, the call is routed over a fiber connection to CenturyLink using what is essentially a sub-channel of the several gigabit connection into the building. From there the call is routed over the Internet to some other provider before being converted back to analog voice at someone else’s phone.
This works great for people, who have limited perceptual acoustic capability, but modems use a lot more of the audible spectrum to do their thing… Which is what all of that electronic screeching is about when modems and fax machines connect to each other; they are working out how bad the phone line is and how much acoustic space they have to talk to each other.
So, given all of this I’ve been teaching my PBX that analog isn’t a bad thing by working out a custom codec (basically an analog to digital sound converter) and some special rules for the timings and encapsulation used to turn modem screeching into 1s and 0s for the Internet.
And today I was successful in making an end-to-end modem connection to a friend’s BBS using ‘period’ hardware…
Said BBS has been running since 1992, I’ve had an account on it since 1993, and I still have hardware that I used in 1994 – so as something of a 30th anniversary thing I set my wayback machine to the early 90’s and made a phone call.
To do this took a surprising amount of work…
First, I had to get my circa 1994 Powerbook 165c working, which required replacing some capacitors in the backlight assembly. Then I had to bodge a serial cable that converted from 1994 Apple 8-pin to regular 25-pin. Then I had to get a decent BBS terminal application onto the 165c.
This software installation required two additional computers of various ages and several operating systems to move data from the present-day internet back in time to 1994…
See, the 165c uses antiquated file systems based on what density and how many sides the 3.5″ floppy you stuck in it happens to have – while my M1 Max laptop has no idea what a floppy is, let alone what MFS or HFS is.
So, the solution was to use my recently repaired G5 iMac as the intermediary, as it can read USB2 flash storage as well as operate a USB floppy drive, and it can still run OS9, which can read and write HFS on 1.44M floppies.
So the process is simple:
on the M1 laptop go to an internet archive of ancient Motorola 68K Apple software
download “Black Night” (an ancient ANSI BBS terminal application) as a .SIT (Stuffit) archive
put that onto a USB2 flash drive via a thunderbolt-to-USB adapter
plug USB2 flash drive into the G5
move the stuffit archive to the desktop
fire up the OS9 compatibility layer in OSX 10.3.6
decompress the .SIT archive
copy resultant installer to a floppy I formatted in the 165c
put floppy into the 165c
and install software.
See? Simple.
How2Install stuff on a 165c in 2022… The process goes right to left.
From here it was just a matter of configuring Black Night to use my old USR V.everything modem, which is using the DB-25 to Apple cable and the modified modem-friendly port on my PBX to call a BBS across town…
Connecting at 12,000 baud over several back and forth A/D-D/A conversions – not bad!
Pardon the HVAC noise in the background; my office has some impressive forced ventilation because I routinely let the magic smoke out of things as part of my day-to-day duties. 🙂
And a photo for posterity
I’d not been on EOTD in a couple of years, so it took some time to catch up on my ‘e-mail’ and the forums, but it’s nice to see that the system still gets some use… I replied to a bunch of folks going back a year or so, and now I’ll wait to see how long it takes to get a reply. 🙂
Listening to "When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies" by Gunship
Earlier today I posted some photos of my G5 iMac, so I figured I should show off the rest of my “G” collection…
Before the G5 there was the aptly named G4…
PowerBook G4 17″ 1.33Ghz – CD case for scale
I’ve actually had three of these over the years… The first I picked up off the shelf at the Apple Store in Tyson’s Corner Virginia on February 25th, 2004 for about $3500. Unfortunately the first one had a screen defect, so Apple swapped it out for me and that became number 2.
I used the second one until October 1st, 2004 – shortly after I started at where I currently work and needed a PC to do PC things with. I sold it to finance the PC, and a few months later bought the G5 iMac.
The above G4 PowerBook I picked up in October of 2020 just to have one again. Shortly after I got it I replaced everything in it with new old-stock parts, swapped the HD for an SSD, and maxed out the ram.
I fire it up a couple of times a month to do writing, old use old PhotoShop, or putter around in Garage Band – just like I used to.
Before the G4 was the similarly named “G3”, and I have one of those too…
PowerBook G3 “Pismo” 400Mhz
I’ve had two of these over the years…
The first was a G3 “Wallstreet” I picked up in 1998, about a year after moving to Virginia the first time. The Wallstreet was essentially my primary computer until I replaced it with the G3 “Pismo” in February of 2000.
The Pismo these days is maxed on ram, 1 whole gigabyte, and runs an SSD that holds OS 9.2.2 in one partition, and the OSX public beta in the other… I imaged the drive as I had it right after installing the OSX public beta, and that’s what I put back on it when needed.
The Pismo is essentially a time machine I use to transport myself back to the better days of the late 90’s. For example, it connects to a BBS I’ve been using since 1993…
bbs.eotd.com / 303-679-0161
As you’ve probably gathered by now, I’m very into self-contained machines and I generally have the bleeding-edge laptop for {current year}… I think it’s a function of moving so much over the years; it’s just easier to toss a laptop into a case and go when required.
Prior to the G3 Wallstreet I used a PowerMac 6500/225 which a PowerPC 603e machine – or a “G2”, and I had an 8100/100 back in 1995, which is a PowerPC 601 – or a “G1”. I don’t currently have an either of those because they’re towers and require a separate keyboard, mouse, and monitor – and a lot of space.
