RIHAHN.COM

Tag: RetroComputing

  • Adobe

    I finally got my copy of CS6 Master Collection to run on something – and have just cancelled my Creative Cloud subscription – saving me $600! Which I’ve already spent on a 2013 MacPro and some parts – because of course I did…

    Anyway, getting to this point wasn’t easy…

    I mentioned in the last entry that I’d found a way to get Mojave to install in a VM in Monterey – which takes some trickery because for Apple the existence of 32-bit applications it right up there with Bigfoot and Flat Earth theories.

    So what you do is download the installer for Mojave, disconnect the Mac from the internet (wired and wireless), and then drop to a command line and enter:

    sudo date 1013083200

    This convinces your mac that it’s high noon on February 7th, 2002, which is far enough back in time that it stops caring (briefly) about your mad desire to run a 32-bit application…

    Now you can get Parallels to make a VM out of the downloaded Mojave installer, and once Mojave is hidden in said VM the host OS is none the wiser when you access it.

    So now I could install CS6!

    But I couldn’t…

    See, the thing we all said would happen when software companies went to online copy protection using accounts and client / server key systems – happened. Adobe turned off the authentication server that all of the pre-CC software used, which instantly rendered my $2500 software package completely useless.

    CS6 simply would not install – even though I have the big-ass box the software came in, all of the media it contains, and a physical copy of the key that activates it…

    Fortunately, with a little digging around, I discovered that Adobe still has the offline keygen running. So you can have CS6 generate a challenge key based on your software key, and you can put that and your software key into a form on a dusty webpage, and it will generate the response key that will enable your software.

    Or, at least until someone at Adobe notices it’s still running I’m sure…

    To get to this offline keygen you need an Adobe account, which I have because I’m a CC subscriber. I’m guessing this is so they can pin someone down if the key they use in the offline keygen is fake – and also gather an email address for marketing spam reasons.

    Anyway, I managed to get CS6 to install and fired up Photoshop – which immediately complained about the lack of 3D acceleration in the virtual machine.

    Sigh…

    Ok – make a USB installer out of the Mojave installer I downloaded:

    sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Mojave.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/UNTITLED

    Reboot the trashcan with option, boot the USB installer, wipe everything out and install Mojave natively on the machine.

    Thirty minutes later I’m back to using the offline keygen for Adobe and expecting to have an issue because I just used it 45 minutes ago – but it faithfully spits out another response key and CS6 activates.

    Photoshop runs really nice on the trashcan!

    And I now have a non-SaaS way to do art stuff. Go me.

    Listening to "Jacob's Ladder" by Huey Lewis & The News

  • Progress Report

    The BlueSCSI hardware I ordered back on the 17th arrived last night, so the evening was spent futzing with the 8100…

    The BlueSCSI device itself is pretty interesting. It’s entirely open source so I’ve spent a few days poking around it in its innards code-wise, and might take the time to add a few features I want – like an OLED display of bus traffic…

    I have the latest incarnation of the BlueSCSI, which utilizes a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) microcontroller versus the old ‘blue pill’ STM32 MCU – so it can saturate a late 90’s 10mbit SCSI bus pretty easily. Which is nice to have in an late 90’s computer…

    The initial setup was pretty easy. I picked up a couple of high endurance 32G microSD cards at Microcenter for like $7 each, formatted them EXfat on my Mac, and then whipped up a couple of blank 1024MB HFS files to put on the cards with good old DD…

    dd if=/dev/zero of="HD10_512 Power Macintosh 8100-80 1024MB.hda" bs=1M count=500

    The BlueSCSI uses the filenames of the drive containers to determine how to present the image, so “HD10_512 Power Macintosh 8100-80 1024MB.hda” translates to “Use HD emulation (versus CD, MO, etc) and make it look like SCSI ID1, LUN0 with a 512 byte sector size”, and all of the text between that and the .hda is ignored and is just for identification.

    From here it was a simple matter to add the BlueSCSI to the chain in my 8100, boot it, and then format the .hda image HFS when the Mac popped up the Unrecognized Drive dialog…

    And presto – a new 1G SCSI drive appears on the desktop.

    To test the full implementation, I set up the BlueSCSI as ID1:0, pulled the original 2G HD out of the 8100, and did an install of 8.6 from one of my G3 iMac restore CDs…

    That little black square in the center of the PCB has more processing power than the 8100…
    (2xCortex M0+ @ 133Mhz : 240MIPS / PPC601 @ 80Mhz : 158 MIPS)

    The BlueSCSI worked just fine and the 8100 had no idea it was talking to 21st century solid state storage that was the equivalent of 16 of the largest hard drives you could get back in the day.

