Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac(blog.decryption.net.au) |
Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac(blog.decryption.net.au) |
- WriteNow! a very nice word processor that was originally developed for Next computers, before word took over it was the favorite.
- ClarisWorks/AppleWorks - One of the better pre office integrated apps - the database was REALLY easy to use, and interfaced well with the vector graphics module, spreadsheet, and word processor...
- FoxBase+/Mac - Before Microsoft bought Fox Software they got "Mac religion" and it shows in the incredible FoxBase+/Mac its amazin how much capability fits in a floppy.
- SuperPaint - great bitmap paint program though not as accurate as later graphics apps. (fractional/grid positioning was an issue)
- Ready,Set,Go! A great alternative DTP program to PageMaker/Quark. Never used others but I hear I think it was FrameMaker that had some sort of template/database feature to manage/generate catalogs. There were some interesting things back in the day.
- Stepping out - virtual larger desktop
- PowerPrint - Hook into epson compatible parallel printers with serial->parallel adapter.
- Comic Strip Factory - way before there was ComicLife there was Comic Strip Factory - a nice clipart based comic strip compositor.
- HyperCard - Never got into it but it had quite a community.
- Of course programming languages like Pascal, Logo, and BASIC in various flavors.
Of course you have the early greats like the Adobe programs and Microsoft Word/Excel/Office.
I think this is partially why people want these types of objects. You can actually own them. You can understand them. You can mod them.
Modern cars, games, computers, etc. aren't owned anymore. They always have updates, and could be bricked at any moment if the manufacturer wishes, gets bought or goes out of business.
There's nothing preventing this from being the golden age of computers. The capabilities of the hardware are near magical. We just need to bring back the concept of ownership.
Also, new tools are way more capable and cheap - all you need to fix an old computer with a sub-50mhz bus clock is a multimeter/scope, soldering iron, and other bits, which can easily be purchased new for $200.
Outside of the internet.
Get a network adapter (which pretty sure exists for the SE/30), and, like, Eudora(?), and you MIGHT even get email. Struggle there is everyone (rightly) does email over TLS, so there’s that.
BUT, add a raspberry pi as an email gateway, telnet to it for some Lynx love, and, boy, that’s a lot of computer utility.
Glaring gaps are anything graphic intensive, notably photos, and graphical internet.
Betting there’s some nice games that run on the SE.
Outside of the internet.
The internet is what 80% of people use computers for. They probably spend more than 80% of their computing time on it.
Furthermore, for business use you need to run the latest Office 365 applications. While an SE/30 could probably give a modern computer a run for its money at actual productivity, it’s not going to cut IT compatibility-wise. Plus there’s the whole PDF issue.
I imagine the current crop of college students that I teach today will feel the same about Minecraft, Angry Birds and the original iPad when they reach their 40s or later.
https://generalatomic.com/teil1/index.html
If you work through the base kit and the sequels, it offers a complete undergraduate course in electronics, minus the math.
I returned it because I couldn't afford it. The cost with peripherals was almost 3X the price of the Epson so I took advantage of Apple's return policy and let it go.
I still have my original computer though, a 128k Mac that I upgraded to 512k within a couple months of getting it back in January 1985. I have the printer, an external floppy drive, and maybe something else. I used it to introduce my kids to computers, teaching them to type and use a mouse and to play the one or two games that I have for it. I have several software applications that are not Apple software including one with capabilities that I made good use of back in the day. It was mathematical software that I could feed the software points defining a line and it would compute the equation defining that line out to the nth order polynomial. It understood linear, logarithmic, and exponential scales so all you needed as input were the points in x,y space and the scale for each variable. It was very powerful and there was nothing like it in DOS land or in early Winland. I used it find the equations of lines in published nomographs and then used those equations to write and debug QuickBASIC software to calculate reservoir properties on an old Compaq 286 (later a 386 and 486, etc).
I don't remember the name of the software but it was very a good mathematical application. I still don't think there is similar software for Windows unless Wolfram Alpha can do the same thing. I haven't needed to try in a long time.
Thanks for this reminder.