And before the 8100/100 I had a PowerBook 165c which I posted about a few days ago. And while it’s not a “G” machine, it was the machine that started it all for me back in 1994.
My G5 iMac started getting a little flakey the other day, which usually means one thing; the dreaded aging capacitor issue…
See, back in the old days capacitors were basically a can of electrolytic goo, and over two decades or so said goo dries up and leaks out of the can.
If you catch the caps early you can prevent the inevitable leaky mess, but either way this stops things from working. And the only real fix is to buy new capacitors of the same values and replace the old ones, which can be rather time consuming.
Fortunately, I have a spare newer “ALS” G5 that just needed some spare parts – and now I had them.
My old G5, stripped of everything I needed for the new ALS G5. The DVD-Rom goes in the upper left, the 3.5″ HD in the upper right, and the PSU in the bottom.The bad caps in the VRM for the CPU. You can see the tell-tale expansion by the ‘doming’ of the caps, and the one in the foreground (and the one behind it) has just started leaking.The new G5 up and running with the donor parts from the old G5 – it’s the circle of (computer) life.
I’ll hang on to the husk of the old G5 for replacement parts as the years go on; the screen is in really nice shape, and there’s a lot of little parts that could be handy someday.
Today we set the wayback machine to 1998; the very early days of 3D video games powered by dedicated 3D hardware…
The era of “3dfx” and a whole lot of voodoo.
This was the absolute best 3D card in ’98 – ran about $500, has 12 MEGS of ram, and a 90Mhz clock speed. This was in my EverQuest rig, which had a bleeding edge 300Mhz Pentium II, 128 MEGS of ram, and a very fancy SCSI-II drive subsystem.
I think at the time I was building this machine Windows 95 was the top PC OS – Win98 wouldn’t come out for a couple of months.
One of the nice things about this card is you didn’t have to set jumpers for hardware bus settings like IRQ. The drivers had evolved to a point where they could poll for the card and figure things out.
Good times.
Listening to "Standing on Higher Ground" by The Alan Parsons Project
A long time ago, in the before-times of early 1994, I bought myself a laptop that would change everything…
The Apple Macintosh PowerBook 165c had come out in February 1993 and was the first laptop to have a 256 color display. It looked like nothing else on the market; it was simultaneously very 80’s and very 21st century – and was something of a dream machine for computer nerds.
I really, really wanted one… But they were about $3400 in 1993, or almost $7000 in today’s money.
In early ’94 I was using some generic 486DX-33 PC as my home computer and I had a Toshiba “Satellite” T1800 that I used when I was away from home – but what I really wanted was that PowerBook.
So, for my birthday in 1994 I managed to find a 165c for the low, low price of $2400 and after selling the Toshiba acquired it. It had 4 megs of ram, an 80meg SCSI HD, a 33Mhz 68030 CPU, and that amazing 8.9″ 640×400 color LCD all housed in a remarkably tiny box – and I was over the moon to have it!
And, as another testament to just how long Apple stuff will last – it looks a bit like this:
The 165c in all of its grey plastic and rainbow apple gloryMmmm – trackball. And two buttons! (a rarity for Apple products)
The 165c currently runs Apple’s System 7.1 from the built-in 80meg SCSI HD…
Back in the day I primarily used the 165c as a writing tool, so it had things like Office 3.0 and Norton Utilities on it. But I also had a few games on it, like the amazing pinball simulation “Crystal Caliburn”…
The 165c was the first Mac I personally owned (I’d used a Macintosh Plus for a year or so back in ’87, but it wasn’t mine), and it was a big part of my life-long appreciation of the brand and its “Think Different” moniker.
About a year after acquiring the 165c I picked up a PowerMac 8100/100 which was instrumental in my graphic design work at the time, and somewhat cemented my use of the Macintosh platform to this very day…
1993 68030 on the left, 2022 M1 Max on the right – and almost 30 years between them.
In my ongoing expose of all of the old Apple stuff I’ve acquired over the years, here’s my “PowerMac8,1” iMac G5.
The 2004 version of the 17 inch G5 iMac, running Ubuntu 16.04-PPC
Back in 2001/2002 I was teaching CompSci at Marianapolis Prep in northern Connecticut.
Among my duties as the CompSci teacher was bringing the school’s technology into the 21st century… I upgraded the school with this new Internet thing and a full suite of Mac-based stuff; including frame relay internet, bleeding edge campus-wide WiFi, Xserve machines, and about thirty Apple eMacs.
I came to really like the iMacs that the students were using and decided I’d get one some day…
After I started where I currently work, in 2004, I needed a PC for what I was doing there so I grudgingly sold my 17″ G4 laptop to pay for it. And a couple of months later, for Christmas 2004, I bought this iMac to have a Mac around.
This is the 1.8Ghz G5 (PPC970FX) and has 2Gigs of ram, a 160G HD, and an AGP 8x GeForce FX go5200 video card. It does 10/100 ethernet, 802.11 B/G wireless, bluetooth 1.1, and even has a 56k v.92 modem built in. And there’s also a DVD burner, which was pretty fancy in the early 2000’s.
All in all this was a pretty stellar bit of kit in late 2004.
These days the G5 runs Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS for PowerPC and is pretty much a conversation piece. But it’ll still get on the Internet and do basic Internet things – at 1.2Ghz Celeron M speeds. 🙂
Another interesting old bit of Apple tech I have laying about here at home; the Gen1 Airport Express.
