Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Ahead by a Century

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:04:10 GMT

As “MARCHintosh” has continued I suppose I’ve been thinking more about the actual antique hardware I set up than doing things with it. One item discovered via mere emulation before the month began did at least provoke an idea, though. Going through a giant disk image of selected software, I happened on a “2020Patch” extension. After a while, I started to think about how the Control Panel only offers two digits for setting the year. Emulators appear to draw their clock setting from the host system such that I never look at files I’ve made in them and realise there’s something off about their date stamps, but that would of course be different with my SE/30. Once I’d examined some recent date stamps on it I realised they’d indeed wound up back in the early years of the twentieth century.
( Shifting systems and times )

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A Minor MARCHintosh Moment

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:09:57 GMT

After noticing a new “stable release” of the Snow emulator I took a look at the Mastodon account of its developer. The release was promoted there with the comment it had been prepared for “MARCHintosh.” Recollections of having seen a different “month for working with old computers,” “SepTandy,” came to mind.

I had been daydreaming about another small excursion involving Snow, but as I looked up the “MARCHintosh” hash tag I noticed people making a big deal of setting up their actual hardware. Managing to clear off the one table I can set projects up on, I got out my SE/30 and powered it up. Playing some “MacFlims” already loaded on its memory-card mass storage, though, amounted to most of what I could think of doing with it. A major “MARCHintosh” project involves long-distance online networking, but I’m still sorting out how that works, including the potential risks to the rest of your home devices, and might not have all the hardware to “do it for real” anyway. Snow itself promises the potential to “connect to the Internet,” but I haven’t quite tried that either.

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Ten Years of Tumbling

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:59:57 GMT

Feeling wearied ten years ago by the effort of coming up with posts here might not have afflicted me for all that long. Before that mood lifted, though, it did turn into the motivation to sign up for Tumblr and start posting “computer magazine covers” cadged from the Internet Archive and a few other sources. Not that long after I’d started, so it now seems, efforts to clean that service up injured it, and yet there are still other people posting there and operating on a lower key might make it feel a little less reprehensible than some other services.

To push towards the ten-year mark I did resort to posting covers from some computer magazines I hadn’t quite accumulated scanned copies of back when starting. I do feel as if I’m closer to the end than the beginning of that second pass through history. At this point, aware of the certain amount of time that goes into “skimming a magazine and putting together a capsule description to go with the cover” and how I keep feeling like I’m short on time after work these days, I’m contemplating whether I have enough content to just go on to reposting covers from “fifty years ago,” “forty-five years ago,” “forty years ago,” and so on; it might even amount to “a post every day of the month.”

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Mac Like It's 1984

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 23:49:15 GMT

When 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.
( The eventual solution, and going forward and back )

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Back Along The Rainbow

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 01:15:34 GMT

With my parents downsizing, one of the things I took custody of was our partial run (if one that spanned almost ten years) of the Color Computer magazine The Rainbow. Once I’d brought the file boxes of it to my own place after Christmas, I did get to thinking about how each month I “go back forty years,” pick up some of the old magazines already ready to my hand, and leaf through 80 Micro and Macworld. There have been months I’ve needed most of their days to get to the end of those two issues, so I did wonder whether revisiting another antique magazine was the wisest use of my time. It didn’t take me that long to skim the January 1986 80 Micro, though, so I went ahead and extracted the Rainbow issue for the same month.
( An advertising focus )

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Portable Adventures

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 19:01:27 GMT

Happening to think for the first time in a while of a TRS-80 Model 100 mailing list, I looked at its bookmarked web archive and saw some recent messages beginning with a question about “the Z-machine for the Model 100.” (That question had been inspired by news of some Infocom source code becoming “safe to distribute.”) As the discussion explained how someone had managed to get “the virtual machine that ran Infocom and later adventures” running on the portable with the aid of REX, a recent storage development for it, my amusement might have been tempered by reflecting on how I’d used the somewhat different (and more “volatile”) REXCPM to run the old Infocom interpreter for that operating system, but more to prove it could run than to play through games using it. That more people had their own chance to squeeze text adventures onto the Model 100’s small screen seemed good in itself, but perhaps thoughts of “paths not taken” left me wondering if I ought to at least try that other option myself.
( Paths now taken )

