RIHAHN.COM

Tag: RetroComputing

  • 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

  • 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

  • Software

    Long, long ago software came on physical media – actual floppies, CDs, and DVDs – and I’ve held on to a lot of it that I’ve purchased over the years.

    I still have things like Windows NT 4 server install floppies, a boxed copy of OS/2, and even my old Amiga kickstart and workbench disks. But without period hardware for said period software, they aren’t very interesting outside of “I have these”.

    With all of the old Macs I have, having a collection of similarly old Mac software is more interesting because I can actually install it.

    And in that regard, here’s my PowerPC Macintosh shelf…

    From left to right there’s Mac Office 2004, which is PPC.

    The orange cardboard has OS8.5 and 8.6 CDs, the jewel case has OS9.0 CDs, the thin white folder is OSX 10 public beta, 10.0, and 10.1 (the folder is from my purchase of 10.1), then 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 (the universal PPC/Intel version), and the DVD on the far right is a 10.6 PPC Beta which never made it to the final 10.6 version.

    Finally there’s a copy of iLife ’09, which was the universal PPC / Intel version. The last PPC software Apple ever made.

    All told, that shelf spans the entire PowerPC decade; 1998 to 2009.

    Listening to "A Thousand Lives" by At 1980

  • BBSing

    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:

    1. on the M1 laptop go to an internet archive of ancient Motorola 68K Apple software
    2. download “Black Night” (an ancient ANSI BBS terminal application) as a .SIT (Stuffit) archive
    3. put that onto a USB2 flash drive via a thunderbolt-to-USB adapter
    4. plug USB2 flash drive into the G5
    5. move the stuffit archive to the desktop
    6. fire up the OS9 compatibility layer in OSX 10.3.6
    7. decompress the .SIT archive
    8. copy resultant installer to a floppy I formatted in the 165c
    9. put floppy into the 165c
    10. 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

  • The Apple “G-Machine” trifecta

    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.

    Listening to "Neon Blood" by Kalax

  • Capacitors

    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.

    Listening to "City Lights" by Robert Parker

  • 3D

    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

  • 165c

    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 glory

    Mmmm – 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.

    Listening to "I Still Believe" by The Call

  • G5

    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. 🙂

    Listening to "High On You" by Survivor

  • Airport

    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…

    Listening to "Who Can It Be Now?" by Men At Work

  • Case

    The new case for the iPhone came in today…

    I figured making the iPhone SE look like the Macintosh SE was oddly apropos.

    Listening to "Blue Morning, Blue Day" by Foreigner

  • So long, Server

    After many long years, Apple has discontinued MacOS Server.

    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!

    Listening to "The Flame" by Cheap Trick

  • Every Day I’m Shuffling

    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…

    Listening to "Mr. Roboto" by Styx

  • iPhone, part 2

    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.

    Listening to "Sentimental Street" by Night Ranger