krpalmer: (apple)
[personal profile] krpalmer
I'm cautious about invoking "political content" on this journal, but when I saw some "Apple commentators" bring up a Twitter post on the account of the Prime Minister of Canada, my thoughts veered in a direction I did want to say something about. Seeing Justin Trudeau promote with enthusiasm (and in both official languages) an article about the Macintosh emulation now available on the Internet Archive got me supposing that while there are people who were using Apple computers in the 1980s and people who've seen themselves as having "bought into a story" afterwards (as I suppose I was, just earlier than some), they don't amount to a constituency to be talked up in an analytical fashion. I was therefore willing to suppose Trudeau had used a Macintosh back when the game Dark Castle was a standout on it, and from there I could wonder if Pierre Trudeau had bought one of the computers (although this does bring to mind all those smirking juxtapositions of "the computer for the rest of us" and Apple's pricing strategies, along with how the elder Trudeau had been well-off before becoming Prime Minister) after retiring from office, and if he'd used it himself or supposed himself "too old for this sort of thing" even with its much-promoted graphical user interface and left it to his sons. Of course, the computer could also have been in a school lab with games floating around.

In any case, I was already aware of those Javascript emulators, but can admit to thinking I'd rather stick with files saved on my own computer for use with the self-contained Mini vMac emulator, especially given its recent push from the small black-and-white screen of the original Macintosh towards the larger, more colourful screen my own family's purchase not that far into the 1990s provided us with. (There was a comment in the article wondering if the author's return to MacWrite could be extracted from the emulator; I can do that with Mini vMac, even if I don't do that often.) After a first bit of difficulty that had me supposing the PCE Javascript emulator demanded disk images formatted in a way Mini vMac couldn't do anything with, though, I did find at least some of the files from the Internet Archive can be put to that offline use, and that before this somehow amusing bit of unexpected attention paid to the whole thing.

July 2025

S M T W T F S
   12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 7th, 2025 07:27 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios