Mac Like It's 1984
Jan. 30th, 2026 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen last I posted about the Macintosh emulator Snow, I’d been inspired by it beginning to offer the first 68030-powered machines to see if it could run QuickTime. Not that long afterwards, a “milestone release” promising serial bridging had me wondering if that previous diversion I’d found in it, “simulated dot matrix printouts,” would be easier to manage at last. I sorted out how the bridging was supposed to work and got a terminal program running in Terminal itself, but when I tried attaching the captured ImageWriter commands to the PostScript file that would turn them into more modern page images I realised from those garbled images that data was dropping out. Wondering if this had something to do with requiring the terminal to be set to a specific baud rate, I went back to the old manuals I’d found back while daydreaming about somehow converting my previous Epson-interpreter programs. Connecting at a variety of speeds and trying out different terminal programs still didn’t work.
With the sudden thought I could try to change a larger variable, I started up the old portable a variant of Linux now runs on to test Snow there. Despite knowing from experience the portable couldn’t quite manage to emulate the more elaborate sound hardware of the “post-68000 Macs,” it did manage to capture all of the ImageWriter commands. I’ve sorted out how to wirelessly transfer files from that computer to my more regular systems, but I did wonder for a little while whether this amounted to one more nudge towards “Linux isn’t just for the holier-than-thou these days.” Then, though, the more or less steady code updates producing “bleeding edge builds” mentioned further adjustments to serial bridging. I tried again on macOS, and this time I had recognizable output. It seemed that my own minimal adjustment of “increasing the size of the emulator’s own serial port terminal buffer, compiling my own version, and at least cutting down on how many times I hit the pause button to copy output” could pass from the scene at last. However, despite having wondering for a while how much “dot matrix aesthetic” I really need in my life, I’m still tending to make new virtual printouts every time I download a new build just to make sure the bridge still works.
As a distraction from that I did start thinking about getting some more colour games running on Snow’s high-end systems, pushing as far into the “System 7 era” as these first 68030 Macs could get. When I tried the “Asteroids clone” Maelstrom that had established the shareware legend Ambrosia Software, though, I found the program seemed to wobble between “shooting forward” and “shooting backwards,” which did make it hard to play. Trying to sort this out, I resorted to the older emulator vMac, which couldn’t manage the fade-in and fade-out effects and still showed the same problem. I tried installing not just System 7.1 but the bulkier System 7.5.3 in Snow (which meant loading quite a few more floppy disk images), and found the same problem. Eventually, I was able to resort to the MAME front end Ample, where I found the same problem while emulating the Macintosh IIci; the slightly faster and later Macintosh IIvx could at least play the game even if the mouse pointer is touchier in MAME.
One thing I did manage to do in Snow is get some CD-ROM images to load. This involved attaching an “empty drive” to its emulated SCSI train right after startup; attaching a drive with a CD image already loaded in it seems to lock things up. The first driver I added to System 7.1 had some slight problems, so for a while I did use System 7.5.3, where a driver was at least loaded during the lengthy installation. I got so far as to get Myst running, something I’d wondered about in my last post, even if I didn’t explore very far. After that I did find a driver that worked better with System 7.1.
It was around this time that I started thinking more about Snow also offering the earliest Macs. Part of wondering about all the effort I put into the virtual ImageWriter printouts is the awareness I already knew how to use the LaserWriter driver, “print to a PostScript file,” and export that file to turn it into a higher-quality document. One thing about the ImageWriter that I’d kept thinking about, though, was how it had been the sole option for the first if also, perhaps, still the most infamous Macintosh. A perhaps-peculiar part of me wanted to get a better sense of that particular infamy. That might have been inspired by having happened not that long ago on an article in a TRS-80 Model 100 magazine explaining how to link that portable to the merely “transportable” Macintosh (you could use the same cable that connected the Mac to an ImageWriter) but cautioning you not to create a Model 100 file too large for MacWrite to load. I’d always supposed the Model 100, where a fully equipped machine gave you a little less than 32K of free RAM to fill, was a bit cramped to work with; even if I’d also known the first version of MacWrite stopped accepting text around “ten single-spaced pages” this further calibration of limitation felt sort of unfortunate.