Before the Apple TV, if you wanted to pipe iTunes to your stereo on the other side of the room, you needed one of these – which is why I bought this one back in 2004.
Unlike a lot of the other older Apple stuff I have cluttering up my house, this no longer works with modern hardware… Well, it still mechanically works just fine, you just need an early 2000’s Mac to connect to it and configure it.
Fortunately, I have a few of those. 🙂
Interestingly these had pretty good analog sound quality due to the TI Burr-Brown DAC they used, and with Apple Lossless (ALAC) and using TOSLink (that headphone jack also houses a laser for fiber optic use) the output was 1:1 to the original CD – over wireless!
It was pretty cutting edge stuff in 2004.
I used this with a Sony SAVA 500 home theater setup, which was also pretty good for someone without a zillion dollars to spend.
These days it’s all about the Apple TV, which has enough CPU grunt internally to run its own network connections and Apple Music application. And everything is ALAC now…
I’ve been using Apple’s server product since OSX came out, I guess it would be 2001 or so, so I have some passing history with the product for a couple of decades – and it’s a bittersweet thing for me to see it come to an end.
Now, granted, most of the features of “Server” have been included in the base OS for some time now – so I’ve only used “Server” on older machines. But I’m kind of a collector of older machines…
The last stand alone OSX server product, which I run on my Xserve.
My Intel-based Xserve for example still runs Snow Leopard Server, which was $499 back in the day. But, before the Intel-based server there was the dual G5 server which ran Tiger Server…
The “Universal Binary” version of Tiger Server – it ran on both PPC and Intel, and was the only OSX that did both on one disc.
I think the unlimited client version of Tiger Server was $999 back in the day.
Anyway, it was a good run OSX Server – have a good one buddy!
Here’s another odd bit of Apple history that you can still plug into a Mac and expect it it to still work…
The original iPod Shuffle.
This is my 1Gig Shuffle that I picked up back in February of 2005, and like my iPhone 1, it still holds a charge for days and still works beautifully.
I use it for my evening walks because you can still plug one of these into a bleeding edge M1 Mac running the latest OS, and Apple Music (iTunes) will still see it and load it with random music.
Though you do need an adapter these days to get from USB type-A to USB type-C…
I’ve long since lost the original headphones and now use a pair of JBL Quantum 50s with the Shuffle, which are certainly good enough for walking around to a personal soundtrack.
It never ceases to amaze me just how long Apple stuff lasts…
For the pure entertainment value of it, I present my original 2008 iPhone…
Technically this is an iPhone 2G as it’s the 2008 16G version of the 2007 iPhone 1. The photos are taken with my 2022 iPhone SE. And yes, I take good care of my stuff. 🙂
In a tribute to Apple’s build quality, the original iPhone still works… It takes a charge, connects to wifi, does basic Internet stuff, and runs apps just like it did 14 years ago. It’s even running the latest version of iPhone OS that it will run, 3.1.3.
Back in 2016 AT&T turned off all of the cellular service the original iPhone can use, so there’s no way this thing can ever make another phone call – but as a time capsule of how things have changed, it’s pretty neat to have.
Now, what’s really interesting is that the latest version of Apple Music (iTunes for us old folks) running on the latest MacOS (12.3.1), using the latest Macintosh hardware (M1 Max) will still recognize the original iPhone and transfer data to and from it.
And this means I can do things like invert the above photos…
Here’s my 2022 SE as seen by the original iPhone’s 2 megapixel back camera… This was pretty amazing quality back in 2008.
And one more photo for giggles…
My roommate’s iPhone 12 Pro Max compared to the original iPhone… What a difference 14 years makes.
Prior to my first cellphone I had a pager… In the early 90’s everyone had a pager as it was far less expensive than a cellphone both in cost and in service fees… Some places would even give you the pager for free if you signed up for a yearly contract.
My pager had a fancy multi-line LED display on it that would show the name and number of the person who paged, so I could then find a payphone to call them back and find out what was up.
My friends and I had various codes worked out where we would put in the call-back ‘extension’ things like 518. 518 meant “meet at Denny’s at 6pm” – which was easier and cheaper than finding a payphone.
I got my first cellphone in 1995 shortly after I’d gotten into the I.T. department at Intelligent Electronics (I.E.). The phone at the time was a Motorola “MicroTAC” of some variation that was basically the cellphone you saw in every movie, TV show, and music video of the early 90’s.
I recall that it was fairly expensive to purchase, a couple hundred bucks, and even more expensive to operate… I want to say it worked out to about a dollar per minute to use it. Fortunately I.E. covered part of the cost because I was on-call.
The next cellphone was a Motorola “StarTAC” in 1997. Like the MicroTAC before it, the StarTAC was the cellphone to have in the late 90’s. I used the crap out of that phone as I was working contracts in D.C. at the time at places like the Pentagon and my entire life centered on that phone and my day planner.
In 1999 the StarTAC, in its belt holster, got caught by the seatbelt in a friend’s Jeep and flipped off my belt and into a nearby puddle – which ended the StarTACs run as probably the most used cellphone of my entire life.
After this, I got into Nextel’s ruggedized phones and used a Motorola i1000 plus and then an i305 for many years…
On February 26th, 2008 I got my first iPhone. An iPhone 1 – the first iPhone…
The iPhone had been out for about a year at that point, but I wasn’t real enthused with the walled garden aspects of it… When it first came out it was an entirely closed system and the phone would only run what was on the phone from Apple. And this seemed like a waste to me as, in my humble opinion, the iPhone was actually a Newton with a cellphone built into it.