On page 9 (10 in the archive) of the April 1988 issue there is an advert for Eureka: The Solver by Borland International (Of course! They had such excellent software for years.)
There is a writeup about it on pages 191-192 (pages 192-193 in the archive).
One of the tools available is a polynomial finder. That is the tool that I used.
I will look around to see whether I still have the disk.
I may need to scan old MacWorld magazine images to find it.
While emulators are definitely convenient (especially when living in apartments), there is something about using physical hardware from the era and appreciating their technological limits compared to modern hardware. I also feel it is beneficial for young people who weren’t around to experience these machines during their heydays to experience them, to get a feel for what computing was like and how things have changed, for better and for worse. I miss the Living Computers Museum in Seattle, which was in operation before the COVID-19 pandemic and the passing of its owner, Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft.
Also, I love my mechanical keyboards from the era! I have a few old mechanical Apple keyboards (including the legendary Apple Extended Keyboard II) and two non-ADB NeXT keyboards.
Wish you could swap innards like you can swap engines with (some) cars.
Technology feels so "all worked out" today, with the right to repair out the window, everything is fused, and just dies one day and that'll be it.
I do fantasise about being reunited with my 386 DX 33, 4MB of ram and 40MB of hdd! It was the cream of the crop. Oh, that reset button has seen some action.
I’ve decided it’s completely unnecessary to justify this retro computing passion, there’s nothing wrong with venerating the ingenuity, ethos and craftsmanship of the time.
The excitement we felt at the breakthroughs that were coming fast and furious back then, the community and camaraderie of fellow nerds, the realization that those massively constrained systems with 10,000 to 100,000 times less power than we have today still managed to offer massive value to us as users and programmers - that’s pretty amazing.
Another reason to love that era was that there was still genuine idealism in the industry and everything was far less corporate than today.
Mine currently runs System 7 and After Dark 24/7 (while acting as a Tailscale exit node) on my shelf, and I’m currently (slowly) designing a facsimile mouse for it. I love tinkering with the thing even if the screen size is atrociously small for practical use because _everything just works without any bullshit_,
Then again I have a long history of having something like this around (I used to have the same Pi setup as a Plan 9 terminal solely for SSHing into my homelab without distractions), but there is something about that particular era of computing that makes me not just nostalgic but genuinely interested in re-living it to a degree.
I don’t really miss the Sinclair or Ataris I had before, nor any of the other 8/16 bit computers I used—-not even the games—-but there is something about the early Macs (up until the IIfx) that is indelibly burned into my brain.
We had rudimentary Internet, Mail, NNTP, all the barebone stuff, and being on the cusp of the browser era was very fun (I do miss my NeXT too, but hardly as much in comparison).
Perhaps my acquired hate of low profile non-buckling-spring keyboards is misplaced?
Then, cars rust and naturally become rare and expensive to restore to a running state, and almost all of the appeal is that you can show off in them, displaying how much money you can afford to spend on a hobby.
Old computers are pretty cheap and are limited to old software, and there's nearly no showing off other than on HN.
Whatever rocks your boat I guess.
Originally I was thinking about getting touch with PowerPC architecture and check out how Apple did the 68K emulator. But now I'm completely burnt out from work, I simply have no interest in programming at all, and the laptop sits in a drawer collecting dusts.
I feel sad for it and myself.
There are small electric-car companies that let customers do what they want, like Edison Motors, but they make industrial-sized work vehicles. It would be nice if a similar small company started selling consumer cars, but the automotive industry is heavily plagued by bikeshedding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality) to the point that large trucks and busses are allowed to do their thing, while subcompact vehicles have been effectively regulated out of existence.
Most of the faults on EVs come from dead electronics like a fried MOSFET or PCB trace, and coolant leaks inside the motor due to gasket failures derived from race-to-the-bottom cost cutting designs to save money, which your average user won't be able to repair themselves unless maybe we're talking about completely swapping out the entire ECU/motor/battery/assembly with a brand new one instead of repairing it, parts which haven't been designed for easy repairability. And that's excluding DRM issues and the fact that those parts aren't sold to consumers and even if they would, stuff like ADAS sensors, motors and batteries still require calibration with dedicated equipment during installation and can't be plug&play like a laptop battery swap.