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SnowTime Experiments

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 17:57:34 GMT

When my RSS reader pointed me to a retrospective on QuickTime as “an Apple innovation of the 1990s that managed to have made it out of that decade,” it just so happened I’d managed in recent days to have simulated an early stage of that step towards “multimedia” myself. While working with the Snow emulator to try out “dot matrix printing” and “old word processors,” I’d kept an eye on its development. A “branch” promising steps towards offering the Motorola 68030 microprocessor had got my attention, but I’ll admit to wondering how many steps would be needed until it became available. When the first “030 Macs” showed up in the general “cutting-edge build,” it was something of a pleasant surprise.
( Speeding up and stress testing )

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Random Flakes of Snow

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 22:45:42 GMT

Poking away at the Snow emulator to explore a few corners of the antique Macintosh experience has stayed interesting enough to get me wondering about making another post on the subject. The whole matter of “old computers,” though, can leave me thinking “it interests me, but anyone likely to see this here would, at best, just sort of shrug and think ‘too much detail.’” The best I can do is keep this introduction short and put everything else a click away.
( Guest appearance by actual antique hardware )

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Stretching a Few Limits

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 22:26:35 GMT

Noticing how the simulated ImageWriter printouts I’d winkled out of the Snow emulator looked a little squeezed compared to the characters on screen, and supposing this had something to do with the dot-matrix printer’s horizontal resolution not being an exact multiple of the horizontal resolution of the original Macintosh screen, had seemed something I’d just have to shrug about for the moment. Beyond the question of just how much “dot matrix aesthetic” I need in my life, it remained an involved process to build up a file of printer commands.
( Two partial solutions )

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Snow-Written Images

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 19:17:50 GMT

Working around the (current?) output limitations of the Snow emulator to build up some sequences of dot matrix printer commands was, perhaps, just enough of a complication to result in a slight increase in satisfaction at seeing “dot-matrix output from a Macintosh.” After testing the different resolutions available in the Epson printer driver I’d used to feed my existing “printer-command-to-PDF” utilities and seeing confirmation of the old comments about how the early Macintosh would try to scale down larger sizes of its bitmap fonts to produce somewhat better output than you got on its screen (regardless of how this did or didn’t apply to “What You See Is What You Get”), though, I did get to thinking this hadn’t quite matched the earliest days of the computer. As important as Epson printers had been to computing as a whole, they were “a” printer hooked up to a Macintosh. “The” dot matrix printer for that computer, the Apple-branded model with a driver included in the standard system software installation, was the ImageWriter.
( An antique solution )

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Not Quite Snowed In

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 22:35:21 GMT

Retyping from scratch is one way to produce a second draft, and I can imagine someone telling me reasons why that might be preferable to changing a word here and there. Having to transcribe text out of a window showing the emulated screen of an antique Macintosh with the sense everything I had worked on in the new emulator Snow was locked inside it wasn’t all that pleasant, though. Once I’d posted about that, I went straight back to the emulator and started poking at it a bit more. One menu promised terminals monitoring the emulated serial ports. Digging through my existing archive of disk images, I turned up MacTerminal. A few period criticisms of that program and an awareness of all of the terminal programs that followed it came to mind, but when I tried it out I did find the plain text I’d tried sending in the modem port terminal window, and could copy the text into BBEdit in my modern system. (It had been “hard-wrapped,” though.)
( An imagination runaway )

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Something of a Snow Job

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 22:09:37 GMT

After setting up a series of TRS-80 emulators on my “Linux portable” and compiling an Apple II emulator there as well, my thoughts turned to Mini vMac. I’ve used that particular program for some years; perhaps the thought of trying out one more way to get it running was more enticing than a different thought that “if I wind up moving to Linux, this will maintain one connection to at least the Macintosh in days of yore...”
( Software evolutions )

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A VCC Digression

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 19:46:45 GMT

Thinking to check in on the Color Computer 3 emulator VCC a little while ago, I found a new version of it had become available. It promised a somehow intriguing amount of enhancements for a version number change from “2.1.9.1” to “2.1.9.2.” I went ahead and set up a new “bottle” in the commercial Wine front end CrossOver, which is how I run the Windows-only emulator. When I tried launching the new version, though, I crashed into error messages.
( A simple problem, an extended solution )

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The Other Easy Option

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 12:46:08 GMT

One motivation in the mix that got me installing Linux on another of my old computers was to take one more crack at getting a particular emulator running. To begin with, I had compiled “Virtual T” on macOS. As I poked away at it, though, I found its emulation of the floppy disk drive that could be interfaced with the TRS-80 Model 100 didn’t quite work. This wasn’t the only way to get programs and files into and out of the emulated portable. However, after I’d found the disk drive did work with the Windows version of the emulator (running via Wine, but an earlier version lacking a few features), curiosity had me trying to see just what the situation was with Linux.
( Curious byways )