    And has no moving parts.

    And is half the size of a postage stamp…

    Das blinkenlights!

    Being as everything was working, I went ahead and installed the SCSI adapter in its 3.5″ adapter and then onto the 8100’s drive adapter… So now the 8100 has RGB lighting, because all computers need RGB lighting here in the future. 🙂

    Next up was getting the external BlueSCSI setup and formatted, which was about the same as the internal one save that it’s not clear which way the contacts on the microSD go in the holder – so there was a moment of USB connecter flipping to get it installed… But it was eventually seen on the external SCSI bus and formatted as well.

    And with both drives accessible, it was time to get a bunch of OS8 PPC utilities off of macintosh repository, get them unstuffed / unzipped, and copied onto the external drive in preparation for reloading the 8100 again.

    As you can see in the above image, I happen to like LaCie’s “SilverLining” SCSI tools, and one of the nicer parts of SilverLining is the updated SCSI drivers it installs on the various drives in the system – but it can’t do this on a running system drive. So I need to set up the external with Silverlining, make it bootable with an OS, put all of the tools I want to install on it for simplicity, and then boot off of it to set up the internal.

    And thats about where I ran out of time last evening.

    The external SSD is the blue box behind the power cord.

    I also ordered a bunch of upgrades for the trashcan from OWC yesterday; 64gigs of ram, a new 1TB SSD, and a slightly upgraded CPU… Those parts should arrive today, so I’ll disassemble the trashcan some time this weekend and get it tuned up.

    Oh, and I’ll have to reload it with an older OS… CS6, as it turns out, has a lot of 32-bit code in it and Apple phased out 32-bit support after 10.14 (Mojave). Which is fine really, the trashcan came with 10.9 (Mavericks) and 10.15 (Catalina) was really the last decent MacOS…

    I’ve not been overly impressed with the MacOS since the transition to 11, 12, and 13 – since the transition everything has been entirely too iPhone-like for my tastes.

    Listening to "Amberina Sun" by mitch murder

  • MacPro6,1

    Being an ‘old fart’ I’m not super enthusiastic about SaaS models.

    I mean, I’ve done things like buy a magazine to get a game I had to type into the computer to run, drive twenty miles to the local Amiga store to purchase applications on floppies that came in a ziplock bag, and even camped out at CompUSA to buy a game on CD the midnight it released…

    In each of those instances I was purchasing a thing that I could continue to use as long as I wanted… In some cases I still use them thirty years later. So this “renting” your software thing doesn’t sit well with me. Doubly so when it’s hundreds of dollars per year for an application suite that doesn’t really improve in ways I use – they just move the buttons around on occasion from my point of view.

    I’m looking at you, Creative Cloud.

    As I’ve mentioned here previously, I’ve purchased copies of Adobe Photoshop (and Illustrator, Premier, Acrobat, etc.) pretty much since they came out. But since 2016 I’ve been on the subscription plan, which is about $600 a year… Or roughly $4200 spent since I bought that $2600 license for CS6 Master Collection in 2013.

    My current CC subscription comes due in August, and I think I’ve given Adobe enough money over the years.

    Now, while I could just go back to using CS6 (which does everything I need it to do), it won’t run on Apple Silicon machines as it was written in 2012 for the Intel Macs of the day… And Apple Silicon machines won’t emulate the old Intel architectures either – so if I want to use my CS6 license I need an Intel based Mac.

    The problem there is Macs tend to hold their value really well, so getting a previous generation machine would cost as much as a year or two of Adobe subscription and that just didn’t make sense financially.

    But retro-computing people rarely make sense financially… So maybe something slightly older than the previous generation?

    I have a personal rule for my retro-computing habit in that I won’t seriously consider owning anything I’ve not owned in the past… I’m not into old computers for the sake of old computers as much as I like to have bits and pieces of my past accessible in the present – so I collect machines (and parts) for architectures I’ve actually used, mostly to maintain access to the things I’ve created on those systems.