In early February Apple announced that an SDK was coming soon, and starting with iOS 2.0 people would be able to write apps for the iPhone – so I jumped on the bandwagon.
And in March the SDK arrived… And the rest is trillion dollar history.
One of the first photos I took with the iPhone 1. My cat, Marshal, doing what cats do – sleeping.
Since then I’ve bounced around to various phone makers here and there and have had things like an LG V20 and a Blackberry PRIV, flagship phones like the iPhone 12 Max, and cheap ‘burner’ phones like my current Nokia 6300 4G.
Today I will be circling back to the iPhone once again, but this time instead of a gigantic “two-hander” $1200 uberphone, I’m going with the much more sanely priced 2022 “SE” which I picked up for $400.
The 2022 SE was announced on March 8th and is the 13th generation of the phone I picked up in 2008…
I kicked around the idea of getting one for a month or so before pulling the trigger… Mostly I’m returning to the fold because I miss having a decent GPS-enabled camera in the phone and I’ve decided to not sell my Apple Watch, which requires an iPhone to operate. And, I can justify $400 for a current generation smartphone that is still a pocketable size.
The 2022 SE is basically a 2016 iPhone 8, filled with the guts from the 2022 phones. So it’s about as future-proof as you can get in a cellphone and should get software support for at least five years.
Anyway, the new phone will be delivered sometime today direct from Apple.
Listening to "If Anyone Falls In Love" by Stevie Nicks
I got a few questions about the Before Times from my post yesterday – mostly asking about how the Internet finally materialized out of government funding and corporate phone companies…
Being a bit of a scholar of this sort of thing, back in 2004 I took the opportunity to go and visit a spot in Virginia where a lot of what we think of as the Internet came to be…
The series of ownership stickers on that utility box is why we are here…The ownership stickers changed as this box’s owners went from Lightnet (top) to WilTel (middle) to MCI (bottom).
Set your way back machine for 1983: CSX Corp and SNET (Southern New England Telephone) teamed up to create a new kind of private line service using the latest technology called fiber optics.
SNET provided the technical knowhow to make the network work, and CSX had the easements and property rights (being a major train company) to put it in. This new company was called, creatively, “LightNet” and it covered roughly 5000 miles and served more than 40 cities east of the Mississippi.
LightNet provided interstate private line telecommunications service to other common carriers such as US Sprint (heard of them?) and government agencies for voice, data, and video.
This same year LDDS (Long Distance Discount Service) is formed… More about them though in about a decade…
In 1985 another new company was formed, “WilTel”, who used decommissioned pipelines as conduits for buried fiber optic lines in operational easements. WilTel’s network covered 27 major cities west of the Mississippi… Places like Minneapolis; Omaha; Kansas City; St. Louis; Tulsa; Oklahoma City; Dallas; Houston; Denver; Salt Lake City; Los Angeles; and many others.
In September of 1987 LightNet and WilTel hammered out an interconnect agreement that tied the two networks together and created a coast-to-coast fiber network and laid the groundwork for a US spanning pure digital “backbone”.
Essentially the first inklings of a national “internet” that could be accessed by everyone, not just universities, were formed by these two companies back in 1987.
One could literally hang a sign on the fence that says “The Internet Started Here”.
Ok, so we move onwards.
1989 WilTel buys LightNet in its entirety for something like $365 million.
1990 WilTel and MCI announce a long term agreement to access each other’s fiber networks. This creates a network of over 50,000 system miles, or the biggest fiber based network in the world.
1992 LDDS from a decade ago has become the fourth largest Long Distance carrier in the country by consuming anything it can fit into its corporate head.
1994 LDDS acquires Dial-Net, renames to LDDS Communications, then acquires IDB-WorldCom.
1995 LDDS Communications buys WilTel for $2.5 billion and becomes the provider for GTE, Ameritech, and SBC. The whole mess is renamed to “WorldCom”
1996 MFS (yet another octopus telcom company) buys UUNET. In turn WorldCom buys MFS.
1997 WorldCom buys CompuServe, buys MCI, buys Brooks Fiber, and renames to MCI-WorldCom.
1998 MCI-WorldCom becomes WorldCom.
1999 WorldCom tries to buy Sprint but is stopped when European and US governments wont allow it.
This is probably the reason the Sprint box is on the other side of the pole from the LightNet / WilTel / MCI box…
The LightNet / WilTel / MCI box is on the other side of this.You had one job, Sprint Guy…
And In 2002 WorldCom files a record bankruptcy case (3.8 billion) and renames back to MCI.
All of this happened around this little set of buildings next to some train tracks in Fredericksburg Virginia… Neat huh?
Listening to "Turn It Up" by The Alan Parsons Project
Believe it or not, there was a time before the Internet… It was a time simply known as “online”, where systems weren’t as interconnected as they are today and tended to be purpose built for a specific function – like a Bulletin Board System, or BBS.
My very first online experience was in 1981. Under the supervision of my father so I didn’t break anything, I was allowed to use his TRS-80 Model 1 and the 300 baud “Direct Connect” modem he had on it to dial into a local TRS-80 BBS he frequented.
The Direct Connect was so named because you could connect it to an actual phone line – and because of this it went much faster… Prior to this my father had an acoustic modem, which had two foam cups on top of the box where you set the handset for the phone and had a switch for 75 baud or 110 baud.
