Too Late to the Party

Return with me to the distant past of...oh, let's call it 2005 or so. Cell phones are everywhere, but not yet universal. While a significant percentage of high school students have their own mobile, a cell phone is still a "going off to college" thing, as often as not.

Facebook and YouTube are in their larval states. AOL Instant Messenger is still extremely popular. Various phones were integrating limited browser functions, but with mobile phones like the RAZR, texting was still the primary form of communication.

It was into this environment that Sony, a company known for being willing to try weird experiments, released a device called the "mylo COM-1"in September of 2006. The name stood for MY Life Online, and it was a little miniature tablet thingie with a slide-out keyboard. It could run a web browser and do email anywhere there was a wifi signal.

Thing is, despite being targeted largely at teens who didn't have cell phones, it had a sort of jellybean Playskool "My First Toy Handheld" look about it and cost $350 at launch. That was a lot of clams for something that looked like a kiddie toy and had a crude 2.4" 320x240 pixel display.

So less than a year and a half later, in January of 2008, Sony dropped the "mylo COM-2" on the market. The COM-2 was slicker and more adult-looking, sharing its form factor with the PlayStation Portable.

It had a tack-sharp 3" 640x480 LCD that added touchscreen functionality, and a tethered stylus was included, attached to the neoprene carrying sleeve. They keyboard was improved, and was now backlit. There were menu shortcuts for the most popular communications apps of the day...

The browser now supported Flash for playing YouTube videos and online games. There was a 1.3MP camera on the backside with a convex mirror next to the lens for taking selfies. The desktop could be configured with your most-used apps.

It had its own built-in music and video players, and a photo album. It had a feed reader and built-in games. It could transmit music and pictures to other nearby mylos. 

It was really a slick little device...

Thing is, between the launch of the COM-1 and COM-2, it was almost instantly rendered obsolete by the announcement of the iPhone, which could do all of this stuff and then some. Plus, you know, you could use the Apple device to make phone calls.

The COM-2, launched in January for $299 (yes, all that added capability over the COM-1 came with a fifty dollar price cut; Sony could see the writing on the wall) and by the 2008 holiday season was being fire-saled for $199. Slow sales caused it to be quietly discontinued by the end of the following year.

Smartphones and tablets killed a lot of categories: They decimated handheld GPS's and cheap cameras and palmtop computers; they cut deeply into the sales of calculators and handheld games and MP3 players. The one thing they killed that almost nobody remembers is the "smart not-phone", since it was only around for a year or so and sank without a ripple.

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At the Controls

Compared to a modern digicam in the same price bracket, the controls on the Mavica FD88 are fairly spartan...

Just barely visible on the left side of the camera is a two-position up/down slider switch to set focus to Auto or Manual. In manual mode, focus is adjusted by spinning a ridged chrome metal ring around the lens that's not actually physically coupled to anything; it's just a rotary electronic input.

There are switches on the left side of the back panel there for turning the LCD illumination on or off, adjusting display brightness, and playback volume for the camera's beeps and video playback. Arranged vertically down the right-hand side are the zoom control (left for wide, right for tele), the power button with its bright green safety tab, and the eject button for the diskette. Fortunately disk ejection is manual so that even if the battery goes toes up, you can still pop the disc out and get your files to a computer via sneakernet.

The cluster of controls on the bottom center and left include a slider that controls whether the camera records stills, video, or is in playback mode. The "display" button toggles through the various settings on the viewscreen, depending on how much info you want cluttering the margins while you're trying to shoot.

The flash control toggles through On, Off, and Auto, while "Program" presets the exposure to favor various settings, or it can be left in the default Auto.

The "Picture Effect" button gave various JPEG adjustments. There was a B&W setting as well as a Negative one, the latter reversing the colors, as you'd expect.

There was also Sepia:

...and Solarize:

The round D-pad looking button was toggled upward to enter the camera's menu system on the screen and then for navigating around inside the menus.

There were toggles for the self-timer and macro modes (macro could focus surprisingly close on these, down to a couple inches).

Then there was the File submenu...