    So, being as I owned a “cheese grater” MacPro5,1 back in the early 2010’s (I gave it to my roommate in 2013 after I acquired that year’s 27″ iMac), I was thinking I would simply acquire another one and that would solve the Intel Mac need…

    Then I thought about the fact they still go for $500+ in a condition I would be interested in owning, and then there’s the thousand watt power supply in the things that’s needed to run the Xeons that lead to the moniker of ‘iHeater’ – and I live in “Modern Times” with “modern utility bills”, so I shelved that idea.

    But, as fate would have it, I was visiting a new (to me) Mac repair place yesterday… It’s over where the Cinderella City Mall used to be back in the 80’s, and I was there to look over their retro collection seeing if there were any parts I could use when I spotted a lonely Mac Pro Trashcan…

    Back in 2013 when the MacPro6,1 came out I really wanted one, but they were “Pro” and due to this rather expensive at $4000 for the entry level model. The iMac was the better machine for what I was doing, and cost half as much even though it came with an amazing 27″ screen – so thats the direction I went.

    Eyeballing the machine’s identifiers printed on the bottom I determined it was was a BTO 2013 base-model, so it had the 4-core Xeon in it but had the dual D500 video cards – which is perfect for CS6. And the MacPro6,1 can pull off a max of about 500 watts, which is half as much as the 5,1’s peak use and averages about 80watts to the 5,1’s 200watts.

    So, two criteria met; a decent intel machine in nice condition, and fairly cheap to feed both electrically and cooling wise… All it needed was to be less than the cost of next year’s Adobe subscription and I was in business.

    After talking to the store owner for a bit about old macs and recounting some tales of stone age computing for him, I asked about the Trashcan:

    Me: “So, that trashcan over there – what are you asking for it?”

    Him: “That? Those were weird; too limited for the professionals they were meant for, and too expensive for general users…”

    Me: “Yeah. Apple actually wrote an apology for the mistake they made with those – but I need an Intel mac for my old CS6 license because I’m tired of paying the Adobe Mafia to make art…”

    Him: “Oh!? You can actually put it to use? How about $300?”

    Me: “Sold!”

    And ten minutes later I was on my way home with a new trashcan…

    The 2013 MacPro6,1

    First things first – wipe it out and reload it… I got it onto my wifi and started the online restore, going with the latest OS it will run: MacOS 12.6.8 “Monterey”.

    This took about a half an hour, and then once I hit the desktop I discovered the HDMI on the trashcan is only good for 30Hz @ 4K, so my ginormous LG OLED was flickering… But a quick run over to Microcenter for a $30 mini-displayport / thunderbolt-2 to 4k/60 HDMI cable fixed that right up.

    And the rest of the evening was spent moving in; loading apps, configuring things the way I like, etc.

    I did get a chance to fire up SecondLife on the trashcan and head over to a popular hangout to see how it fared; a solid 15FPS in the default graphics settings. So, not bad for a collector’s item. 🙂

    After work today I will break out the huge box of CS6 and install it all, make sure everything still works as it used to – and then cancel my CC subscription… Which will pay for the trashcan twice over.

    Maybe I’ll take some of that CC savings and upgrade the RAM and SSD in the trashcan in the next month or two…

    Listening to "Risky Fulfillment" by Neon Nox

  • The Elder Nerd

    I’ve been doing this computer thing for a while now, so I get the privilege of being able to pipe up on various forums and social media posts when someone is looking for some esoteric bit of technical information from “the good old days” of computers and / or the Internet… Which right now is essentially anything before 2010.

    I do find it interesting how the recollections of us ‘old timers’ are becoming more valuable over time – mostly because of bit-rot… Every year the collective brain-trust of the Internet looses another few thousand web sites from the early days as servers are turned down, storage deteriorates, hosting bills stop being paid, ISPs are absorbed and cannibalized, or modern tech simply loses the ability to access information more than a decade or two old.

    Take my recent posts about having to use my circa 2007 XPS M1710 laptop to do some pretty basic things with web-enabled hardware that is a mere five years old because of a simple TLS change. Now expand that timeframe out to the early 90’s when the Internet as we know it was just beginning.

    I have copies of old websites I built in the mid to late 90’s for both myself and clients that are essentially impossible to view without resorting to antique hardware and software – simply because they use deprecated javascript and Flash components… Macromedia / Adobe Flash, as you should know, was the biggest thing on the Internet in the late 90’s and early 2000’s – but the ability to view that entire decade of content was essentially deleted from everything in 2011…

    I also have things I created in the 80’s that are in formats that simply cannot be opened unless you have the right forty year old software that runs on dinosaur hardware you can only find in a museum.