Check out EV clinic(no affiliation) for horror stories on EVs and hybrids failures. Due to poor design, a lot of EVs (maybe excluding Teslas) are reliability ticking timebombs whose failure is a matter of WHEN not IF.
Right.[1]
I think of those guys at the Computer Museum who took years to repair an IBM 1401. They even had the assistance of some of the designers and retired IBM field engineers.
It is simple though, it doesn't have a lot of complex parts to repair.
- The water pump going out, as we drove up a mountain, and rolling back down into the drive way of a converted apple barn. Where we found a nice cleaning lady who took my dad the 20 miles into town to get a new water pump, which he replaced in that driveway and got us back on the road.
- The rear diff throwing a bearing well after midnight in the middle of nowhere west Texas. The car limped a few miles down the road to a surprisingly still open gas station. My uncle, a mechanic, happened to have the necessary parts to fix it on him. So when he picked my dad up an hour later, they went ahead and spent the rest of the overnight hours replacing it in the parking lot of that middle of nowhere gas station.
- Spending several days at various salvage yards looking for rear tail lights. They are just the right height to be taken out by shopping carts. Unfortunately the 79 is the only year that didn't have a connecting strip that goes between the left and right hand sides. In the 90's they were very hard to find, I can't imagine they are any easier today. Seriously, buy an extra set even if you don't need them.
If you ever want a to move to a modern V8, Ford's panther platform from '02-'11 are just as big, roomy, and easy to work on as that Thunderbird. Plus you'll get modern conveniences like anti-lock breaks, air-bags, and good part availability.
Many countries in Europe are now restricting access to cities to exclude even what would be considered relatively new vehicles. For example, Amsterdam's plan includes a transition to a zero-emission city center by 2030, and is already at Euro 4 emissions, affecting many vehicles from the 2000s. Germany's cities are also well ahead on emissions restrictions, as is Paris. No classic for you! I think only one of my cars would be allowed to operate in much of the Randstad today, but thankfully I don't live or work there anymore.
Meanwhile PDP-8 systems like mine are selling for in excess of €6k these days, and someone recently paid €1750 for a NeXTstation Turbo Color like mine, to say nothing of the other 20+ 60s, 70s, and 80s systems in my collection. I regularly remind my wife: if I drop dead unexpectedly, SELL that stuff, don't junk it or give it away.
A random 1950s-1970s car in serviceable driving condition can be had for a few grand around here, but Millennials having kids, nostalgia, and money all at the same time, not to mention COVID madness, has shot old computer prices through the roof. I expect that market will crater when they put us in the ground, much as the vintage car market is coming down a bit as we lose Boomers without gaining as many younger people interested in old cars. Populations moving to cities means that parking your vanity car (if classics are even allowed) in addition to your commuter would represent a significant uplift in ongoing expense, which will probably help to keep that market depressed.
People DIY their own EVs all the time, and on the electronics side all you need is a battery, a battery management unit, a charge controller, a motor controller, and the motor. Some of those parts can even be integrated into a single module If your combustion-powered car is fuel injected, it probably needs just as complicated of computer systems as an EV. (with the exception being rare cases of mechanical fuel injection)
The rest of an EV drivetrain is the same as any combustion car, except the transmission can be much simpler or may not be needed at all.
If an electronic components dies within one of those modules, swapping it out is no more work than swapping out something like an alternator or a starter. If the motor itself needs replacement, that's much, much easier than swapping out a combustion engine. Most electric cars have motors small enough that a single person could lift and carry one. If your motor controller died, you might be able to fix it with board level repair, just as you could rebuild an alternator yourself, but almost everyone working on a vehicle, whether DIY or commercially, is going to replace it, with either something new or something repaired/rebuilt by a specialist.