In there you had the disc tool for formatting or copying, the image size submenu for selecting resolution, the quality submenu to toggle between Fine and Normal JPEG compression, and "Rec Mode". The latter was interesting because it could be toggled between NORMAL, which just took a picture; VOICE, which let you record a short audio note with each still photo; and EMAIL, which saved a compressed 320x240 thumbnail along with each JPEG that was suitable for attaching to emails in the days of limited bandwidth.

Then there was the Camera submenu...

Digital Zoom let you toggle that feature off, which you should if you don't want to accidentally junk your resolution every time you try to take a long telephoto shot. White Balance lets you preselect for certain lighting conditions, although even back in '99 the Auto setting worked surprisingly well. Flash Level is what it sounds like, and Exposure gives you plus or minus 1.5EV of exposure compensation in .5EV increments.

I used the FD88 to shoot some of the first gun pictures I ever put on internet forums twenty years ago.

Playing with it today is a big nostalgia kick!

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Origin Stories

While it's one of the largest camera companies these days, Sony was not traditionally a camera company. It wasn't until the digital era that they put their corporate toe in photographic waters.

A clue to the origins of their photographic endeavors can be found in the name of this camera. See, "Mavica" isn't one of those made-up focus group words, but rather a portmanteau of "MAgnetic VIdeo CAmera".

Sony had long been a provider of consumer- and professional-grade video cameras and as far back as the 1980s had dabbled with making stills cameras that would store pictures that were essentially a single frame of analog video signal on a specialized 2" Video Floppy magnetic disc.

The breakout for them was the Digital Mavica line of the late '90s, starting with the Digital Mavica MVC-FD5, which stored images as digital jpeg files on a conventional 3.5" 1.44MB floppy.

This was a huge success in the US, hitting the market just as broadband internet access was growing by leaps and bounds. Instead of needing specialized cables or a card reader, you could snap a picture of your car or your cat or your gun or your boat or your garden and upload it to the internet for all your friends on your hobby forum to gawp at.

Real Estate agents loved the things. You could snap pics of a listing and get them onto the 'net without having to stop by a photo lab or scan anything. They were found in medical and dentistry offices, schools, cop cars, and anyplace else people needed to get pictures on the net quickly.

The very thing that made them popular, however, contained the seeds of their downfall.

Storage on a floppy was limited and slow. In 1024x768 resolution with image quality set to FINE, a disc would only hold six to eight shots, even fewer in 1280x960.

At the same time, the iMac and iBook were surging in popularity; suddenly not every computer had a 3.5" floppy disc, which had been a staple feature of desktop computing for nearly a decade. Sony, a company never afraid to throw a bunch of stuff on the wall to see what stuck, briefly dabbled with a Mavica line that wrote to a mini optical CD-RW disc (wouldn't that be an "Opvica" rather than a "Mavica"? Anyway...)

The writing was on the wall for the Mavica line by 2001. They went from being seemingly everywhere to being quaint antiquities that recorded images on a mysterious object shaped like a "SAVE" icon in a surprisingly few years. Popping a disc out of a Mavica in public today will get even more baffled looks than removing a roll of film.

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Optical Zoom, Digital Zoom

Leaving a friend's house the other day, he spotted a bald eagle perched in the top of a tree across the street.

Using the Wide/Tele rocker on the Mavica, I ran it out to the full optical zoom. You have to be careful when doing this because the indicator will slide across the W->T scale and pause only briefly at the hash mark that indicates you've run out of optical zoom and the camera is going to start applying "digital zoom", i.e. cropping, to get out to its full claimed 16X zoom range.

The lens on the FD88 is a 4.75-38mm f/2.8-3 zoom which, given the 7.21x crop factor of the tiny 1/3" sensor, has a focal length equivalent to a 34-270mm lens on a full-frame sensor. Also, the Mavica can only shoot in its base ISO of 100, although given how noisy it would be at higher ISOs, that's probably not a problem.

Anyhow, here we are using the maximum optical zoom to try and get a picture of the eagle, at full resolution on the "Fine" setting:

I also had the Nikon D800 with me. It was an overcast day and I'd had the ISO set at 400, and the lens I had on the camera was Nikon's trusty 24-120mm f/4 VR, which is a good lens but 120mm isn't a lot of reach on a full-frame sensor.