    Needless to say, if enthusiasts can’t get to the content without going to great lengths the chances of it ending up in an Internet search are essentially zero… Not that the Internet is much more than a context driven ad placement engine at this point; if someone didn’t pay to show it to you, you probably won’t see it.

    As for me, I try to keep the torch lit with a smattering of old computer systems – but I’m pretty picky with my retro-computing habit and tend to only acquire hardware that I’ve actually owned in the past… This is mostly so that I can continue to access and / or modern-format-archive the stuff I’ve created on various computers since the early 80’s.

    My current system catalog looks like this:

    DateComputerStatus
    1977TRS-80 Model-1 (Z-80)Software Emulation
    1978Ohio Scientific C1P (6502)Software Emulation
    1981Sinclair ZX-81 (Z-80)Software Emulation
    1982Commodore VIC-20 (6502)Software Emulation
    1985Atari 800XL (6502)The 400 Mini
    1987Macintosh Plus (68000)Physical Machine
    1989Amiga 500 (68000)MiniMig
    1993PowerBook 165c (68030)Physical Machine
    1994SGI Indy (R4400)Physical Machine
    1995PowerMac 8100 (PPC 601)Physical Machine
    1999PowerBook G3 “Pismo” (PPC G3)Physical Machine
    2000Presario 1400 (Pentium-III)Physical Machine
    2004PowerBook G4 17″ (PPC G4)Physical Machine
    2007XPS M1710 (Core 2 Duo)Physical Machine
    2012MacPro 5,1 (Dual Xeon X5690)Physical Machine
    2013MacPro 6,1 (Xeon E5)Physical Machine
    2020MacBook Air 13″ (10th gen i3)Physical Machine
    2023Gaming Rig (Ryzen 7950X3D)Physical Machine

    Once it’s all put into table form, we can see where computers got boring in the mid 2000’s.

    Prior to the mid 2000’s new architectures and new operating systems kept me going after the latest hardware. But once Apple went Intel in 2005, it was a bit of a slog for about fifteen years until something truly new happened: Apple Silicon.

    Listening to "My Life" by FM Attack

  • 8100, part 4

    The rest of the parts I ordered / had made for the 8100 came in this afternoon – save for the BlueSCSI boxes which haven’t shipped yet – so the evening was spent creating the most upgraded 8100/80 in human history… At least as far as I know.

    The first things to do were put the new pram battery in the holder, stick the mainboard back in the case, and then max out the video card…

    I left one of the VRAM simms flipped over for posterity.

    Everything reassembled and the video card snug in its PDS slot.

    Once again I was successful in manipulating all of the brittle plastic pieces to snap everything back together, so it was time to press the keyboard’s power button and see if I got a successful boot – or if I would let all of the magic smoke out…

    264MB of ram…
    And 1024×768 @ 75Hz with millions of colors…

    I was apparently successful – go me! Though there was one tiny error:

    I have exceeded RAM Doubler’s ability to double RAM…

    That line in the photos is the scan line of the monitor being picked up by my iPhone – you can’t see these normally, but the iPhone doesn’t have persistence of vision so there they are… Just ignore them. 🙂

    Anyway, the operation was a success – so the next thing to do was set the clock…

    Macintoshes back in the day were generally immune to the Y2K bug, but the engineers and programmers working on OS8 in 1997 seemed to be of the mind that no sane person would be using the OS after 2019… So while the actual clock is good until 2040, the date picker rolls over on December 31, 2019 to the mid 1900’s.

    This is actually a pretty easy fix though; just get the 8100 onto the internet so it can see an NTP (time) server.

    Getting the machine on the Internet was a simple matter of hooking up the Farallon AAUI adapter, stringing cat-5 across my office, and then configuring TCP/IP in a machine and operating system from when TCP-IP was still in diapers… Luckily I did this a lot back in the 90’s – so getting the machine networked was essentially muscle memory.

    So, now I had an IP address and a route to the Internet, the date was now showing 2023, and the machine came with Netscape 3.0.something from ’97… Let’s do this!

    …

    In short, almost nothing on the modern world wide weird will talk to such an old browser. While there was SSL back in 1997, it was pretty primitive and doesn’t apply to modern TLS encryption, and nothing really does plain old HTTP anymore – and even if something did, Netscape 3 simply doesn’t understand modern HTML, scripts, or even graphic standards.