I did have disk images of some fairly early system and application disks, some of them made from the floppies included with the Macintosh Plus I managed to pick up years ago through the now-dissolved area user group. When I did a little more searching, I found what was said to be images of the disks that came with the very first Macs sold at the beginning of 1984. Despite also finding cautions about the bugs left from the final desperate push to ship, I decided to try them out. As for what to try and fill memory with, I suppose I took an easy way out and decided to transcribe John J. Anderson’s evaluation of the Macintosh from the July 1984 issue of Creative Computing, which I’ve long thought a thoughtful take on the future promise and current perils of the computer at that point. It at least felt like a different sort of calibration against a more human quantity.
Starting up did feel kind of poky. I wondered what “disk drive sounds” would add to the experience in revealing just when the computer was resorting to them; I also wondered about comments I’ve seen about the single-sided floppy drives in the first Macs making odd sounds as they sped up and slowed down to pack in a bit more data. Once the desktop had loaded, I recognized how the floppy disk icon blacked in the metal shutter and the disk space report was in bold text, already familiar from the system versions just following this one. Then, I spotted another difference. “9-point Geneva,” the font used to label icons, had a different lowercase “a.” Once I was aware of that I did spot it in certain old screen shots, including the ones in the Creative Computing article (which looked to have been made using ImageWriter printouts).
Once I’d started MacWrite and started typing, I went so far as to copy the article’s formatting, and noticed the characters of italic text were a little further apart than they were in later versions. Having dabbled with plain-text word processors on systems preceding the Macintosh, I remained impressed with being able to see that formatting. While I’d been aware of complaints involving the lack of arrow keys on the original Macintosh keyboard to go back and correct typos with while preserving correct characters, what I hadn’t quite been expecting was for the line you were adding to to flicker as you typed. That seemed just the sort of thing that would get annoying after a while and did have me wondering about it not having been brought up, even if I remembered there’d been a bit of flicker to the Color Computer 3’s enhanced MacWrite knockoff Max-10.
I transcribed the article in several sessions. One current thing about Snow to keep an eye on is that you have to “save your floppy disk image” after it’s been ejected from the computer. The memory report under the Apple menu kept ticking down, though, until all of a sudden the computer beeped in between words and stopped accepting characters. I’d made it about halfway through the review, just starting into what I found one of its more thoughtful sections, where Anderson talked about “modeless software,” including the comment “effort is what separates the wheat from the chaff, right? The men from the boys. The smarties from the dummies. If you can’t learn about modes, then maybe computers aren’t for you.
“Understand?”
I have wondered about a subsequent comment from him about imagining what it must have been like “when the Model T started popping up everywhere,” though, given my understanding that car had been successful through mass production bringing its price down. Anyway, I decided to get a sense of how much I’d managed to type and stress-test MacWrite by printing out. The emulated system worked for a while reporting it was “saving to disk,” but then the disk ran out of space. I’d noticed the disk image had included both MacWrite and MacPaint and only had about fifty kilobytes of free space left; I discarded MacPaint from my working copy and did manage to make a printout, although it took some time. The computer had run out of memory early on the eighth page. (Later on, I did find Steven Levy’s tenth-anniversary history Insanely Great also gave MacWrite’s limit as eight pages.) I suppose a bit more text would have packed in had I foregone the formatting, but when I saved what I had as plain text and loaded that back into MacWrite I only had “five percent” of memory space open up.