Here's what the shot looked like with the D800:

Thing is, the D800's 36MP sensor, which has over 27 times the photosites and nearly fifty times the physical area of the one on the elderly Sony, allows one to crop very aggressively if necessary...

Space and Resolution

I spent some time exploring the different resolutions on the Mavica FD88 the other day. Basically you have three different resolutions in which you can record jpegs, and you also have the choice of recording in either "Fine" or "Normal" quality, which controls the compression on the jpeg.

The Mavica FD88 could shoot in 640x480 "Standard" which was a pretty aggressively compressed jpeg, to fit the most pictures possible on a 3.5" 1.44MB disc. This image is only 66kb. Of course in 1999, there was a good chance these photos would need to be transmitted over a 56k dialup connection.

This shot was at 1024x768 resolution, also "standard" compression. This was 130kb, so you could fit a lot fewer of them on a floppy. This was also the most common monitor resolution at the time, so if you smeared this across a 17" CRT screen, compression artifacts would be getting noticeable.

A max resolution 1.3 megapixel image, 1280x960 pixels, shot in "Fine" quality, took up 320kb on a 1.44MB floppy.

Depending on how busy the images were, you could only get three to five of these max resolution Fine quality jpegs on a disc.

Still, with images increasingly being viewed on handheld screens, this 1999 camera picture has more resolution than can be fully displayed on a 2012 Samsung Galaxy S III.

This last image, an 8688x5792 pixel jpeg, was shot with a Canon EOS 5DS. 

Funnily enough, despite being so large that you would need nine or ten 3.5" floppies to hold it all...this picture file is bigger than an entire Windows 3.11 install...it doesn't hold up to pixel-peeping very well.

As an experiment I was using an old EF 28-135mm IS USM lens that came out in 1998. It works fine on older digital cameras and is plenty for film, but just isn't very sharp anywhere when you zoom in on a fifty megapixel image. 

Add in the compression of viewing it online on a screen with a fraction of its native resolution, and that's a lotta wasted data. (The RAW file is 57.3MB before processing in Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw. That's bigger than an uncompressed Win95 install.)

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Lungfish: Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro

It seems oddly appropriate to kick off some intermittent posting on this dusty blog with a digital fossil that was not very fossilized when I started here back in '07. Heck, in 2007, the Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro was barely dead; it didn't exit the catalog until the end of 2003, replaced by the S3 Pro.

Fuji was an early player in the digital photography world. In fact, when legendary German camera brand Leica decided to dip their toe in the consumer digital market, their first offerings were re-skinned Fujifilm digital cams.

During those early years, digital cameras were mostly novelty toys and the few professional digital cameras for use by photojournalists and such were collaborations between Kodak and film camera makers like Nikon and Canon, grafting a digital sensor made by the former onto a conventional film camera body made by the latter.

That early era of Frankenstein DSLRs would seem to have come to an end with Nikon and Canon launching their own entirely in-house offerings in 1999-2001, but there was one holdout.

See, Fujifilm was eager to get in on this DSLR action, and they had some interesting sensor technology to offer the market, but they didn't have a modern autofocus single lens reflex camera , having essentially bailed on the 35mm SLR market in the Eighties. So Fuji turned to a deal with Nikon, who would supply the actual camera bits, onto which Fuji would graft the digital sensor and hardware to make it work.

Fuji had worked with Nikon before, producing sensors for the company's early "E-series" DSLRs. Further, using Nikon hardware for their own DSLR launch would let Fuji buyers immediately piggyback off the vast Nikon F-mount lens library, so it seemed a win-win.

The initial offering from this pairing was the FinePix S1 Pro, which was built on a Nikon N60 body and had two marketing problems: First, asking people to shell out $3500 for a DSLR built on the chassis of a $300 entry-level film SLR is kind of a big ask. Second, Fuji marketing stumbled badly in the description of the sensor.

Fuji's SuperCCD sensor had 3.1 million photodiodes, but rather than arranging them horizontally & vertically, they were in diagonal rows and the resulting image was interpolated into a 6.2 megapixel image...so Fuji marketed the S1 as a 6.2MP camera. At the time, the $3,000 Canon D30 had a 3.1MP sensor and the $5,500 Nikon D1 had 2.7, so this was a big deal, at least until everyone started complaining about the actual number of photodiodes.

At any rate, the S1 Pro was succeeded in 2002 by the S2 Pro which was an upgrade in several ways. Importantly, it used the much more high-end Nikon N80 as the base camera, which made it feel a lot less chintzy and offered much-improved capabilities over the downmarket N60. Second, the new iteration of the SuperCCD had a 6.1MP sensor that, using the same interpolation method, turned out images of a jaw-dropping (for the time) 12MP resolution.

While the S2 was a modest success and was itself succeeded by a couple more iterations of Nikon-based cameras with Fuji sensors, Fuji eventually abandoned the DSLR market in '09 to concentrate on its mirrorless offerings.

A friend noticed this S2 Pro in a pawn shop, where it had languished for a while with a $50 price tag before moving to the bargain table, where it was scooped up along with several old video game carts and one of the old swivel-lens Nikon Coolpix cameras, the whole lot going for a Jackson. Not having much in the way of Nikon glass and knowing my love for weird old cameras, he passed the S2 Pro along.

It's an interesting artifact of its era. Its Frankenstein nature becomes apparent in that the Nikon camera part still runs on the same 2 CR123 batteries as a regular N80, but there's also a pull-out tray for four AA cells to power the grafted-on Fuji digital bits.

There are two card slots, but unlike modern systems, you have to decide in the menu whether you want to record to the SmartMedia or the CF card bay. It won't record to both simultaneously.

SmartMedia is a pretty well dead format, kept alive mostly because apparently some keyboards (the musical instrument, not the input device) use them. The largest SmartMedia cards only ran to 128MB, and I found a new-old-stock Fuji 32MB one on Amazon. Shooting in 12-bit CCD RAW, the 32MB card will hold precisely two images. Fortunately I have plenty of smallish CF cards formatted in FAT16 lying around from the D1x.

The top plate, at first glance, is straight-up Nikon N80. The difference is the Mode Dial, which has been replaced with one that adds the self-explanatory "ISO", whereby you adjust sensitivity by twiddling the Command Dial with the Mode Dial in this position, and the more cryptic "CSM", which puts you in the FinePix's Custom Settings Menu.

On the back of the camera is a small monochrome LCD for toggling through basic camera operations, as well as displaying ISO and resolution. Below that is a 1.8" color LCD for reviewing photos and the camera's basic setup menus: time & date, card formatting, CF/SmartMedia, color space, resolution, and suchlike.

One last feature that seems odd compared to modern DSLRs is the settings menu for the rear display. After every photo you can either have it off; set it to "postview", which is what we would call "preview" nowadays, showing the image you just took; set it to "preview", where it will display the image you just took and not actually record it until you press the F2 button; and "preview + histogram", which is what it sounds like.

I was stumped at first because it wasn't recording the pictures I had taken. This was because I had the camera set to "preview" using my current understanding of the term. Oops.

Once I got it figured out, though, I was pretty happy with the performance of the old SuperCCD...

Beep.

Beep boop.

I bow to the master.

I've got a few older handheld video games: A Gameboy and a Game Gear and a Game Boy Advance, but this is the best shrine to old handhelds I've seen. And they're all mounted with velcro so he can take them down and play them.

Now I'm all nostalgic for my old Tomy Hit & Missile...

eMac gripe.

I've been using my eMac as my media server-cum-iPod docking station for about a year and a half, and it serves its purpose just fine, but I do have one serious gripe: That keyboard blows goats.

Seriously, could it possibly have less tactile feedback? Perhaps if they used stale marshmallows under the keys instead of fresh ones...

The only reason I haven't replaced it with the old keyboard from the iMac is that it's footprint is so much smaller, which is an important consideration in a keyboard that gets used maybe once a week. That and it's... well, prettier and cooler-looking, and the white keyboard matches the eMac. How Mac-dorky is that?

One thing that I am impressed with, however, is how useful it still is for web surfing; for a six-year-old machine, it's still capable of most everything short of gaming or video-heavy applications.

Handhelds again...

The experiment with the Gameboy Advance was annoying.

The games I tried were remarkably sophisticated for a handheld console, considering that my previous handheld experiences had been limited to the Game Boy and Sega Game Gear. Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed retained at least the flavor of the PC version, and Eye of the Beholder was pretty much identical to the classic SSI PC games; unsurprising considering that the Game Boy Advance probably had roughly the same wheaties as the 286 on which I first experienced the classic "Gold Box" AD&D computer games.

The fatal flaw of the GBA was the unlit LCD screen, which really cut down on the places where I could really enjoy it. It quickly began gathering dust...

Stymied.

The aforementioned Apple IIc has just sat forlornly in its case since it arrived on my doorstep. Last night it occurred to me that I hadn't inspected the flat, zippered compartment on the case's lid...

Hey! 5.25" floppies! With the names of what appear to be games on them!

Today I worked up my mojo to pull the little monitor up from the basement and set the machine up, only to find that I was short a video cable. Now, given who my roomie is, I know there have got to be a squillion cables lying about the house, but I'm going to have to wait 'til she gets home to find one.

Bummer.

It's calling to me.

I have an Apple IIc, complete with the bitty little green screen Apple monitor, that I accidentally won in an eBay auction.

Lately I've had this bad urge to hit the web and see if I could scare up some games for it. It'd be neat to play Castle Wolfenstein, Wizardry, or F-15 Strike Eagle in the old school original.

Back on Mac.

Well, my old P4 tower puked its power supply last night, and that meant cranking up the eMac.

It's only a year younger than the wintel box, and it was a stripper when it was new, compared to the P4, whose video card alone cost nearly a quarter of the eMac's purchase price.

Still, I used the G4/500 "Sawtooth" tower for the better part of a year, and this thing is a ton better than it. We'll see how long it takes me to cry "uncle" and repair or replace the PC.

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.

Stepping off the technology train.

My first real PC was an XT I bought back in 1990. I was able to use my beau's 386DX for a bit, and so I didn't buy my next one until 1994, a 486DX/66. It was followed by a Pentium 133 in '96, a PII 233 in '98, and an 800MHz Celeron in 2000. In early 2003, I walked into a retailer and bought the baddest machine they had in stock, a 2.4GHz P4, and the best sound and video cards I could get.

Five years later, with the machine running pretty much the whole time except for the occasional reboot, that machine is still in use as my primary computer. I also still have that Celeron box, although it may be time for a new power supply, as the fan on that one is starting to sound like a mating cow.

I don't game like I used to. There's not many games out there that have just compelled me to run out and buy them, and even if I did decide to play computer games again, I have two long-neck beer cases crammed full of jewel cases for games I already know I like. That's probably sixty to eighty pounds of CD's.

I'll probably bump the RAM on this machine up to a full gig from its current 512Mb, and maybe toss in another hard drive at some point, but I suspect that until there's a quantum leap out there that just forces me to upgrade, I'll be running this XP box for years to come. After all, that Celeron is still running 98SE, and I never get the burning urge to upgrade it when I turn it on...

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.

Archival vs. Ephemeral.

As anyone who has tried to hunt down old software on cassette tapes or 5.25" floppies knows, magnetic storage media is far from archival. As it happens, if you got into the CD-ROM game early enough, you may be finding out that some CDs are even less archival than others.

Isn't it ironic that in the digital age is still looking for new media storage as archival as good ink on acid-free paper? (Of course, writing out Microsoft Office in binary would take a sheet of paper or two. It'd be a bear to type back in manually when you wanted to restore from archives, too.)

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.

Me? I'm normal...

The next time I'm browsing eBay for games for my TurboGrafx-16 or apps on 800k floppies for my Mac SE, I can rest assured that I am flat frickin' normal when compared to a guy with not one, but two Crays in his barn.

Hidden Advantage

Marko writes about the retirement of my old Sony Mavica FD. It really is an obsolete system, with its non-standard battery pack and a resolution bettered by most cell phones these days.

The Mavica FD had one thing going for it however, the reason I bought it back in late 2001: With its photos being stored on its built-in 3.5" floppy drive, its storage may have been limited, but spare disks could be acquire anywhere. Also, what other digicam could interface, dongle-free, with any desktop computer built since the late '80s?

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.

Atari!

Spent the day playing Galaga on the 7800. More later.

The bedroom iMac finds another use...

It's a stereo, too!