It's possible to get EVs with cheap components that won't last long, but it's also possible to get components with good design and build quality that will last a lifetime. Combustion engines, on the other hand, are regulated into designs that have extremely high efficiency when brand new, with no care for their long-term performance, so pretty much any modern consumer combustion vehicle has extremely fragile piston rings that begin leaking almost immediately, making for much shorter lifespans than decades-old combustion vehicles.
Driver assist is completely unrelated to the fuel type and open-source solutions do exist, that work on both combustion and electric drivetrains.
And I'm saying that as someone who only had access to a computer for about 4 years before we got internet access.
It's no more difficult to make safe than household wiring, and DIYers work on it all the time.
Driver assist has nothing to do with what type of fuel and powerplant a vehicle has, and those features can be broken by DIYers on any vehicle type. Sometimes being able to disable them is a built-in necessity for safety, for example when driving on gravel roads where they tend to do more harm than good.
Modern ADAS is a whole lot more integrated on EVs than it ever was on combustion cars, not by some inherit requirements of EVs but due to consumer demand when considering a new ev platform.
The driver is increasingly more removed, things like drive and break by wire go through a long chain of controllers in order to allow ADAS, and the input from the user is really just one more signal from a sensor.
There is no longer any circumstance where these systems are completely "off". And none were I would consider off to be safer. (Yes, even gravel and snow)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44422763
“ I do a lot of work on my own vehicles. I think a lot of the responses are from people who do not. Paying for vehicle repair labor is basically a tax. They're making it harder and harder to fix your own car. I spent the afternoon yesterday trying to find headlight assemblies that didn't need to be coded to work correctly. Headlights. All the outrage about right-to-repair around here, and nobody realizes the frog is almost boiled around repairing cars.”
During my adult life thus far I’ve only lived in apartments, and every apartment that I’ve rented has a lease clause prohibiting car maintenance and repairs except for very simple tasks such as replacing windshield wipers. Thus, I drive newer cars that don’t require many repairs, and I pay a mechanic whenever I need to perform maintenance or repairs, which costs a lot of money, especially in the Bay Area (the mechanic needs to pay for two places: the rent/mortgage for the shop and also for the mechanic’s residence). Being able to afford a house with a garage and no HOA will require me to either become rich or move out of the Bay Area.
Paying for labor is indeed a heavy tax, but unfortunately thanks to lease/HOA restrictions and sometimes local ordinances, this tax is unavoidable, short of giving up driving.
But there are places in Seattle where you can rent a garage and the tools you need, for people in your situation. But I doubt it is cheap.
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/comparison-test/a151426...
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15122183/toyota-camry-...
I used to drive a 62 Studebaker. People saw an old car and asked me if it was fast. Hell no, I'd answer -- but by God it can suck fuel!
IMO the ICE has achieved its final form, so now the future has to be something else (electric).
It's an intersting time to live, we are indeed seeing the peak of ICE, though I think there are lots of room for improvement in EGR, compression, more efficient catalytic process.
"smaller market" ICE manufacturers IE isuzu, mazda, hino etc. are sort of working towards this, as opposed to jumping on EV train.
Theoretically, it's completely reasonable for a high compression inlne 3 cylinder with aero wheels/tires to get 60-70 MPG. (With proper EGR, turbo application, CVT)
On page 9 (10 in the archive) of the April 1988 issue there is an advert for Eureka: The Solver by Borland International (Of course! They had such excellent software for years.)
There is a writeup about it on pages 191-192 (pages 192-193 in the archive).
One of the tools available is a polynomial finder. That is the tool that I used.
I will look around to see whether I still have the disk.
I also found my favorite, and first computer game since it was my first computer.
Silicon Beach Software put out a game called Airborne! in 1984. I got the Mac in January 1985 and bought that game with it. Fun stuff!
Thanks for the help.
The author's page: http://www.spinstop.com/roger/eureka.htm
They're attracted to XXXXL EVs because they can make the XXXXL cars they want to make and still claim they're "green"
50mpg from a 5.7L V8, using most of the drivetrain from a truck(!)
My daily driver gets roughly half that, but it has a carbureted 6.6L and an automatic transmission, with some mild performance tuning done. I am satisfied enough with that.
