68000 Revivification
Jan. 28th, 2014 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerOne day after a certain thirtieth anniversary, I got around to trying out a small piece of hardware I hoped would bring me back to the earlier days of the Macintosh. A few years ago, I went to a sort of "estate garage sale" at the house of a late member of the local Apple users' group, and there saw the distinctive cardboard box the first Macintoshes had been in. Most of the original manuals were still inside, along with a computer that had been upgraded from 512K to a Macintosh Plus. Getting to buy the whole package for less than I'd been ready to spend, I took it back to my own place, confirmed the computer still worked and could still load the handful of floppy discs included, and then found myself wondering just what else I could do with it. While nowadays the Macintosh Plus is described as "the first really capable Macintosh" (with, perhaps, an implicit dismissal of the two years preceding its introduction as just a handful of early adopters battling the constant frustration of limited memory and storage), it could still only load 800K discs, not the higher-density 1.44 MB discs that followed. Heading back home and looking for more 800K discs turned up just a handful of them, and to get software on them from the disc images I'd found online that worked with the "Mini vMac" emulator would mean using an intermediate computer as a bridge. I wound up keeping the Macintosh Plus in my basement and only taking it to special sessions of the user group for people to try MacPaint on if they wanted, aware that "DriveWire" made my family's old Color Computers more connected to modern computing.
Then, not that long ago, I happened on posts by someone developing a circuit card that would plug into an external floppy drive port and load disc images off a digital camera memory card. I knew similar things had been developed for a variety of old computers, but seemed to lose track of the site until quite recently, when I happened on a link promising that the person was now selling preassembled "Macintosh Floppy Emu" to people like me unfamiliar with soldering irons. I ordered one of them and bought a necessary memory card after it had arrived in the mail.
Just as had been promised, the "floppy emulator" worked, and I managed to load a few "new" programs, then decided I would commemorate this by writing this post on the Macintosh Plus itself using MacWrite. Experiencing that, though, does make me think again emulators are more convenient. I might not have the same connection to physical hardware as some people do, even if the keyboard has its own distinct feel ("clattering" and perhaps even "banging") and the somewhat bluish monitor with its scan lines just perceptible also adds a certain something. It also reminds me of how my family just might have tilted towards the Macintosh instead of a PC clone becase we'd become familiar with its particular interface through a "MacPaint clone" and "MacWrite clone" for the Color Computer 3, programs perhaps benefitting by just how far that inexpensive home computer sold in Radio Shack stores might have been from the computing mainstream by being able to imitate the "Chicago" system font. The typography of Windows 3.1 wound up looking bland by comparison; so too, I'm afraid to say, did the original "Amiga Workbench" in emulation years later. That, I'm sure, would infuriate anyone remembering the old proclamations of just how superior the Amiga's hardware was, but it does leave me thinking Susan Kare's font and icon designs might have been as important as anything else.
As a postscript, to get this post from the Macintosh Plus to online, I removed the memory card from the "floppy emulator" (after the computer was shut down), stuck it in the card reader slot in the side of my iMac (useful at last, given my digital camera is made by Sony and uses a different kind of card), and copied the disc image I'd saved the document as text to. I then opened that disk image using Mini vMac and used a small utility program to export it to the desktop. I suppose that's still a somewhat involved process, but it didn't take too long.
Then, not that long ago, I happened on posts by someone developing a circuit card that would plug into an external floppy drive port and load disc images off a digital camera memory card. I knew similar things had been developed for a variety of old computers, but seemed to lose track of the site until quite recently, when I happened on a link promising that the person was now selling preassembled "Macintosh Floppy Emu" to people like me unfamiliar with soldering irons. I ordered one of them and bought a necessary memory card after it had arrived in the mail.
Just as had been promised, the "floppy emulator" worked, and I managed to load a few "new" programs, then decided I would commemorate this by writing this post on the Macintosh Plus itself using MacWrite. Experiencing that, though, does make me think again emulators are more convenient. I might not have the same connection to physical hardware as some people do, even if the keyboard has its own distinct feel ("clattering" and perhaps even "banging") and the somewhat bluish monitor with its scan lines just perceptible also adds a certain something. It also reminds me of how my family just might have tilted towards the Macintosh instead of a PC clone becase we'd become familiar with its particular interface through a "MacPaint clone" and "MacWrite clone" for the Color Computer 3, programs perhaps benefitting by just how far that inexpensive home computer sold in Radio Shack stores might have been from the computing mainstream by being able to imitate the "Chicago" system font. The typography of Windows 3.1 wound up looking bland by comparison; so too, I'm afraid to say, did the original "Amiga Workbench" in emulation years later. That, I'm sure, would infuriate anyone remembering the old proclamations of just how superior the Amiga's hardware was, but it does leave me thinking Susan Kare's font and icon designs might have been as important as anything else.
As a postscript, to get this post from the Macintosh Plus to online, I removed the memory card from the "floppy emulator" (after the computer was shut down), stuck it in the card reader slot in the side of my iMac (useful at last, given my digital camera is made by Sony and uses a different kind of card), and copied the disc image I'd saved the document as text to. I then opened that disk image using Mini vMac and used a small utility program to export it to the desktop. I suppose that's still a somewhat involved process, but it didn't take too long.