    There is ‘frog find‘ though, which is a modern web to ancient computer search engine translator that one can at least use to verify connectivity. And there are Macintosh software archive sites like macintoshrepository.org where you can get cool old abandonware… Said site even congratulates you for using an actual old Mac when using an actual old Mac – but the site is too new for Netscape 3 to figure out…

    What I needed was a newer browser – something like Classilla, the unofficial last-gasp of Mozilla compiled for MacOS 8.6 – 9.2 machines. This was child’s play to download with Safari on my M2 laptop but impossible for Netscape 3 on the 8100, so what I needed was a really basic web server on my laptop that Netscape 3 would understand and be able to use…

    Ten minutes later and I had Netscape 3 downloading Classilla_9.3.3.sit from Apache on my laptop – which took about three minutes, and then required another three minutes to unstuff. But once that was done it was possible to get the old 8100 onto the information superhighway! (Albeit really slow, in the breakdown lane, with the hazards on…)

    The internet is really really great. I got a fast connection so I didn’t have to wait. There’s always some new site. I browse all day and night. It’s like I’m surfing at the speed of light!

    Fortunately I maxed out the ram in the 8100, because Classilla – being ‘new’ code from an era where size doesn’t matter – eats up a lot of system memory…

    Here’s Classilla using more system memory than the entire MacOS 8.6 operating system…

    Anyway, once I got the ability to peruse and download stuff, I spent the evening filling the old SCSI HD with period correct games and apps, and hanging out in late 1995. 🙂

    Listening to "Youth" by The Midnight

  • 8100, part three

    Some of the parts I ordered for the 8100 came in today, so it was time to take the machine apart…

    Old ram on the left, new ram installed.

    To get to this part requires some careful fiddling as there are a lot of plastic tabs you need to carefully bend to remove board retainers and brackets. And as I mentioned previously, the plastics in this machine have reached an almost chalk-like consistency and are very fragile… But after some extremely careful bending I got everything disconnected without breaking anything and the board flipped out to do some work.

    First up was the judicious use of some canned air to remove the lint buildup on the CPU heatsink, around the rom and L2 cache simm, and the power supply. Otherwise the system was really clean; someone took good care of it.

    Next on the agenda was removing the 30 year old thermal paste and redoing it with Arctic Silver MX4… Which is overkill on a CPU that dissipates less than 10 watts worst-case – but I might as well take advantage of 21st century chemistry while I’m in here…

    All cleaned up and ready for a new coat of thermal grease.

    Next up was swapping out the ram… I gingerly pried out the two new(er) sticks of TechWorks FPM 32meg and four sticks of Motorola FPM 8meg ram, and replaced the lot with new (as in made in July of 2023) 32meg 60ns EDO ram.

    I then pulled out the old pram battery in preparation for the new one that will arrive tomorrow.

    Being as these batteries only last about 5 years and the computer currently forgets what day it is every time I turn it off, it was time for a new one. What was interesting is this is an aftermarket battery made by NewerTech (now owned by OWC), but NewerTech hasn’t made these batteries since mid-2015… At least it wasn’t the battery it came with in 1994 – which would have leaked motherboard destroying goo all over everything by now.

    This is an all too common occurrence these days.

    And that’s where I have to stop for now as the rest of the parts didn’t come in today, and I want to limit the manhandling the plastics receive… So I’ll install the battery tomorrow and then put the board back in the case.

    In theory the vram for the video card will also arrive tomorrow and I’ll be able to install that before putting the card back in the system. Once that is done, the 8100 will be as maxed out as humanly possible system-wise. I still have the two BlueSCSI devices coming as well, but they won’t even ship until Saturday.

    Oh, there is one more device that came in today…

    A Farallon AAUI to 10base-t adapter.

    Back in ’94 everyone was still working out what the One True Standard would be for computer networking, and each competing standard had a different media type and connector set – so it was kind of a mess… Because of this, Apple in their wisdom decided that the new PowerPC machines would just have an AUI (Attachment Unit Interface) on them, and the user could get a media converter for whatever network flavor they wanted… So Apple only needed one port instead of 2-3.

    But! AUI ports used 15-pin D-Sub connectors, which is the exact same connector Apple used for their monitors… So to prevent confusion Apple came up with AAUI – a proprietary connector for proprietary network dongles.

    Anyway, that’s the update for today – more tomorrow!