I’d like to think I gained a bit of understanding from this. I also realise I’m in a better position than the early adopters; I don’t need to wait months for more programs to show up or spend about as much as the Macintosh cost to begin with on an external disk drive and circuit board upgrades. In supposing I could write a draft of this very post using Snow itself, I resorted to Macintosh Plus emulation. It booted up much faster (which did have me wondering about whether “hard drive emulation via SCSI” was somehow more idealised than floppy disk emulation), and I tried out the later word processor WriteNow. It didn’t flicker when typing, but I did notice the Macintosh Plus doesn’t seem to be emulated with arrow keys on its keyboard. I wound up resorting to the later Macintosh Classic.
With the sudden thought I could try to change a larger variable, I started up the old portable a variant of Linux now runs on to test Snow there. Despite knowing from experience the portable couldn’t quite manage to emulate the more elaborate sound hardware of the “post-68000 Macs,” it did manage to capture all of the ImageWriter commands. I’ve sorted out how to wirelessly transfer files from that computer to my more regular systems, but I did wonder for a little while whether this amounted to one more nudge towards “Linux isn’t just for the holier-than-thou these days.” Then, though, the more or less steady code updates producing “bleeding edge builds” mentioned further adjustments to serial bridging. I tried again on macOS, and this time I had recognizable output. It seemed that my own minimal adjustment of “increasing the size of the emulator’s own serial port terminal buffer, compiling my own version, and at least cutting down on how many times I hit the pause button to copy output” could pass from the scene at last. However, despite having wondering for a while how much “dot matrix aesthetic” I really need in my life, I’m still tending to make new virtual printouts every time I download a new build just to make sure the bridge still works.
As a distraction from that I did start thinking about getting some more colour games running on Snow’s high-end systems, pushing as far into the “System 7 era” as these first 68030 Macs could get. When I tried the “Asteroids clone” Maelstrom that had established the shareware legend Ambrosia Software, though, I found the program seemed to wobble between “shooting forward” and “shooting backwards,” which did make it hard to play. Trying to sort this out, I resorted to the older emulator vMac, which couldn’t manage the fade-in and fade-out effects and still showed the same problem. I tried installing not just System 7.1 but the bulkier System 7.5.3 in Snow (which meant loading quite a few more floppy disk images), and found the same problem. Eventually, I was able to resort to the MAME front end Ample, where I found the same problem while emulating the Macintosh IIci; the slightly faster and later Macintosh IIvx could at least play the game even if the mouse pointer is touchier in MAME.
One thing I did manage to do in Snow is get some CD-ROM images to load. This involved attaching an “empty drive” to its emulated SCSI train right after startup; attaching a drive with a CD image already loaded in it seems to lock things up. The first driver I added to System 7.1 had some slight problems, so for a while I did use System 7.5.3, where a driver was at least loaded during the lengthy installation. I got so far as to get Myst running, something I’d wondered about in my last post, even if I didn’t explore very far. After that I did find a driver that worked better with System 7.1.
It was around this time that I started thinking more about Snow also offering the earliest Macs. Part of wondering about all the effort I put into the virtual ImageWriter printouts is the awareness I already knew how to use the LaserWriter driver, “print to a PostScript file,” and export that file to turn it into a higher-quality document. One thing about the ImageWriter that I’d kept thinking about, though, was how it had been the sole option for the first if also, perhaps, still the most infamous Macintosh. A perhaps-peculiar part of me wanted to get a better sense of that particular infamy. That might have been inspired by having happened not that long ago on an article in a TRS-80 Model 100 magazine explaining how to link that portable to the merely “transportable” Macintosh (you could use the same cable that connected the Mac to an ImageWriter) but cautioning you not to create a Model 100 file too large for MacWrite to load. I’d always supposed the Model 100, where a fully equipped machine gave you a little less than 32K of free RAM to fill, was a bit cramped to work with; even if I’d also known the first version of MacWrite stopped accepting text around “ten single-spaced pages” this further calibration of limitation felt sort of unfortunate.