I think it was this revolutionary aspect of the ‘direct connect’ that prompted my father into letting me use it. 🙂
Anyway, In 1981 I was 12, so while I found the mechanics of the exercise fascinating I didn’t have much interest in the actual content of the BBS… A few weeks later I got my first computer – a Sinclair ZX-81. It came in kit form and was $99, but for a 12 year old it was a good machine.
My next foray into the online world came a few years later, in 1985. I was using an Atari 800XL which had an XM301 modem.
My family had moved to Golden Colorado, mid-school year, so I didn’t know anyone and tended to spend all of my time either at the Colorado School of Mines library on a terminal, or at home dialing into CSNet / NSFNet via the School of Mines, a local call, to do research via USENET.
This was The Internet before The Internet… It’s an easy way for me to feel old when I can say I was on the Internet before it actually existed. I also did a little CompuServe in 1985 – 1986, but the per-minute charges for the service upset my parents so my use was pretty sporadic.
In 1986 I joined the Navy and this curtailed my online exposure for several years. I didn’t even have another computer until 1989, which is when I picked up an Amiga 500. So my next online adventures happened in 1991, and 1991 through 1993 were pretty casual as all I really did was dial around to various Denver area Amiga boards.
In 1993 I’d upgraded to a Hayes “Optima” 9600 baud modem on my Amiga 500 and on June 16th, 1993 I created an account on “Empire of the Dragon” (EOTD), a local chat / RP board run by some guy who went by “IceDragon”. That account still exists and IceDragon (now going by other names) and I still talk on occasion on Second Life, almost 30 years later…
And in September 1993 AOL released the unwashed masses onto USENET, creating the Eternal September. At this time I was running my own BBS and was using FidoNet for my ‘online’ needs, so while I’d heard about it, it didn’t really impact me.
In mid 1994 I set up an account with a denver area dial up ISP and in late 1994 set up an account on FurryMUCK… That account still exists, and I still pal around with Rris, one of the ‘wizards’ from the early 90’s, also in Second Life.
Ultimately, the 90’s are where things really took off for the online world.
Modem speeds in 1990 were 9600 baud, and by 1997 56,000 baud was a thing. But if you were a true computer nerd, you departed analog in the mid 90’s and went digital…
Which is what I did; in March of 1995 I had ISDN (128Kbit) service in my bedroom. I had also moved on from the BBS scene and had gotten into The Internet – such as it was. And, because of the frame relay service I had, I didn’t need to rely on things like CompuServe or AOL to do it.
NSFNet, which I’d used when it was still shiny and new in 1985 was decommissioned on April 30th, 1995, and with this the Internet became a commercial enterprise… And accordingly my first website went online in October of 1995, hosted at dimensional.com in Denver.
By 1998 I had a full T1 (1.54 Mbit) running into my bedroom, though the bedroom was now in Rhoadesville Virginia versus Aurora Colorado. This is when things like rihahn.com (this domain), zebradale.com, ddw.net, pfmtek.com, and other domains went online – all hosted from my house.
From here things have been pretty much the same for me as everyone else; selections of cable internet providers and, as of last year, gigabit fiber. I still have a lot of my old domains from 20+ years ago, still ‘roll my own’ servers, and occasionally sit back and smile at how cool it all was before it became so commonplace. 🙂
Purely for the entertainment value, today I’m installing weird operating systems on my 17-inch 1.33Ghz PowerBook G4.
I briefly had MorphOS, the AmigaOS-alike offering, installed. I installed MorphOS via the last burnable DVD I had handy, so it was pretty easy to install; insert DVD, reboot, hold down alt, choose DVD, boot.
MorphOS looks nice, but doesn’t run well enough to warrant spending the money for a license.
Anyway, not having any more 5.25″ coasters handy everything else would need to be installed via USB – which on older hardware can require some deep magic… But fear not, I happen to have been there when the deep magic was created.
For example, you have to know that any USB stick you use has to be USB2. USB3 sticks simply won’t work. You also need to know your way around Open Firmware, which is the unix-esque boot environment on stranger hardware.
The next OS to be installed was Adélie Linux, which professes to be both PowerPC native and lightweight enough for a twenty year old machine.
To get Adélie Linux onto USB was a bit of an adventure in itself, mostly because my desktop is a bleeding edge Apple M1 running “Monterey”, the latest Apple OS… An OS where Apple seems to have decided no one needs to burn ISOs anymore.
So, after some experimentation here’s the method for booting a G4 off of an ISO burned to USB…
Format the USB as FAT (not 32) with a GUID partition map.
Get a copy of Balena Etcher and use it to spool the ISO to the USB stick.
Stick the USB into the G4 (USB port closest to the user on the right side) and turn it on
Hold down cmd-option-O-F to boot into open firmware.
Open Firmware harkens back to days when you needed to know things like hardware addresses for things you stuck into your computer, so it’s a bit archaic – but that makes it interesting!
Type dev usb0 ls – you’ve just told Open Firmware that you would like to look at USB0, and then asked for a listing of the stuff attached to USB0.
This should return /disk@1 – so there’s a disk residing on the USB0 bus – neat!
Now type dev disk@1 – now you told Open Firmware that you would like to look at the disk residing at USB0.
Now type pwd – this asks Open Firmware to display the Path Within Device-tree to the thing you’re looking at.
This should return: /pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/disk@1 – this is the literal hardware path, so the PCI bus residing at f2000000 has a USB bus with a few ports, and USB port 1B has a disk image attached to it. Simple, right?
Now for the moment of truth. Type boot /pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/disk@1:,\\:tbxi and hit enter – “\\:tbxi” basically tells Open Firmware that whatever bootable volume is at this address is ‘blessed’ and can be loaded.
The system will attempt to boot the image on the USB stick.
Now this information is probably useful to all of about a dozen people on the planet, but you never know. And it’s good mental exercise for me to dredge up all of this old useless information on occasion. 🙂
Anyway, Adélie Linux never ran quite right; the desktop appeared, but interacting with it just resulted in the flickers of menus and it was pretty much unusuable.
I went through the installs of a few other *nix distros that had a PPC variant, and eventually landed on MintPPC which seems to run well enough to be worth my time fixing all of the little driver issues.
Having nothing better to do, and being tired of staring at the walls, today I decided to move some funds around and go for a drive…
The route was simple; I-225 north to I-70, then west to Golden.
I spent a lot of weekends at my grandmother’s place in Golden growing up, and part of my 11th grade year as well. And I’ve not been back there in probably two decades – so, why not go sightsee? And from there I’d just randomly make my way back across Denver to home…
The drive would have been nice if it weren’t for all the people. See, I don’t recreationally leave the house unless it’s to head away from civilization – so I don’t get to experience the anthill that Denver has become very often.
Today’s route took me right through Denver on I-70, so I got to see all of the homeless camps everywhere, the perpetual traffic jam on the highways through town, and the general shitshow that is the average metropolis in the 2020’s.
In case it’s not clear, I wasn’t impressed.
Once I got to the west side of Denver though, traffic lightened up and I hit almost 60 mpg as I entered Golden on highway 58. I took the back way to the old house through the subdivision that was springing up at the base of north Table Mesa in ’86; most of the mountainside is now houses of course.
The old house on East street is kind of a dump now and the current owner doesn’t seem to care too much about it. And they were in the garage with the door up, so I felt it would be creepy to stop and take a picture…
I drove from there down the route I would take to school; Ford street to Jackson street to Golden High School.
Golden high School apparently got a remodel some time in the past as it’s no longer the run-down 1950’s campus mess it was when I went there. It’s quite a ways back from the street now, and it actually looks pretty nice. And the parking lot is a lot bigger, so the students don’t need to park on all the streets around the school.
I then followed south Golden road down to 6th ave.
Over the years they’ve added a half dozen roundabouts along south Golden rd, which kind of complicates things that didn’t need to be complicated – but such is the way things go. The car dealership where I got my first car is still there though, as is the McDonalds I used to get lunch at a couple times a week.
As I crossed Colfax I briefly thought about taking it east, back to the Aurora side of Denver, but given how bad the traffic was on I-70 to get to Golden I figured attempting the reverse on surface streets was a really bad idea.
So I took 6th ave east to I-25, past Red Rocks Community College where I took AP data entry and computer science back in 1986…
After I’d aced the placement test, I got to ride a bus over there every other morning to work on professional grade hardware.
It also got me a login for the terminal system they were using for the data entry portion of the class, which I quickly discovered had levels of access…
To make a long story short, this was my first legit “system hack”. I gave myself supervisor privileges on the school’s S/36 by way of finding an overflow in the classroom application’s user menus that caused the session to drop to an unprotected command line…
This led to my getting a talking to from a system administrator… But it was more of a head-pat because he was impressed that I had figured out the S/36 on the fly with no manual or instruction. And this ended with me getting to spend time on the actual mainframe instead of doing data entry – as long as I promised to lay off the hacking.
I did a lot of tape loading, but I also got to write and run some of my own code on the IBM 308X that lived in a pressurized airlocked elevated floor cleanroom. It was basically about as high-tech as it got, and I had access.
Good times.
I headed east on 6th ave and got off on I-25 south, and slogged my way to south Colorado Blvd.
Heading a ways south on south Colorado Blvd. lead me to Action Computers; a place I worked at in 1995. I decided being as I was there I should at least stop in, say hi, and have a look around…
Unfortunately, early Friday someone had backed up to the front doors, wrapped a tow chain around the handles, and pulled out most of the front of the store… They then cleaned out a good portion of the inventory.
So the front of the place is boarded up and there’s not a lot in the store – and neither Mark nor Allen were there to say hi to. So I nosed around a few laptops before heading out and making my way back home.
Home was a bit further south on south Colorado Blvd, east on east Hampden Ave., south on I-25, north on I-225, and then south on Parker rd.
I stopped at the local McDonalds and got a quarter pounder with cheese and some fries, and ate them in the car as a bit of a wayback moment.
All in all I burned probably $8 in gas and spent $12 on lunch… $20 well spent I guess.
The casual observer of ye olde blog here might have noticed that I’m kinda into this computer thing… I mean, I’ve been doing computery stuff since the late 70’s after all.
For me, it all started when my father got an OSI “Challenger 1P” in ’78 or ’79. Now, I wasn’t allowed to come within arm’s reach of this machine because my father was a bit territorial and no one was allowed to touch his stuff… But the fact it was in the house was enough to get my interest and get me reading up on it.
The next machine to enter my life was a Tandy TRS-80 model 1 my father brought home in 1980. It was the same story in that I wasn’t allowed to touch it, but the TRS-80 had a lot more documentation and it was easier to read up on it.
