The Dream System of 1986
Feb. 24th, 2015 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerA bit over a year ago now, I ordered a new piece of hardware that plugged into the back of the old Macintosh Plus I'd managed to get several years before that and served as a floppy drive. Instead of having to load the programs that can be found in various corners online onto a handful of old 800K disks through a multi-stage process, I could just copy disk images to a thoroughly compact camera memory card and load them in... one at a time. Even with part of the Plus's four megabytes of memory devoted to a RAM disk to hold some system software arranged with care to fit into one startup disk image, loading new programs still meant going around to the back of the computer and pushing small buttons attached to a seemingly vulnerable circuit board. What with needing the dining room table for other things and the awareness the computer is getting close to three decades old and might not last forever being turned on and off (especially since the fan pack that had come with it had a damaged power cord which made me reluctant to try and cool the "beige toaster"), I suppose I wound up not trying out the new setup that much more often than I'd tried using what floppies I did have.
Every so often I would still check the site of the person who had created the hardware, though, and I happened to see that he had upgraded its onboard software so that now it wasn't just emulating a floppy disk drive, but could also be set to emulate an Apple hard disk that had attached to the floppy drive port of the very first Macintoshes, a hard disk the Macintosh Plus (and only a few models following it) could boot from. It took a little while to get the nerve together to start fiddling around with the hardware, and it took a bit longer to figure out the instructions meant that for one piece of software to be upgraded (but not the other) I had to hold down some of the selection buttons while resetting the hardware and not leap at them in the seconds after resetting it. Now, I could boot from a disk image of arbitrary size, but again just one at time: it took a little while longer to set one up in the Mini vMac emulator.
With that, of course, the awareness just gets heightened that Mini vMac can do practically everything the real computer can do but have the arrow keys work in MacWrite, and the emulator boots up at eight times the speed of an actual Macintosh, so that programs load almost instantaneously. I suppose I've been thinking a bit of the smug "so what's the actual point of a personal computer, anyway?" comments made in the pre-networked days of the mid-1980s and the certain malaise that had to be fought back then. On the other hand, certain accomplishments might yet be worth making for their own sake, and the clatter and bang of the keyboard (although it's not the same feel as the premium "Apple Desktop Bus" keyboards that followed to be fondly remembered by those who make a big deal of mechanical switches to this day) as I write the first draft of this post (to again be transferred to a much newer and networked computer by plugging the memory card into it) has its own certain charm. With lots of software available at once, I can suppose I now have a system that would have seemed very adequate in 1986 (although I am aware there were plenty of people back then who would have insisted their different systems were better and cheaper, or cheaper anyway, and could hook up to colour monitors if you were willing to give up their highest resolution modes).
Every so often I would still check the site of the person who had created the hardware, though, and I happened to see that he had upgraded its onboard software so that now it wasn't just emulating a floppy disk drive, but could also be set to emulate an Apple hard disk that had attached to the floppy drive port of the very first Macintoshes, a hard disk the Macintosh Plus (and only a few models following it) could boot from. It took a little while to get the nerve together to start fiddling around with the hardware, and it took a bit longer to figure out the instructions meant that for one piece of software to be upgraded (but not the other) I had to hold down some of the selection buttons while resetting the hardware and not leap at them in the seconds after resetting it. Now, I could boot from a disk image of arbitrary size, but again just one at time: it took a little while longer to set one up in the Mini vMac emulator.
With that, of course, the awareness just gets heightened that Mini vMac can do practically everything the real computer can do but have the arrow keys work in MacWrite, and the emulator boots up at eight times the speed of an actual Macintosh, so that programs load almost instantaneously. I suppose I've been thinking a bit of the smug "so what's the actual point of a personal computer, anyway?" comments made in the pre-networked days of the mid-1980s and the certain malaise that had to be fought back then. On the other hand, certain accomplishments might yet be worth making for their own sake, and the clatter and bang of the keyboard (although it's not the same feel as the premium "Apple Desktop Bus" keyboards that followed to be fondly remembered by those who make a big deal of mechanical switches to this day) as I write the first draft of this post (to again be transferred to a much newer and networked computer by plugging the memory card into it) has its own certain charm. With lots of software available at once, I can suppose I now have a system that would have seemed very adequate in 1986 (although I am aware there were plenty of people back then who would have insisted their different systems were better and cheaper, or cheaper anyway, and could hook up to colour monitors if you were willing to give up their highest resolution modes).