I totally fell into the internet...

The Obsolete Technology Website: All your favorite old computers, plus many of which you've never before heard, plus scans of original ads, downloadable goodies, and more!

Speaking of handheld games...

I had this one when I was maybe ten or eleven that I traded away from a neighborhood kid. You controlled this missile launcher at the bottom of the screen with a knob that moved it left and right and a button that sent your missile shooting straight up towards the top of the screen.

Enemy aircraft crossed from left to right at different speeds and altitudes. When it died, I cracked it open and was fascinated to see that it was entirely electromechanical: Each flight level of aircraft was a filmstrip that scrolled in a continuous loop. Your missile ran on a vertical track; the "reload" time was how long it took to get the little backlit plastic missile back down to the bottom of the screen.

Given all the monkey motion going on inside that little plastic case, it's a wonder that it survived as long as it did in my hands.

Fossil-ish...

I like supporting local retailers, and there's a little joint called The Game Station that I try to stop by once a month or so, even if it's just to take advantage of their 3-for-$20 DVD wall.

Every time I'm in there, I glance in the case full of handhelds, just to see what's new, since I've been planning on adding to my feeble handheld collection for some time now. (Currently I only have the original Game Boy and the Sega Game Gear.) Yesterday, I noticed that they had a couple of Game Boy Advance units for, like $16 each, and a copy of Eye of the Beholder for $8. Heck, that's almost free! And for an old-school D&D geek like myself, that's a nearly irresistible combination.

Let's see how this thing works...

It's too big to be a space station!

At not quite 40 pounds, the original G3 iMac was a handful to move, but the eMac? Yikes. I think it tips the scales at shade over a desk-busting fifty pounds with its built-in 17" CRT.

The one I snagged off eBay (for a buy-it-now price of $80) is a 1.25GHz G4, circa early 2004. At only five years old, it's stretching the definition of "fossil", but with the demise of the PowerPC Macs, even a big G5 tower more or less rates the term these days.

The eMac, which sold new for about $800 in 2004, just absolutely crushes my G4/500 tower in any objective set of benchmarks, and the G4 sold for $3,500 stripped just four years before the eMac, which is ready to boot out of the box. Never let it be said that Apple doesn't have some schizoid pricing practices.

Ports are abundant, with 2 FireWire and three USB 2.0 ports easily accessible on the right side of the case towards the front, and another USB port on the backside of the keyboard. The keyboard is Apple's attractive white/clear "borderless" unit, where it looks as though the keys are hovering above the lucite slab.

One big area of improvement over the earlier G3 iMac is the speakers: while they don't exactly provide floor-shaking bass, they are leaps and bounds better than the tinny units in the old iMac. This makes the machine excel as a second computer for watching movies and doing simple 'net chores, although it will choke on media-heavy sites unless you cram in more RAM than the 512MB with which mine shipped.

I'll post more detailed impressions after I've played with it some more.

Constant craving...

During a recent long car ride with a friend, we got to talking about old video games, reminiscing about favorites from the previous decade like Privateer, Aces of the Pacific, Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe, Full Throttle, and Gabriel Knight.

Man, I need to set up a 486 running DOS so I can get all those old CDs down from the attic...

Mysteries of science.

Okay, so I'm ripping my CD collection to iTunes via my old iMac DV SE.

The target directory is on my external FireWire disc. On some CDs, things bog down to the point where I'm showing stuff being imported at "0.3x", and it will occasionally even choke completely.

What the heck is causing that?

Neat-o!

Mac-on-a-stick! Or a keychain...

I'll be giving that a try with my SE.

Friden Flexowriter.

It's like a typewriter for writing love notes to HAL.

If computing technology was the animal kingdom, that thing would be wondering in its little fishy brain whether its fins would support it on dry land or not.

Thanks to the magic of FireWire Target Disk Mode...

...I finally got OS 10.4 running on my G4 Sawtooth.

For those who are unfamiliar with Macs, Target Disk Mode (first in SCSI, later in FireWire) is a neat method that allows you to power up a Mac in such a way that you can use it as an external hard drive for another machine. Pretty handy.

In this case, I've had problems with the antediluvian 1X Matsushita DVD on the Sawtooth not being able to read modern DVDs. The situation was to boot the G4 into Target Disk Mode and hook it by FireWire cable to the iMac, which saw it as a local drive. Then I just ran the install for Tiger normally.

It's a beautiful day...

...and I need to write my LEM column.

Also, I need to play with old Macs to get my writing mojo going. I can't decide whether to continue tinkering with the 7100 or to drag down a few of the others I haven't yet booted up and see if they're working and what's on them. There's a Quadra 610 and a Centris 650 that haven't been booted yet; may as well do it while I have the monitor, keyboard, and mouse all down here ready and waiting.