    Listening to "The Equalizer (Not Alone)" by The Midnight

  • 8100, part two

    Signs you may be taking this whole retro computer thing too seriously: you have a guy in Ohio hand-making custom high-speed VRAM for a very unique PDS video card that only works in one model of computer from thirty years ago…

    Yep. That’s me…

    The PDS-based HPV (High Performance Video) card that the 8100 came with in 1995 had 2megs of VRAM and would do 832×624 in 24 bit color – which was somewhat crazy for a time when PCs were still 640×480 in 16 colors… But the HPV card was expandable to 4megs using 80ns 68-pin VRAM simms that cost a small fortune back in the day and accordingly weren’t super prevalent – hence needing to have it made here in the 21st century.

    When this new VRAM gets here and I max out the HPV card, the 8100 will support 1152×870 in 24-bit color – which back in ’95 would have essentially been alien technology. I mean, the “web” didn’t make the transition to 1024×768 until 2002 – 7 years later.

    I should also mention that the Apple “Multiple Scan” 17-inch monitor I have on the 8100 was released at the same time in 1994 for a bit over $1000, supports up to 1024×768 at 75Hz, and was just as far ahead of its time as the computer…

    Anyway – I’ve also ordered both an internal 50-pin and an external 25-pin BlueSCSI v.2 adapter. The latter will be used to make a backup of the existing 640meg HD which will eventually be replaced by the former. Once this is done, the original drive will be archived and the system will operate off of the internal adapter as it’s faster and pulls less power from the 30 year old power supply.

    I also ordered eight 32meg EDO 72-pin SIMMs to max out the ram in the 8100. The new ram is 60ns instead of the stock 80ns because I might pick up a Sonnet 500Mhz G3 upgrade card for it, and that will require faster ram.

    Oh, and I have a Farallon AAUI to 10baseT adapter coming – so I can put the 8100 on the LAN at the house, mostly for the giggles.

    Listening to "Be Good to Yourself" by Journey

  • 1995

    Back in early 1995 my living room / computer lab looked a bit like this:

    Back in the days when we still used film… And you can see the 10base2 coax running everywhere…

    In the above photo you can see my IBM Model 330-P75 on the left, which had a Pentium 75 in it. It was my BBS / MUCK dialup box… That’s probably FurryMUCK on the screen.

    In the middle (sitting on top of the monitor) is an HP Vectra VL series 3 5/90. This had a hotrod Pentium 90 in it and was the server for my Major BBS setup – “Silicon Psychosis”.

    And on the right side of the desk is my Apple Power Macintosh 8100/100AV, which was the machine I was using for all of my web stuff and graphic work.

    That Mac is the first computer I ever purchased for myself with the intention of using it for actual work, and accordingly it’s the first machine I owned that I actually made money with… I can attribute that old Mac with getting me really going in internet technology, graphic design, and all of the other things I still do to this day.

    And since the mid 2000’s I’ve been looking for another 8100 to complete my collection of all the old Macs I’ve owned.

    But they are rarer than hen’s teeth because they were like $4500 in 1995 – or about $9000 in 2023 money – for the 100Mhz model, they were only around for six months before the PowerPC 604-based machines came on the scene, and they were insanely fragile… So there weren’t many of them to begin with and most of them have self-destructed or simply fallen apart over the years.

    These are also Apple’s first PowerPC machine, so they are a collection of weirdness internally… The 100 and 110Mhz machines used a Peltier Junction cooling system that was generally more trouble than it was worth, they used “NuBus” for expansion cards, and the video card is interfaced on the processor bus using a PDS (processor direct slot). PDS was problematic because if someone removed the card and didn’t install a terminator board bad things happened – and being as every other computer on the planet that had cards didn’t have such a setup, there were a lot of blown machines.

    But for all the hassles of this new RISC platform you got some bonuses: MacOS was lightyears ahead of Windows, the PPC 601 ran circles around Pentium-based machines, it was all SCSI inside which left old ATA in the dust, the new PPC machines came with 2-meg video which offered 1152 x 870 resolutions and thousands of colors at the same time, and the machine would address 264megs of ram in a time where most people were running 32megs or so.

    Anyway, roll the clock forward almost 30 years and I finally found an 8100 that met my specifications: fully functional and as close to ‘new’ as possible…

    Just after I put the 2meg PDS card (on the right) back in the machine…

    The complete setup running MacOS 8.6!