In 1981 I entered Junior High…
At school there were four Commodore PET machines in vacant a corner office, and no one did anything with them. They had clear vinyl dust covers on them when I found them, leading me to guess that A) even the teachers didn’t have any idea how to use them and B) that meant it was okay for me to monkey with them.
Remember, this is the mimeograph and overhead transparency era, so something like a personal computer just didn’t fit into the curriculum – yet.
I would spend the occasional recess in that corner office figuring out the vagaries of loading things from tape and playing with the classroom programs the machines came with.
Eventually though, with relentless pestering (and probably assuming I would soon void the hands-off policy on his machines), my father finally caved and bought me a Sinclair ZX-81 for Christmas in 1981.
The ZX-81 was a $99 kit in 1981, which is about three hundred dollars in 2022 money, and that really got me started on both hardware and software systems. I also became even more of a social outcast by adding ‘geek’ to my already well-worn ‘nerd’ moniker from being a gamer.
I found that I had a legitimate talent with computers, and by the end of my first month I’d written my first text adventure based on my AD&D world… The problem with the ZX81 is it had no storage when I got it, so everything I wrote I wrote on paper and typed in every time I wanted to run it.
My father eventually gave me his old Radio Shack portable cassette recorder, and I got that plugged into the ZX81 to save and load stuff. And a month or two after that, the routine showing off of things I’d written prompted my father to get me a 16K ram expansion and an actual keyboard for the ZX-81. And by summer I had filled my big tape case with software I’d written for the thing.
Some time in 1982 I managed to score a Commodore VIC-20 – I think via my grandmother for my birthday… The VIC-20 was a $299 machine in 1982, which is roughly a grand in 2022 dollars – so it was a pretty impressive thing to have.
The VIC was where things really started to take off for me with computers; it had a pretty descent processor that was the emerging industry standard for personal computing (6502), enough ram to be useful, a nice keyboard, and enough bells and whistles to be entertaining to write things for.
In 1984 I started High School at Skyline… Probably my favorite part of starting High School was that Skyline had a computer class – if you could call it that…
Computer Operation and Data Entry was an elective, and it was integrated into the math department. And even though the school had owned a half-dozen Apple IIe machines for a couple of years at this point, the class is really self-study because no one in administration had a clue what to do with the systems.
The computer lab itself was right off of the library, on the second floor, so it was easy to get books and take them to the desk for reference.
Most of the self-study course work used Apple Logo, which bored me to death, but I could get the lesson done in 5-10 minutes, do the typing drills really quick, and then move on to my own projects… The machines at the school also had “Koala Pads” which, while primitive, kinda got me into the tablet thing decades before tablets were a thing…
Outside of school I’d been working in 6502 assembly for a year or so, using the VicMon cartridge on my VIC-20 (I blew past BASIC in a couple of months because BASIC eats up too much of the limited VIC-20 memory). The Apple machines also used a 6502, so most of my time on the school’s Apple IIe’s was either learning stuff I was interested in (D/A converters were my thing in 10th grade, I wanted to build a robotic arm), working on my own programs, or reverse-engineering games to see how they work.
My first legit ‘software hack’ was in 1985, on those machines at Skyline… Using a hex editor, I removed the copy protection from a friend’s copy of “Karateka” so that I could play it too.
A couple of times up there in the computer lab I got so focused on whatever it was I was working on that I missed my next class, which was Graphic Design. Fortunately, it was another elective, and I wasn’t too worried about it.
This was the beginning of the end of school for me. I started to evaluate electives by how much time they took away from whatever hardware or software project I was working on…
For my machines at home, I’d been trying to talk my parents into springing for a Commodore 64 now that they’d come down in price – mostly to get my hands on the 6510 and its extra I/O lines… But then I saw some news about Atari’s new “XL” series, and they looked pretty sweet.
And then there was Apple’s ad for the “Macintosh”, which was amazing, and the whole ‘mouse’ and ‘graphical user interface’ thing looked absolutely killer… There’s no way I could get one though as they were really, really expensive; $2500 in 1985 dollars or $6700 in 2022.
I really wanted a 68000-based machine though… Someday!
In 1985 my grandmother passed away and left her house in Golden to my father and my aunt. My father bought out my aunt’s half and we moved after my 11th grade year had started at Skyline.
During the 1985 upheaval I got an Atari 800XL as something of a concession prize from my parents, which I updated with two Happy-mod 1050 disk-drives and an XM301 300 baud modem.
I had that 800XL until after I had enlisted and moved to my duty station, so July-ish of 1987. A guy in the barracks had an Apple Macintosh Plus though, and I spent a pretty decent amount of time messing with it. It was greyscale, but I still really, really, really wanted a 68K based system now.
I finally got a 68K machine in September of 1989, in the form of an Amiga 500. My ex-wife and I gave that Amiga a helluva workout over the next couple of years…
I finally replaced the Amiga with an IBM PC in late 1993, mostly for my BBS efforts. And then in 1994 I started work at “Intelligent Electronics”, where things really took off.
At one point in late 1995 my living room / computer cave contained a PowerMac 8100/100 (PowerPC), an HP9000 C110 (PA-RISC), a DEC AlphaStation (DEC Alpha), an SGI Indy (MIPS), and probably a half dozen assorted generic PCs in various states of assembly.
I wasn’t happy with learning one architecture, I wanted to learn ALL the architectures!
August 1995
March 13th, 1997 – file server, Internet server with ISDN router and 56K backup, and the BBS server
March 13th, 1997 – my ‘art station’ with my HUGE digitizer
This sort of madness continued into 1997 when I sold off a lot of it to move to Virginia.
Post-move things calmed down a bit with regard to weird computers and architectures. I tended to use an Apple PowerMac 6500/225 for my personal machine and a handful of Pentium II and III-based machines for games and Internet stuff… The weirdest thing was probably the DEC Multia VX40 I was using as the email server…
In 1998 I picked up an Apple PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet) and used that as my “personal” computer for a couple of years. I also had a couple of generic PCs that I used for EverQuest duty.
In February 2000, after we’d all survived the Clockpocalypse of 2000 and right before I moved to northern Connecticut for a teaching job, the G3 Wallstreet was traded out for a G3 Pismo.
By 2003 the G3 laptop had gotten pretty long in the tooth, so I sold it to pick up a rather generic Compaq S5000 machine and an Nvidia FX 5600 at the local Best Buy (Mostly to play Shadowbane and Horizons on), and then gave the Compaq to Robin before jetting back to Virginia in February of 2004.
In late February 2004 I picked up the first 17″ PowerBook G4, which turned out to have a screen defect…
Apple replaced it and I used the second 17″ G4 until shortly after I started at where I currently work… They wanted me to do PC things, so I needed a PC, so in early October 2004 I sold the PowerBook and bought yet another generic PC.
This sort of thing has continued on for nearly two decades now; around my birthday I’ll get a new Mac because I like Macs – and then some time during the next year I’d sell it and get a PC for a while.
The PCs are usually pretty generic gaming rigs filled with whatever the latest Intel is and some cutting edge video card – so they aren’t really worth mentioning. The Macs though can usually be used to reference a specific point in time as they are specific models… So here’s the full list:
Powerbook 165c in 1994 (still have)
PowerMac 8100/100 in 1995 (sold)
PowerMac 6500/225 in 1997 (sold)
PowerBook G3 Wallstreet in 1998 (sold)
PowerBook G3 Pismo in 2000 (still have)
17″ PowerBook G4 in 2004 (still have)
17″ iMac G5 in 2004 (still have)
20″ iMac in 2006 (sold)
24″ iMac in 2008 (sold)
13″ MacBook in 2010 (still have)
27″ iMac in 2013 (sold)
17″ MacBook Pro in 2014 (sold)
11″ MacBook Air in 2015 (still have)
15″ MacBook Pro in 2019 (sold)
16″ MacBook Pro in 2019 (traded in)
27″ iMac in 2020 (traded in)
13″ M1 MacBook Air in 2020 (sold)
And the latest M1 Max powered 16″ MacBook Pro this year…
That’s a slightly crazy amount of money spent on Macs – though I tend to sell the Macs for close to what I paid for them, or trade them in at Apple for the bigger better machine – so it’s not as bad as it looks.
Still, Apple should give me some stock or something for being such a long time customer. 🙂
A bonus photo of every Macintosh CPU line Apple has used, all running side by side:
Left to right: Motorola 68030 running System 7.1, Motorola PowerPC G4 running OSX 10.5.8, Intel Core 2 Duo running MacOS 10.13.6, Apple M1 running MacOS 11.0.1
My 1-of-6000 Collector’s Edition Atari VCS 800 arrived today.
I got it all set up and played some Asteroids and Tempest with the roommate, which was tons of fun. The vector graphics emulation is really cool, and the controllers are amazing.
Here’s a few photos for posterity:
Fresh out of the shipping box. I really like the attention to detail on the boxes, with the silkscreened asteroids graphics.The Collector’s Edition with its actual wood accents. The fit and finish of the machine is top-notch and it feels really solid.Number 2292 of 6000
I got it hooked up to the TV and turned on, where the system did an OS and BIOS update, which took a few minutes. After that though, it was a seamless experience and the built-in games (arcade cabinets and original 2600 games) were well presented and easy to navigate.
And it was really cool to see the original Atari Font in use again.
So far I can say Atari nailed it. It’s an amazing little machine and the reproductions of classic Atari games are perfect.
My PowerBook G4 has been under the proverbial knife getting all of the worn parts replaced with new old-stock parts — which is a nice thing about the older laptops; user serviceable parts inside.
The G4 now has a new DC-in and left-side USB board, a new NVRAM battery and right-side USB board, a new bluetooth module, new battery to charge controller harness, a new battery, new 65w charger brick, and a new 8x “superdrive”.
Older 4x superdrive removed (the empty spot with the writing on it)NOS 8x drive foreground and original 4x drive. The new M1 MacBook Air is in the background.NOS NVRAM battery and USB board installed. There’s two Panasonic lithium coin cells under the plastic.Old DC-in board removed – check out the scoring on the barrel connector. The ambient light sensor is in the clear plastic at the top of the board.NOS DC-in board in place, as well as the NOS bluetooth module (small board on top of the speaker housing)
Once everything was done I buttoned her back up, ran the hardware checks to make sure everything was functional, and then re-installed OS X 10.5.8 to test the new drive.
Everything seems to be working fine.
The new charging system works — the light on the DC in from the wall wart now works and the battery took a full charge and tested to a 2.5 hour run time (back in the early aughts 2 hours was pretty good for a desktop replacement machine). And the system keeps time now when it’s unplugged… Bonus.
All in all, I’m fairly happy with how it all went. And the G4 is now pretty much new. 🙂