Desperate.

I've got productivity software out the yinyang for old Macs and all the communications widgets I can handle, but I'm desperate to find some games that will work on 680x0 machines and/or early PPC Macs.

Got any? Let's make a deal: tamslick A T aol D O T com.

Punked out.

So I unhooked the TAM from where it's been sitting in the corner of the dining room and parked it away. I schlepped a 14" Apple monitor, and an old keyboard and mouse down from the attic. I went back upstairs, dug out the massive Quadra 950, dragged it to the head of the stairs, and...

...punked out.

I realized that this beast didn't have a CD-ROM drive. I had never booted it up, and had no clue what OS was already on it. I have no OS floppies well, except for system 6.0.7 for my SE; fat lot of good that does me if something's pooched. There's a SCSI external CD burner around here someplace, but hey, look! A Power Macintosh 7100/66! It has a CD drive! And I've played with plenty of Power Macs lately. I'll just work up to tackling the '040 tower gradually by getting my feet wet with a much more familiar old Mac.

I turned the 7100 on for the first time and it chimed to life without a hiccup. It sported 40MB of RAM and (whoah!) a brace of 1.5GB hard drives. That's pretty sexy specs for 1994; I think at the time I was using a 486DX/66 with... 8? 16? MB of memory and a 250MB HDD and there wasn't a game it wouldn't run.

The 7100 was running OS 8.0; I immediately threw in my 8.6 upgrade CD, and while it was crunching away, I went to find my 9.1 CD.

Which was in my TAM. Which was all powered down. Thank $DEITY for paperclips...

Unfortunately, to upgrade from 8.6 to 9.1, you have to boot from the CD, which this 7100 resolutely refuses to do, no matter how I prod it. More later...

Monday's child will boot up in a tower case...

Tomorrow's project: Boot up either the Quadra 900 or Quadra 950 tower, and see if I can get it running OS 8.

Lowered Expectations...

Once something becomes a "mature technology", you begin to take it for granted.

When silicon chips and LCD displays became cheap and common enough, there was no longer any really burning need to spend the money on a Seiko or Casio digital watch if all you needed to know was what time it was; the fifty cent watch from a gumball machine could do that.

Some technologies are more mature than others.

Repeat after me: I will not buy a cheap-ass "powered USB hub".

&^*$@%^&&**!!!!!

Drinking from the fire hose.

Moving up here, my CD collection filled two big cardboard boxes slightly larger than longneck beer cases.

The iMac has a 13GB internal hard drive.

To quote Roy Scheider: "You're gonna need a bigger disk."

"Eat up Martha"

I met up with TD at the NRA convention this past weekend. He'd been hinting that he had a totally awesome piece of swag for me that would surely make a good subject for a Digital Fossils column. He wasn't kidding:



Bonus supergeek points for getting the reference in the post title...

State of the Experiment Address.

I'm typing this on my iBook, sitting on the front porch. For the last three weeks or so, I've been doing all my computing on Macs, none newer than eight years old. Not being much of a power gamer any more, this is all blogging, web surfing, writing, emailing, iPodding, and what-have-you. Here's how it's going:

The iBook, a G3/466 Firewire machine, was no great stretch. It's been my de facto portable all along. It's running the latest version of Panther, and has been for about a year. With my recent Firefox woes, I've started using Safari on it and will download Camino as soon as I get around to it. It connects to the network with its internal AirPort card.

My G3/250 WallStreet is in use as a "bridge" machine, running OS 9.2. It stays more-or-less permanently plugged-in in a corner of the living room with a Farallon WiFi PCMCIA card and an AppleTalk dongle hanging off it. Should I do some writing on one of my "lap savers", a 2400c or a Duo 280c, I'll AppleTalk the file to the WallStreet and email it to myself.

A G4/500 Sawtooth tower is my main machine. Browsing the web with Camino, it's also using Panther because the old Matshita LP-2 DVD drive won't read my Tiger install. Because it's still on Panther, and with its two USB ports clogged by the Logitech mouse and keyboard, it provides a job for the last computer.

Sitting next to the Sawtooth on the desk is a slot-loading G3/400 iMac DV SE. I have Tiger up and running on it. Thanks to the magic of a powered USB hub, it has a Hawking USB WiFi connection, as well as serving as the dock for my iPod Nano and my card reader for the Compact Flash cards from my Nikon Coolpix digital camera. Using the iMac as basically a media server lets me rip CDs or download Firefly episodes without tying up the Sawtooth. As the internal drive fills up, I'll just go ahead and get an external FireWire drive for all the media crap. Since both the iBook and the G4 tower are (barely) just new enough to have FireWire ports, this will pay bonus dividends down the road.