    So this is my new 8100/80, which while not exactly the same as my circa ’94 8100/100AV, it’s close enough to the original that I spent the afternoon back in 1995.

    Overall the 8100/80 is pretty much exactly the same as the 8100/100 performance wise, mostly because the 80 is a clock-doubled CPU on a 40Mhz bus while the 100 is a clock-tripled CPU on a 33Mhz bus – so it essentially runs all of my old OS8 software just like the original.

    Those who know these machines will probably be agog at the fact all of the faceplates are intact, and while the plastics are a little yellow they’re still in amazingly good shape… The face plates and the front of the machine are held on with plastic tabs, and the plastics on these machines after 30 years has essentially turned into powder. So if you look at the bezels the wrong way they break off…

    I also have the original Apple Multiple Scan 17″ monitor and the keyboard and mouse the system came with – also in pristine condition… Save for the control door on the monitor – the little plastic tab that holds the door closed snapped off – but I think I can use the baking soda and superglue trick to fix it.

    Like I said, the plastics are really brittle now.

    I picked this all up from Tammy over at Apple Rescue of Denver for a song… It’s got 112megs of RAM in it (72-pin 80ns simms) and a 640meg SCSI HD – and now has its original PDS video card in it.

    Everything runs great and I’ve been loading old software on it all day.

    I think, like the rest of my functional Apple time-capsules, I’ll max it out as much as possible and get it running on an SSD. This means I’ll need to order a BlueSCSI, more ram, more video ram, an AAUI to ethernet adapter, and other sundry items – all of which are available online for relatively cheap.

    Should keep me entertained for good long while. 🙂

    Listening to "As the Days Go By" by Marvel83'

  • OS v.old

    Welp, today Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2012 and 2012 r2 will be EoS (End of Support) on October 10th.

    These EoS announcements always make me feel my age, because it seems like just a few weeks ago I was testing 2012 to replace my 2008 r2 systems – and being irked at the Windows 8 UI they used for it…

    But that was a decade ago.

    I remember when I first got on the Windows Server train back in 1995. Windows NT 3.51 for workstations had just been released and I wanted to see what all the hubbub was about. At that time I was running Solaris and Novell systems at work, which were the big dogs in the workstation / network arena, but Windows was the big dog in the home market – so I was curious.

    The big thing that NT 3.51 did that got me onboard was to support RISC architectures like PPC, Alpha, and MIPS – because my systems at home at the time were PPC, Alpha, and MIPS machines. I did have a few IA-32 based machines laying around too, but mostly for games and BBS duty (MajorBBS at the time used DOS and phar lap). But most of my day-to-day computing was on RISC machines running things like MacOS, DEC OSF/1 AXP, or IRIX.

    Anyway, I got NT 3.51 running on my DEC AlphaStation 200 with only a few issues, and after some initial grumbling about it I decided to keep it around…

    Then a year later, in ’96, came NT 4…

    NT 4 SP1 marked the end of MIPS support, SP2 the end of PPC support, and SP6 the end of Alpha support – but by then I’d picked up enough expertise with NT that I stuck with it on x86 and x64 hardware.

    My entire career has been keynoted by my use of non-standard architectures and operating systems though, and even in the most Windows-based organization I still manage to do things with Linux running on oddball hardware… Like when I set up Marianapolis’ servers, labs, and student area computers – everything was Apple; Xserves and eMacs everywhere. Or at work today; my Active Directory and file servers are Windows because my user-base is Windows, but everything else is either Linux or MacOS.

    And even here in 2023, 40+ years since my first computer, I still tend to gravitate to “weird” systems; I’ve been puttering about with RISC-V for several years now and a lot of my spare time entertainment is futzing with core designs to run on a Terasic DE-10 nano running a Cyclone-V ARM-based FPGA.

    It’s all been a really fun ride, and even as I type this on a bleeding edge ARM-based Apple Silicon M2 Max RISC machine I’m looking forward to the next weird architecture to sink my teeth into. 🙂

    Listening to "New Horizons" by Timecop1983

  • History in computers

    My company has been in business since 1999, and one of the services we used to provide was hardware compatibility testing. What hardware compatibility testing is, is seeing how a given piece of software operates on various hardware platforms – CPU, north/south bridge, video card, sound card, etc.