I did have disk images of some fairly early system and application disks, some of them made from the floppies included with the Macintosh Plus I managed to pick up years ago through the now-dissolved area user group. When I did a little more searching, I found what was said to be images of the disks that came with the very first Macs sold at the beginning of 1984. Despite also finding cautions about the bugs left from the final desperate push to ship, I decided to try them out. As for what to try and fill memory with, I suppose I took an easy way out and decided to transcribe John J. Anderson’s evaluation of the Macintosh from the July 1984 issue of Creative Computing, which I’ve long thought a thoughtful take on the future promise and current perils of the computer at that point. It at least felt like a different sort of calibration against a more human quantity.
Starting up did feel kind of poky. I wondered what “disk drive sounds” would add to the experience in revealing just when the computer was resorting to them; I also wondered about comments I’ve seen about the single-sided floppy drives in the first Macs making odd sounds as they sped up and slowed down to pack in a bit more data. Once the desktop had loaded, I recognized how the floppy disk icon blacked in the metal shutter and the disk space report was in bold text, already familiar from the system versions just following this one. Then, I spotted another difference. “9-point Geneva,” the font used to label icons, had a different lowercase “a.” Once I was aware of that I did spot it in certain old screen shots, including the ones in the Creative Computing article (which looked to have been made using ImageWriter printouts).
Once I’d started MacWrite and started typing, I went so far as to copy the article’s formatting, and noticed the characters of italic text were a little further apart than they were in later versions. Having dabbled with plain-text word processors on systems preceding the Macintosh, I remained impressed with being able to see that formatting. While I’d been aware of complaints involving the lack of arrow keys on the original Macintosh keyboard to go back and correct typos with while preserving correct characters, what I hadn’t quite been expecting was for the line you were adding to to flicker as you typed. That seemed just the sort of thing that would get annoying after a while and did have me wondering about it not having been brought up, even if I remembered there’d been a bit of flicker to the Color Computer 3’s enhanced MacWrite knockoff Max-10.
I transcribed the article in several sessions. One current thing about Snow to keep an eye on is that you have to “save your floppy disk image” after it’s been ejected from the computer. The memory report under the Apple menu kept ticking down, though, until all of a sudden the computer beeped in between words and stopped accepting characters. I’d made it about halfway through the review, just starting into what I found one of its more thoughtful sections, where Anderson talked about “modeless software,” including the comment “effort is what separates the wheat from the chaff, right? The men from the boys. The smarties from the dummies. If you can’t learn about modes, then maybe computers aren’t for you.
“Understand?”
I have wondered about a subsequent comment from him about imagining what it must have been like “when the Model T started popping up everywhere,” though, given my understanding that car had been successful through mass production bringing its price down. Anyway, I decided to get a sense of how much I’d managed to type and stress-test MacWrite by printing out. The emulated system worked for a while reporting it was “saving to disk,” but then the disk ran out of space. I’d noticed the disk image had included both MacWrite and MacPaint and only had about fifty kilobytes of free space left; I discarded MacPaint from my working copy and did manage to make a printout, although it took some time. The computer had run out of memory early on the eighth page. (Later on, I did find Steven Levy’s tenth-anniversary history Insanely Great also gave MacWrite’s limit as eight pages.) I suppose a bit more text would have packed in had I foregone the formatting, but when I saved what I had as plain text and loaded that back into MacWrite I only had “five percent” of memory space open up.
I’d like to think I gained a bit of understanding from this. I also realise I’m in a better position than the early adopters; I don’t need to wait months for more programs to show up or spend about as much as the Macintosh cost to begin with on an external disk drive and circuit board upgrades. In supposing I could write a draft of this very post using Snow itself, I resorted to Macintosh Plus emulation. It booted up much faster (which did have me wondering about whether “hard drive emulation via SCSI” was somehow more idealised than floppy disk emulation), and I tried out the later word processor WriteNow. It didn’t flicker when typing, but I did notice the Macintosh Plus doesn’t seem to be emulated with arrow keys on its keyboard. I wound up resorting to the later Macintosh Classic.