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Another Escape Route Test

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 22:20:29 GMT

Not that long ago I got to thinking about just one of the old portable computers I have lying around. My old MacBook Air, bought not that long before a trip from a store selling used computers as well as new machines, had been a thoroughly portable machine. However, it only had four gigabytes of RAM with no way to increase that. This made me refrain from upgrading it to the final operating system versions it could support, even if the absolute final version among them has passed over the “no security updates” horizon. At last, the thought of installing a version of Linux on it occurred to me, and perhaps just before the latest burst of general lugubriousness over perceptions of rotten software from Apple. (Many years ago, during a previous burst, I set up an even older black-plastic MacBook to dual-boot into Linux, so I suppose that setting up just-in-case escape routes has been something I’ve been proving I can do for a while.)
( Booting and rebooting )

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Telewriter Unwrapped (the hard way)

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 21:52:19 GMT

“There were computers from other companies than Radio Shack?” seems just amusing enough a realisation for me to use it in explanations of how I got to delving into “old computers,” but I do wonder about it oversimplifying things. In any case, there have been things about the particular computer I was using when I came to the realisation just mentioned that I learned well after the fact. It doesn’t seem that many years ago that I was looking at the list of software on a Color Computer archive and really picked up on a program named “TW-80” to the point of wondering about its name. From reading old issues of The Rainbow magazine I’d known about a word processor for the “CoCo” called Telewriter. When The Rainbow’s editorial content had still been dot matrix printout, full-page, typeset ads for Telewriter had promised to transcend a text display that might seem unpromising for word processing (with sixteen lines of thirty-two characters each and no lowercase, just capital letters in “reverse video” boxes to indicate them) by drawing characters on the highest resolution graphics screen. I’d known how the program had become Telewriter-64 as the Color Computer reached the 8-bit memory limit and then transformed into Telewriter-128 on the Color Computer 3, which had a much improved text display. The not quite in-between number, not mentioned in a Rainbow article on word processors that had shaped my awareness of the options there at the end of the 1980s, tickled my fancy enough to load TW-80 in an emulator. I sorted out it pressed the equally improved graphics of the “CoCo 3” into service.
( Listing included )

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The Four Decade Later Upgrade

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 22:53:22 GMT

With what keeps being said about the TRS-80 Model 100 more than four decades after its introduction, there are moments I imagine being accused of insufficient appreciation of that pioneering portable. One of those computers has been in my family for more or less forty years now. In recent years, though, when I’ve switched it on that was as much to see that it could still be switched on as anything.
( Software via hardware )

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Following the Breadcrumb Trail

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 23:47:47 GMT

Looking again at the Wikipedia articles promoted as recently improved, I glanced at one about “sports fans,” got a bit more specific by looking up “fantasy sports,” and then turned to the description of an IBM computer applied to that pastime early on. Heading on to how that computer was constructed from “cards” combining what would now seem simple electronic components, I then looked at the similar system of the Digital Equipment Corporation. That had me thinking back to the AltaVista search engine, and then I looked forward to Kagi, which I still haven’t sampled yet to see if I want to start paying for its service. An offsite link did appear critical of it, though, so I took a look at it and noticed the piece offered some faint praise of a small search engine I hadn’t quite heard of before. Once I’d managed to find Marginalia Search through a different search engine, my first impulse was to type in “MSTings,” and that managed to list part of my home page first. As gratifying as that was, I did then remember that the very first time I’d connected to the Internet (somewhat in advance of even AltaVista) I’d been thinking about the Infocom adventure games that hadn’t had a hint book in their economy collection (even if the first such collection’s hint book, in not being able to use the special ink and developer pen of the original “InvisiClues,” pretty much gave me the solution to everything any time I tried to find the subtlest starter hint). I didn’t have quite as much success now just turning up results with my first effort, but a bit of prompt refinement did work a bit better.

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Working Things Out Backwards

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 23:21:01 GMT

After reading a book about calculators and then a weblog post about a brief slice of their history when pocket electronic machines became available in the early 1970s, I happened on an emulator program for some of the first Hewlett-Packard pocket devices. That got me thinking about their particular method of data entry, and whether I’d brushed by “Reverse Polish Notation” just because of the unfortunate potential for inappropriate smirks. I did get to the point of looking up the manual for the HP-35 calculator, the original “electronic slide rule,” and then I started searching in my phone’s “App Store.” One free application offered the layouts of the HP-35 and two of its immediate successors, the enhanced HP-45 and the cost-reduced HP-21. It did offer “haptic feedback” when you pushed on-screen buttons, but when I realised it didn’t quite offer the multiple memory registers of the HP-45 I started looking at calculator programs you had to pay for. One person offering quite a few programs had a “free sample” ready in the form of the HP-70, a simplified financial calculator, and that was enough of a preview for me to buy an HP-35 program for my phone and a HP-45 program for my iPad.