    In 2018 we stopped offering this sort of testing; it had fallen to the wayside as hardware homologation and better driver models had appeared in more modern operating systems. But we still have a lab full of antiques from when we did this sort of thing, and I keep it around because I’m into old computers…

    The above photo shows some of the test machines we used for compat testing back in the day. The age of the system increases as you go from the upper shelf (8th gen Core i7) to the lower left (Pentium II 350Mhz). In between are K6-IIs and IIIs, Pentium IIIs and Pentium 4s, Pentium Ds, Core 2 Duos and Quads, Celerons, Durons, Semprons, Athlons, Phenoms, and a few other CPU architectures of bygone days in various sockets and Slot 1 / Slot A configurations.

    These machines are basically frames without side panels or, in some instances, case plastics. They were intended to be life support for a motherboard / CPU combination that various peripherals would be plugged into to fill out a compatibility test matrix.

    We used a lot of drive imaging to make this go… Early on it was done with Norton “Ghost” images on CD – which is why all of the machines have a rom drive in them, but in early 2010 I switched things over to Clonezilla pushing images from a central server… Which is why all of the test boxes also have a NIC in them.

    And yes, I still have all of the drive images. If you know someone who needs a period-correct Win98 install for a K6-II, I can hook you up. 🙂

    You’ll probbaly notice the piles of video cards on top of the rack… Most of the compat testing we did was for video games so we always had the latest chipsets on-hand, and those cards on the top shelf are cards I pulled out of the various test systems we last used in 2018.

    I also have a cabinet in that lab full of video cards ranging back to the dawn of PC gaming…

    These are all numbered to correlate to a spreadsheet of make, model, chipset, and in some cases firmware versions. The cards start in the upper left with a couple of Voodoo 3 2000s, and eventually get to a GTX 1080 at the bottom.

    Sadly, when taking this photo, I noticed a couple of cards with failed caps… I need to figure out if that’s something I want to fix I guess. These are cards that will probably never see electricity again – and probably not worth the effort.

    My personal collection of old PC hardware contains a couple Canopus Pure 3D II cards that I used back in my EverQuest days, and a “Diamond Stealth 24” from all the way back in 1993 – which predates the collection here by a couple of years. But between this cabinet and my own collection – it’s pretty complete. 🙂

    Listening to "Saved by the Bell" by Miami Nights 1984

  • Exhibit A

    Right after the last post, I had to break out the old Dell laptop again – so I figured I’d do a quick post that kind of illustrates a typical day for the Wizard…

    I have a client here at work that makes an internet connected thingy – which really narrows it down I know – and they do a lot of their app-to-device QA over in one of my labs. Normally this QA is sanity checking on various mobile devices to make sure the UI works at whatever the new screen resolution is or that the app works as intended in whatever the new OS version happens to be.

    But occasionally we help them recreate problematic scenarios reported by their customer service, and the current problem is a couple of specific home routers that aren’t working for their onboarding process.

    One of these routers is the base model Eero, which is Amazon’s in-house wifi router and isn’t a big deal to replicate – other than the Eero setup wanting your location, email, phone number, blood type, and a copy of your family tree to set up the mandatory online account to activate the damn thing…

    The other two are proprietary “Technicolor” wifi routers commonly supplied by Comcast for their broadband service – and that’s the reason I’m involved…

    The two proprietary routers were fairly cheap on ebay, but aren’t real happy about operating outside of Comcast’s network and expect their WAN side to be supplied by coax.

    I was getting ready to build a DOCSIS test network using an old Arris C3 and a selection of open sorcery (DHCP, TFTP, NTP, Syslog, and this), but I was eventually able to convince these routers that their WAN connection was being provided on an ethernet port by ONT (Optical Network Terminal) instead of coax.

    This still requires a lot of hand-holding to get the routers to understand what they are talking to, and due to these requirements a separate test network was needed…

    To set up this test network I needed a local router to talk to my edge router, and for small scale test networks that aren’t doing performance testing I like to use the venerable Cisco RV042 because it’s rock solid and super flexible, and lets me do things like supply custom DCHP flags… But once again no modern browser will talk to the web server in the RV042 because it’s more than two years old.

    So I had to drag out the Dell XPS again, and ten minutes later had reverse engineered Comcast’s provisioning strategy well enough to sufficiently emulate it for these two routers… And tomorrow we’ll do the testing to try and determine if it’s the router, wifi, or Comcast that shuts down the client’s onboarding.

    And that’s why they pay me the big bucks. 🙂

    Listening to "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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