Am I missing my trusty P4/2.4 yet? Nope. Not really. So far, these old machines are doing everything I need them to do. What I can't get over is the fact that I have a very capable, complet, four-computer wireless network, with two laptops and two desktops that could be had off eBay for much less than $1,000. Neat! :)

Browser woes fixed. I think.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I've been having nothing but trouble with the latest release of Firefox 2 running on Panther (10.3.9).

After a frustrating run with Safari, I've downloaded Camino. It seems to be doing everything I need: To wit, acting like an older version of Firefox that doesn't lock up constantly.

With it doing so swimmingly on the G4, I'm going to download it to the iBook next.

That was weird.

Keeping ancient computers around and actually using them means you get to see some pretty weird stuff from time to time. Sometimes you even get to see pretty weird stuff when you're not using them.

I keep a few old PowerBooks stacked atop the bookshelves in the living room where I can grab one on my way out the front door to do some writing on the porch. As I was walking through the room yesterday morning, I heard this weird clicking buzz coming from atop the bookshelf.

Oh, crap! I had just finished next week's column for Low End Mac on the 2400 the night before, and had left the computer sleeping, intending to AppleTalk it over to the WallStreet and polish it up before emailing it in. Could the snoozing Comet have suddenly decided to lunch its hard disk or something?

I snatched the 2400c from the top of the stack, but its sleep light just blinked at me silently. The noise wasn't coming from it. Setting the Comet on the futon, I grabbed the next 'Book off the stack, the Duo 280c. It, too was inert. The noise was coming from the bottom laptop in the stack, the 1400cs. Scooping it up, it became apparent that the strange buzzing sound was emanating from its speaker. This was odd, because the battery was deader than Elvis.

Opening the lid and poking the on/off key got me nothing. I plugged in an AC power supply and hooked up the computer and the noise stopped. I still got no response from the power key, and when I unplugged the AC adaptor, the noise resumed. Ejecting the battery caused the buzz to cease again, and when I went upstairs and fetched another (also dead) battery and inserted it, the noise didn't return.

I hooked up the AC and used the power reset switch on the back of the notebook, and it powered up normally. I shut it down and it stayed silent. The only abnormality I could detect with the battery that had been in it when it was making the noise is that the righthand-most of the four battery terminals was bent slightly outward from the other three.

Who knows what caused the speaker to suddenly go berserk, especially when the battery was run down so flat?

See, this is how it's supposed to work.

I'd been running OS 10.2.8 on the G4 tower.

Now, I like the idea behind OS X, don't get me wrong, but the early implementations left something to be desired. All the swoopy graphics touches that make the interface "pretty" are worthless if they make the machine limp along like an arthritic slug. I had hope, however.

As long as Jaguar was the only game in town, I kept my iBook (a G3/466 with 192 megs of RAM) running OS 9. It just wasn't worth staring at the spinning beachball of frustration every time I tried to do something. When the chance came to upgrade the clamshell to Panther, I jumped at it, and it's been running 10.3.9 just fine since.

That's what gave me hope: I knew that there was no reason that a G3 iBook should be faster than a G4/500 tower with half a gig of RAM, save for the fact that Jaguar is one bog-slow OS. When the mailman came yesterday, he probably wondered why I almost knocked him over getting the padded envelope out of his hands. I had the first Panther install disk in the G4 almost before the front door slammed.

It's like a whole new machine.

Disposable.

I wrote my last column using my PowerBook Duo 280c, a computer that is fourteen years old. Although the comparison isn't exact, it's roughly the equivalent of a 486-era notebook. Mac laptops just seem to dodge the landfill long after they are completely technically obsolete.

The idea inspired me to go crawling eBay to see if I could find an equivalent DOS-powered machine. When I moved, I realized that I had a slew of games still on 3.5" (and even 5.25"!) floppies, as well as plenty of old MS-DOS install disks. Rather than go through the workarounds required to get them to run on my present-day XP box, it'd be nice to have a machine on which they could run in their native environment, yet is easy to stow away when I'm done playing.

Unfortunately, on eBay you just go to "Vintage Apple" to find the old Mac you want, but you have to go nose through "Vintage Computing" for a DOS box. Do you know how long scrolling through those listings takes when you have to stop and look at every Timex Sinclair and Mattel Aquarius ("NEW IN BOX!!!1!!")?