Once I’d become used to it I could see how “RPN” entry worked with complicated calculations; the question was just how many of those complicated calculations I actually do. I also got to the point of thinking I ought to see if I could still multiply and divide by hand on paper, and found myself prone to errors while multiplying at length. My only hope is that practice would help there.

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Straight Back to Mariani

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 21:36:57 GMT

In the final stages of preparing a post about some new-to-me Apple II emulators, I went back to the GitHub page for the “Mariani” emulator to retrieve its URL. While there, I happened to notice the number of “branches” to the code, and was curious enough to take a look at them. Spotting something called “delete-key-mapping” was sufficient to get me thinking I might keep delving into Mariani after my post was up.
( To correct your mistakes )

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Fresh Emulation Options

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 22:51:19 GMT

One recent upgrade to the long-established emulator Virtual ][ promised improvements to its rendering of Apple II graphics. That got my attention. While Virtual ][ includes many useful features and I bought a license for it some time ago (long enough ago that I have to admit I’ve used the license code to get the program running on more than one computer), in an age where some emulators make efforts to simulate the blurred-together look of cathode-ray tube monitors it had got to looking a bit old-fashioned. However, those modest improvements didn’t seem enough to make a post about.
( Heading for Mariani Avenue )

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Return to Fractalus

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 22:49:47 GMT

Keeping up with a sort of digest of “Color Computer news” (it was where I’d learned about the regional antique computer exposition I went to last year), I saw a pointer to a video promising a detailed look at a game ported to computers including the “CoCo 3,” Rescue on Fractalus. The game (an early work from Lucasfilm Games, later LucasArts) was a sort of science fiction flight simulator where you flew down valleys and over mountains generated via what was just becoming a buzzword, “fractals,” shooting alien gun turrets off the ridges and landing to rescue crashed pilots. While my recollections have my family only buying the game during the final closeout sales at Radio Shack on Color Computer software, by which the state of the art for people who’d bought more expensive computers had become Wing Commander, I’d played Rescue on Fractalus enough to take some interest in the video.
( Returning to the rescue )

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End of One Road Elsewhere

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:40:53 GMT

After eking along my Tumblr side project of posting computer magazine covers for years, today the cover of the last issue of MacLife in my old subscription emerged from the now altogether depleted queue. I had been wondering for a while whether to just let that account sit, use it for occasional “reblogs” of the posts of others, or go back to a certain number of computer magazines I hadn’t quite managed to include in the lineup the first time around. One extra thought that came to me was that, in covering thirty-five years of computer magazines in less than that time, I’d more or less reached the fiftieth anniversary of the first issue of Creative Computing (even if that can leave me wondering how that magazine might have covered even the second half of the 1980s had it survived its corporate overlord a bit longer). Making “fifty years ago” reblogs would mean a lot of time in between them, though.

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From the (Library e-)Bookshelf: Empire of the Sum

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 21:20:15 GMT

With extra time on my hands, I’ve been getting some reading done. When my thoughts turned to the more purely ebook-focused lending program my city’s library makes available, I browsed through the categories I’d set it to focus on some time ago and had one title catch my eye. Once I’d looked a little further into Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, I was further intrigued by recognising it was by Keith Houston, mentioned in the cover image to be the author of Shady Characters. I’d found a copy of that book in the remaindered and reduced-priced section of a bookstore years ago and been amused by its histories of punctuation marks notable and not so notable; if this newer history of pocket calculators was as interesting it would seem worth reading.
( Summing things up )

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A New Player

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 21:45:35 GMT

Succumbing to temptation to buy one of the Raspberry Pi mini-circuit board computers boxed with useful accessories at the vintage computer expo I visited two weekends ago, I at least had an idea for a specific use for it. The person selling it (alongside much older computing hardware) mentioned a retrogaming multisystem I am aware of, but I was thinking of hooking it up to my TV to play downloaded videos. (That, I suppose, is at the very least as dodgy a thing to admit as a retrogaming system requiring ROM files...) While the latest Macintosh portable I’d been connecting to my TV worked pretty well, I’d wondered about making a more permanent linkup.
( Slight technical difficulties )

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