Rather than having to turn on one of the stereos in the next room or drift off to the crappy Sony clock radio, my bedroom DVD player/web browser is lulling me to sleep with Tangerine Dream's Atem.

This "living in the future" stuff is cool.

Random iMac thought...

You know, if this old iMac had a PCMCIA slot or two, it would be damn near perfect for its current use. (I have PCMCIA WiFi, Ethernet, and modem cards lying around, but I'll need to go buy a USB WiFi unit...)

Bill Cosby's computer.

I got lost in the wilds of cyberspace the other night and somehow stumbled across a TI-99 fanboy site. A TI-99/4A was the first computer I ever bought, at a garage sale back in '83, for the princely sum of $150. (My first car, bought only two years later, cost me $650.)

Anyhow, I had totally forgotten about the game "Microsurgeon" until I saw those screen shots. Oh, lordy, the hours I whiled away wandering through the circulatory system of mister digital patient, zapping blood clots and bacteria...

Fondly remembering when nostalgia was cool...

Actually, it seems like it's getting cool again.

I'm looking for a Mac RGB monitor (one of the little 12" units; my existing one is developing a weird "tick") to keep my LCII and IIsi running, and so I keep an eye on eBay.

Old Apple IIe and IIgs units, if running and with software, are just smoking Mac Quadras in the price department. There's a whole graphic design agency's worth of 040-powered Macs up for auction right now, five whole machines, that you can get cheaper than the going rate on a Apple II+ or IIe w/monitor.

It's been a long time since I played Choplifter or the original top-down Castle Wolfenstein on a greenscreen...

It's a baseball off day...

But across the room, the 1996 World Series is happening all over again on an old Sega Genesis playing in demo mode.

The newest generation of sports titles tend to feature eye-popping graphics that make it easy to forget that... well... real baseball on TV doesn't really have graphics that are all that eye-popping. There are no worm's-eye view, panning, Matrix-effect slo-mo jump shots of Jeter firing to first when you're watching the real thing; the cameras are all in the stands. From across the room on a Sylvania 19" tube, this archaic game looks pretty much exactly like I remember the '96 Series looking. From across the room. On a 19" tube.

Only better, because there are no commercials and the Braves are leading two games to one. :)

A package has arrived...

...full of fun and games and goodies. A Sega Master System and a Sega Genesis. An Atari 7800. A GameCube. (Although it's form factor appeals to me, it's not super fossil-y. Yet.)

I've managed to get an extra TeeWee for the museum. A space cleared off on a table to get stuff set up...

Now to set the dial on the Wayback Machine to 1986, when Kurt Cobain was just barely old enough to buy a shotgun, Def Leppard were still employed, and 256 was a lot of colors.

Mortal Kombat!!!1!!!one!

Just found the Mortal Kombat II cartridge for my Sega Game Gear in the bottom of a box full of old software docs while cleaning up around the crib.

There goes my productivity for the day.

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.

You know what the museum needs?

An iMac.

But which iMac?

One thing that's really changed for the better over the years.

The 19" ViewSonic on my main desktop crapped out last year and, being lazy, rather than go out and buy a new monitor, I just pirated the 17" Mitsubishi from my backup machine. After getting used to the 19-incher, going back to a 17" monitor was like staring into a postage stamp.

This makes the whiff of nostalgia from playing Master of Orion II on my Mac Performa 636CD even stronger; I remember when the Apple MultiScan 14" display was, if not high-end, at least an average monitor. Now it makes the 17" Mitsubishi look like a drive-in theater screen by comparison. And were all monitors so curved back then? This thing's like looking at a fisheye lens. I'm spoiled by flat screens. Oddly the effect is nowhere near as bad on older all-in-one Macs; you expect to be staring at a bitty screen with those, and the effect is kind of twee.

What do you need a computer to do?

How many people out there use a computer for one simple task?

Let's say, just writing and printing documents in a word processing program. You can go out and pay a hojillion dollars for a dual core Xeon loaded with Windows Vista and a gig of RAM and only ever use it for word processing, but is that really efficient?

One guy took a stopwatch to a 3 GHz P4 and a couple of "obsolete" machines. He put MS Word in the startup files of each and held the stopwatch while booting the machines.

The results may surprise you.