Sadly, the old DOS laptop market is nowhere near as robust. To be fair, neither were most old DOS laptops. With the exception of a few name brands like Toshiba, most PC laptops of the era were pretty flimsily constructed, uninspiring affairs. I wonder what the comparative ratios are between keepers and landfill fodder for both DOS laptops and Mac PowerBooks?

If I had a time machine...

I was messing around trying to get the TAM to talk to the 2400c when it occurred to me that if I had that setup back in late '97, I would have been big pimpin': Apple's super-snob appeal desktop machine and the flavor-of-the-month subnotebook were both serious computing status symbols when they were new, and would have gone together like peaches and cream. Free-range peaches and organically grown cream, of course. From some pretentious yuppie grocery store with carpeted aisles.

This has given me an idea for a post, or a column, or something...

UPDATE: Looking at this more closely, the Macs I'm using during my experiment (a G4 "Sawtooth", a graphite iMac DV SE, and a key lime iBook SE) would have been a pretty swoopy computing suite, circa late 2000. It might be neat to do a series of experiments; go "back in time" and try using a comparable suite from 1992 (Quadra 950/LCII/Duo 270c) or 1994 (Power Mac 7100/Performa 636CD/PowerBook 540c), and see how it feels.

Poverty sucks.

Want.

When you have a 270c and a 280c, a full dock would be the ultimate accessory. Sigh. There will be others...

This is me, tearing my hair out...

Remember the other day, when I was going on and on about how easy my little AppleTalk experiment was? Yeah, well, that was then, and this is now.

How come an ancient Color Classic, circa 1993 and running an OS that generated its zeros and ones by banging small rocks together, fired up and chattered back and forth with my much more recent PowerBook 2400 without a hitch, but when my Twentieth Anniversary Mac, a nearly contemporaneous machine, was asked to do likewise I got bupkis? I've tried both the 2400 and the G3 WallStreet and the TAM refuses to divulge its existence to the network through either the modem or printer ports.

Work proceeds apace on figuring out just exactly why. I'm all ears if anyone has any ideas on where to look.

Oh for the glorious days of big hair, skinny ties, teen movies...

...and really lousy keyboards.

(H/T to Dustbury.)

...and a fossil comes to life.

I'm typing this paragraph in MS Word 5.1 on a Mac Color Classic as part of an experiment. If all goes well, this fairly unskilled Mac user is going to use her opposable thumbs, her wits, and a set of AppleTalk dongles to transfer the file to a PowerBook 2400c. Wish me luck...

And now we’re on a PowerBook 2400c running System 8.6, typing in Word:2001. I simply hooked the dongles to the respective machines, powered up the ancient ‘030 Color Classic running System 7.5.3, opened Chooser on the PowerPC 2400, turned on AppleTalk, and BAM! There was the Color Classic’s hard disk, all ready to be browsed. Now to re-save it with new edits as a .rtf file, open Internet Explorer, and use gmail to mail it to myself as an extension via the PowerBook’s Farallon WiFi card…

Abracadabra! Now we're on the desktop of a G4 Sawtooth running OS 10.2.8, using TextEdit to view the .rtf file that was begun on a fifteen year old Color Classic that doesn't even have enough hard disk space to install the operating system that is currently being used to manipulate the file. Even better, the whole process of transferring the file was done by a user who had never used AppleTalk until... oh... thirty minutes ago or so, and who had time to eat dinner during the whole process (A nice tossed salad with a delicious Wasabi Dijon dressing) and even clean up the dinner dishes.

No muss. No fuss. A file handed across three machines with completely different generations of operating systems and CPUs, with less drama than it takes to dub a DVD. Now to cut and paste into Blogger's edit window...

Digging in the fossil beds...

A care package from New Hampshire arrived the other day. Among other goodies, it contained a couple of AppleTalk dongles.

I'm thinking about dredging up one of my older all-in-one Macs, perhaps the Color Classic or the 20th Anniversary, and seeing how difficult it is to move a file between one of them and a newer machine without cheating and using my SCSI CD burner...

Mac 4 cheap.

Reader Casey writes

Hey Tam,

I read your other blogs, and just saw this one. How easy(and cheap) is it to convert from Win to Mac? I currently use XP on a box cobbled together from hand me down parts from friends who have money for "upgrades" .

I've been thinking about experimenting with Macs, something portable/laptopish, but don't want to invest a lot of money for something I may not go any further with.

Any recommendations(and expected prices) for something that would help give me a feel for Macs without breaking the bank? I have no problem with used or refurbished equipment.

...and I thought it rated a post of its own in response. I know he asked specifically about portables, but I'll touch on desktops, too, as we're in a fairly propitious time for scoring good deals on those.

