Galactic Domination

Probably the first computer strategy game to really eat chunks of my time was Empire. Of course, I also liked the building aspects of Sim City. So when I ran across Civilization for the first time, I was hooked.

Civ was the prototypical "4X" turn-based strategy game, where the X's stand for "EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate". Trying various strategies was endless entertainment for me.

The one that really got me hooked, though, was Master of Orion, which added the fun of designing the starships for your fleet for maximum micromanaging nerdalicious fun.

How tickled was I to get it loaded and up and running on my clamshell iBook last week?

Pretty darn tickled, let me tell you.

Let me conquer this galaxy and then I'll give you a retro book report!

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! :)

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?

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...

...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...

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.

PowerBook notes and other stuff.

Found my 500-series AC adapter.

First I tried bringing up the 520. All the bootup sounds were normal, from the chime to the reassuring chugging from the hard drive, but the very obviously active matrix screen went to multicolored snow and then to a sheet of yellow with a couple of blue stripes. This was odd behavior from a passive matrix grayscale screen, at least to my way of thinking. I'm pretty sure that the little tab at the top of the screen bezel wasn't labeled "PowerPC" when it came from the factory, either. I set it aside to crack the case open and solve the mystery another day.

Next was the 520c. It wheezed to life and ran okay, although the screen took a bit to "warm up" (an artifact I also noticed on the old 1400cs.) Ugh. Passive matrix. With the time I spent on the 2400c the other day having spoiled me rotten, I just can't handle the vapor trails left by the mouse pointer on a passive matrix screen anymore. I powered it down and set it aside.

Finally was the 540c. Schweet. Crisp, clear, active matrix display, with every pixel present and accounted for and ready to work. And... Oh! The keyboard! Folks will go on and on about the keyboard on the WallStreet or the 1400 like it's the second coming of the IBM Model M, but I'm here to tell you that in my opinion neither machine has a better keyboard than the Blackbird. Light resistance, a noticeable "tak!" as the key bottoms, ample palmrests... Two very enthusiastic thumbs (and eight other happy fingers) up. It's running System 7.5.3 and has ClarisWorks and Nisus Writer already loaded. I'll be doing some experimenting with getting files off of it for uploading here in the next day or two.

Incidentally, I also accidentally won an auction for a G4-500 tower the other day. I didn't mean to. I felt sure I'd get outbid at the last minute... Thank goodness my monthly stipend check will be in the mailbox this afternoon. The upside, however, is that I can set it on the desk in here in place of VFTP Command Central and use it for blog-work and general surfing.

Hmmm... Both good and bad, I guess.

Regarding the Mac Powerbook 2400c:

Pros: The bitty 800x600 screen and the computer it's attached to is so tiny and cute that I let out a little involuntary "Squee!" every time it does something computerlike. It's a new enough 'Book that it auto-sleeps when closed. The keyboard is a mite cramped, but has a decent feel to it. It's so small and light that it's easy to scrunch up all nice and comfy with some pillows in the corner of the futon and balance it in my lap; you hardly notice the weight of it. I've read many a coffee table book that weighed as much or more. Oh, and it's a lot more sure-footed on the web than I remember it being. The little 180MHz PowerPC runs Explorer 5.1 under System 8 just fine, and...

Cons: Whoops. Yeah, the web... Just what I'm trying to get away from. On the other hand, unlike my iBook, no surgery is required to make this one 'net-incapable; all I have to do is pop out the PC card, et voila! No more webz to distract me. Did I mention the keyboard is cramped? Also, no Page Up/Page Down/Home/End keys, which I constantly use for navigation.

Overall: If only the keyboard was a wee bit bigger and had navigation keys other than the cursor keys. Among laptops, so few are truly laptops. This one gets a B- for my needs, docked only for the interface.

EmpowerBook?

I'm easily distracted.

There. I've admitted it. Gotten it out in the open.

I recently had a genius idea for boosting my writing productivity. I would park accessible extension cords or A/C power supplies for one of my older Mac laptops in a couple of strategic locations (one that could be reached either from the dining room table or the futon in the living room, and one near the bed,) and drag out an older 'Book to use as naught but a writing tool.

My stated excuse for this was exactly what I admitted above: An older Mac would keep me from being distracted by the intarw3b and this would help my productivity. No more being interrupted by a research check at Wikipedia that turns into a two-hour Wikiwander. No more stopping what I'm doing every forty-five minutes for a quick ego check at Sitemeter or Technorati. But that wasn't the whole truth.

If all I wanted was a distraction-free environment, I'd pay five dollars plus twenty bucks shipping on eBay for one of the early Pentium laptops out there that have miraculously escaped the landfill. A bare-bones Win98 installation, delete Solitaire, make sure that it had no wireless card in it, and down the road I'd go. Except that zero distractions was only a part of the equation.

See, I'm not typing business letters here, or entering data into spreadsheets, or whatever; I'm trying to create something, something enjoyable for other people to read, out of whole cloth (or a woolly-headed hangover, whichever.) I know that there are gifted writers out there who can compose beautiful essays with crayon on a napkin in the crowd at a hockey game; Zen masters who can contemplate koans in the middle of a busy lunchtime crowd in Tokyo's Ginza district while being mugged. I'm not one of them. I need that pretty gravel trap where somebody's raked everything into serene spirals and curlicues. I do my best writing on a Mac.

I briefly considered an Alphasmart Neo, recommended highly by much better writers than I, but it doesn't really fit my own peculiar needs. Yes, the infinite battery life means you can take it anywhere and write when you feel like it, but I usually Sit Down To Write. There's a clear demarcation between "This is me writing" and "This is me futzing around and doing normal stuff". The instant boot-up is neat for those who are hit by a thunderbolt of inspiration and need to get it on the screen fast, but I chew stuff in my head for hours, days, or even weeks. That recent anal bleaching comedy bit? I bounced that off the heads of dinner companions almost two weeks before hitting the "publish post" button.

Lastly, this stuff is written on the fly. When it's Time to Write, I sit down at the keyboard and bang out the bit in question live in Blogger's "Create Post" window. It gives me 14 lines of text to play with and I write from first draft and then annoy RSS readers by editing from the finished product. If it's a five paragraph post, I do a lot of scrolling. If I'm writing something for the books, I need even more than fourteen lines, because I'm constantly going back over what I just wrote, so the Alphasmart is out for me, and a word processing program is in.

That word processing program, however, needs to be on something that doesn't annoy the pee out of me. Older Wintel laptops, for the most part, look like a flat black lunchbox on which someone has dumped a tray of Scrabble tiles. We're back to that non-meditative mugging in the Ginza. Mac laptops, on the other hand, don't annoy me by constantly waving "look how ugly I am!" signs in my peripheral vision. I could care less about the rest of the thing, the whole 'Pentium vs. Power PC' and "Win98 vs. OS 7/8/9" nonsense; once you're inside the word-processing program itself, who cares what OS you're using or what CPU is under the hood? You type. Words appear on the screen. Everybody's happy.

Luckily I have several old Mac laptops to choose from, and I've been piddling with them and chatting with Marko on the phone and emailing folks geekier than I to help make up my mind. What I have to choose from, I've divided into three rough categories: Regular old notebook-type notebooks, Mini notebooks, and "Newer" notebooks. Here's the breakdown thus far:

Of the Regular Old Notebook-Type Notebooks, I have three "Blackbird" type machines. The 520, 520c, and 540c are out because they use different A/C power supplies from my other machines, and I don't have any. The 540c has a nice keyboard and an active-matrix LCD. It has PCMCIA slots and I have a PCMCIA WiFi card, but the antique 040 processor and OS mean I won't be tempted to do much web-surfing on it.

I also have two slightly less antique machines in the same category, a 190 and a 1400cs. While both are blessed with adequate keyboards, they also both suffer from a similar problem: dual-scan LCD displays. These bug the heck out of me because if you're not looking at them at exactly the right angle they wash out to nothing, and the mouse pointer leaves trails like you haven't seen since your last Grateful Dead concert. Not as big a deal when parked on a firm, flat table in a well-lit Starbucks, but a dealbreaker for me when perched on my lap curled up in the corner of the futon.

Of the Mini notebooks, there are the two Duos, a 270c and a 280c. Teeny and light and easy to balance on a lap, their total absence of built-in media drives or PCMCIA slots means that I couldn't get distracted even if I wanted to. The 280c is the nicer of the two machines, but the keyboard isn't as positive as I like. I frequently find myself missing keystrokes when typing fast by not bottoming out the key completely, but that could probably be improved with practice.

The nicest of the minis is a 2400c. A pretty little machine with a swoopy case that's all gentle arcs and curved corners, it has a crisp active-matrix display and is a joy to use, except for one thing: It's hard to get much keyboard into a laptop with a footprint slightly smaller than an 8.5x11" sheet of paper. Again, I don't know how much of that is me not being used to the 7/8ths-scale keyboard and how much of it is the nature of the beast.