For both desktops and laptops, Macs newest OS release ("Leopard", or 10.5) has effectively orphaned a slew of machines that have been in use for years. Although individual Mac fans will perform heroic work-arounds and hacks to let them install Leopard on systems on which it was never intended to run, the used market is currently seeing a slew of late G3 and early G4 machines being dumped for a song. I have seen older iMacs sold by the flat (six or seven computers) on eBay for less than you would pay for even a minimal new computer.

As far as notebooks go, the clamshell (or "toilet seat") iBooks are bottoming out in the depreciation curve. Even late models are bringing less than $200 for the most part. Some of these later iBooks have DVD players and FireWire ports. I still use one as my main notebook; it has built-in WiFi and makes a great traveling computer.

For all-in-one desktops, iMacs are getting stupid cheap. As the last schools using them are forced to upgrade, they can be snagged for next to nothing from resellers. Mine is an early slot-loading model with DVD and a 400MHz G3 and came with a (mismatched) keyboard and mouse for a bit under $100.

The biggest effect lately has been that all the early Power Mac G4 towers that have been used as servers and production machines lo these many years are having their hard drive pulled or wiped and being shipped off to resellers. I've got a G4/500 tower here with half a gig of RAM and DVD drive and a Zip drive and the works; I won it for seventy-four dollars and some-odd cents, shipping included. It had a wiped 27GB hard disk and came with nothing but a power cord. That's okay, though, because it hooked right up to my existing monitor and USB keyboard and mouse. All I had to do was disconnect my Pentium 4 box and plug the Mac right into the exact same cables. It didn't even need a driver installed to make use of the eleventy-jillion key Logitech keyboard.

So, yes, if you want to get into just playing around with Macs to see if you like them, now's a good time to score an old one cheap. Just don't plan on doing a lot of gaming with it, unless you like older games.

T-t-t-t-too much time on his hands...

'80s buff/supergeek hand-builds Apple IIGS laptop.

Fear his 1337 skillz.

The experiment has started...

Maybe it marks me as getting old, but it feels really weird to call a G4 tower a "fossil". I'm just sayin'.

And as far as "computing on the cheap" goes, I'm pretty happy with picking up a G4/500 with half a gig of RAM, a Combo Drive, and a Zip drive for just under $75, shipping included...

Things I need to find...

...to make me happy.

I mean real, attainable things, not "peace in the Middle East" or "a pony".

1) My G3 WallStreet needs a PRAM battery. And a battery battery. This is just a matter of remembering I need a battery at the same time as having some walking-around money.

2) I need to install OS X on my iMac so that my USB wireless dongle will work headache-free. And I need to install OS X on my new G4 so that it will work, because it shipped with nothing but zeroes on the hard drive, and they function better when you sprinkle a few ones in there, too.

3) No more computer toys until I get a flat panel monitor. This old Mitsubishi CRT has been in use for some five or six years straight and is starting to give an occasional disturbing flicker. This flicker is what we in the hobby refer to as a "hint", and what laypeople refer to as a "bad omen".

Feeling experimental.

I spent the afternoon yesterday typing away on my iBook on the front porch, amazed at how easily this "obsolete" machine handled my day-to-day tasks. That's when I got the idea for the experiment...

I know that diehard Mac fans who believe that the Wintel universe is some arid wasteland of malware and crashes are going to find this hard to believe, but my P4 XP box has been running for about five years straight now, only getting rebooted about once every month or so whether it needs it or not. No problems with virii or strings of inexplicable crashes. But it has got to be tired; it just has to be. Plus, it's nothing but a box full of game-shaped distraction at this point.

So as soon as I get this G4 tower up and running, it's going up on the desk to be my main desktop for a while. Call it 30 days. I'll also power down this old Mitsubishi 17" CRT and free up some desk real estate by borrowing a 14" flat panel from my roomie. I'll set up my iMac DV SE slot loader as well. Thirty days of doing everything I need to do on computers on eight year old Macs, the most expensive of which could be picked up for right around $100 on eBay. It'll be fun. I hope.

Neat-o.

I don't often wax fangirl-ish about computer hardware...

All my PC's, from that first XT to the newest P4, have borne the mark of the inveterate tinkerer: The cases were held shut not with the factory Phillips head screws, but rather with large knurled aluminum or plastic thumbscrews. I've swapped out or installed enough expansion cards to consider myself a fairly dab hand at the process.

I just installed an AirPort card in my G4 "Sawtooth". Wow! Lift one latch and the whole side of the case, motherboard and all, swings down and displays the machine's guts. In pops the card, raise the side and latch it again and hey, presto! All done. This thing is just all ate up with clever industrial design touches, from the one-latch case opening to the built-in carry handles. I'm liking this a lot.