The "Newer" G3 'books pose a quandary. The iBook SE is an extremely competent machine for being eight years old. It has been my loyal road warrior since fall of '01 and quite a few posts on my blog have come from its keyboard. It's comfortable to type on and has a good screen. And built-in WiFi. How much discipline do I have with teh intarw3bz just a click away? The other is the Wall Street, which has the biggest screen of any of my laptops as well as what is widely considered to be one of the best keyboards for writing of any laptop ever. Of course, this means it's a hoss, both big in size and weighing in at 7.5 pounds (only two pounds less than a Garand, and how'd you like to have one of those on your lap all afternoon?)

So, I've pulled out the 540c, 280c, 1400c, iBook, and Wall Street and I'm going to put them through their paces this week. Anyone with any serious experience using these as writing tools is welcome to chime in the comments section. I figure that even if the whole thing's a bust, I should at least have something to submit to Low End Mac.

Trash 80...

Back in the early '80s, I was involved in a gifted students' program sponsored by a major university. Basically, they let a whole bunch of 7th graders take the SAT with the intention of keeping up with the brainiacs. Those of us who did best on the standardized test were invited to the Big University campus to take part in an awards ceremony. There were fabulous prizes for those who did best on various parts of the SAT, and while I got a softcover copy of A Handbook to Literature, that's not the prize I wanted.

The prize I wanted was what they gave to the real mental giants among us: A Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer. This computer was the granddaddy of both the Alphasmart (with which Marko's so happy,) as well as every laptop on the market today.

Sporting a 32K ROM, among the last pieces of software actually coded by young Bill Gates, the Model 100 was a fantastic laptop computer for its day. Totally silent in operation thanks to its firmware-based operation, it blinked into life immediately, had a built-in 300 baud modem, and could be hooked to a variety of peripherals. With its full-stroke keyboard that is tactilely superior to the Logitech 'board I'm typing this on, plus its 20+ hours of battery life on 4 AA cells, it's little wonder this machine was still popular among writers and journalists long after its day had passed.

When my friend Byron came up to VFTP Command Central this weekend, he brought a Model 100 that had been darkening his attic for the last dozen-and-a-half years or so.

Who knows? Maybe I'll use it to write the next great American novel.

Mock the toilet seat styling if you wish...

...but the old first-generation iBooks had some good stuff goin' on. I love the built-in carry handle, the ports are recessed enough to protect them from dingage without having to resort to flimsy crack-and-fall-off hinged plastic covers, and the unit itself is flat-out the most rugged laptop Apple's ever made. So it's not the most expandable machine in the world. Big deal. Expandability's not something I really look for in laptops, anyway, since I'm not buying a laptop for power gaming.

For what I actually use a laptop for (transporting files, mobile surfing, or writing on the go,) I could be doing a lot worse than that old iBook FireWire/SE.

I wish it had better sound, though. Especially when playing Fallout or watching a movie. All the monkeying around I've done with Wall Streets and Blackbirds lately has me spoiled for the stereo.

As appropriate a place to start as any...

...I suppose.

I'm sitting on the porch.

I'm not typing on my oldest laptop, but it's not my newest, either. It's an old PowerBook G3. A "Wall Street". A laptop computer that could reasonably be picked up for $100 on ebay. Another couple of bucks for a PCMCIA WiFi card, and I'm in business.

In its day, the Wall Street was top of the line. A racehorse, available with a huge active matrix display, a big, comfortable, full-function keyboard, and unbelievable battery life, even if you didn't yank your CD ROM drive and replace it with a second battery. You know what? It still has all that.

What do you need a computer to do?

Watch DVD movies?

Play massively-multiplayer online shoot-em-ups?

Run a gargantuan, bloated, OS full of tons of crap you'll likely never use?

Then an old machine is probably not the answer for you.

On the other hand, if (like most people) all you need is a machine that will allow you to surf your favorite message boards, blog, write, email, and even play the games you loved five, ten, or fifteen years ago, then there are literally thousands upon thousands of computers out there just waiting to be saved from the landfill. Desktops and laptops waiting to be bought for $100, $50, or just taken off someone's hands. Computers that will do everything you need them to do.

The same thing can be said about so many other things in the planned-obsolescence world of consumer electronics. Tetris on a black & white Gameboy or Space Invaders on an Atari 2600 are just as fun now as they were the first time you played them. Heck, a couple of weeks ago, I saw kids lining up at an arcade to put quarters into a Pac Man machine, anxious to play a game that was "old" before they were born...

This is going to be a blog about archaeology, about paleontology, about fossils. Digital fossils. But like some Jurassic Park dream come true, these fossils can be brought back to life.

I hope you enjoy the ride. :)