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Mac Nostalgia On Two Fronts
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jun 21, 2001 05:08 PM
from the apfelschnitzel dept.
from the apfelschnitzel dept.
mbishop writes: "There's an article over at MacCentral about this years MacHack keynote where all the original creators of the Macintosh got together to talk about OS X and what they think about Steve Jobs." And if the early days of the Mac are too recent for you, Tom Owad writes to say that "the Apple I Owners Club, founded in 1977 by Joe Torzewski, is back, along with the most extensive reference to the Apple I in existence. The site contains over 120 pages detailing the Apple I computer."
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Mac Nostalgia On Two Fronts
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RE: the hardware is too damned expensive (Score:3)
This was true in older Macs - anything before spring of '97, and to a lesser extent 'till Jan of '98.
The old old Macs used special video and network cards and modems. And were all SCSI and ADB or Serial. (Note ADB is the same as S-Video).
Then Apple went to IDE and PCI. But with ADB and Serial, then in '98 they went all USB and tossed in Firewire.
Now your Mac has an IDE CD, Hard Drive, two USB ports, one or two Firewire ports and in the case of the towers, AGP and PCI slots.
The hardware isn't that damned expensive, it's a really good deal and it tends to last longer than your normal name brand or home built PC. At least that was my experiance when I was lead support tech for 1600 PCs and Macs, and it's my experiance now as lead support tech for 500 PCs and Macs.
Re:Speaking of apple's anybody remember Geos? (Score:3)
And now it looks like Geos is being used in embedded solutions like the Nokia 9xxx phone.
http://www.breadbox.com/normal.html
Re:It's not all memories (Score:3)
Re:The low end (Score:3)
I used to post to /. from those very vt420s about two or three years ago, while my machines were pending repair work I never got around to doing. :) For people who are comfortable with Lynx (like all the little Pokemon-playing kids that could never wait for the unstable NT PCs to come back online -- zero in-house NT admins at the branches), those vt420s are great.
The sfpl admins wouldn't recompile Lynx for their VMS box with SSL and cookie support, though, so that's when I all but stopped using my Hotmail account.
(Posted from work with Lynx for Win32. :)
< tofuhead >
--
Man, if there was any justice in this world... (Score:4)
I'm sure Jobs has by this point convinced himself that Macintosh was ultimately his baby, conveniently forgetting that his REAL baby (figuratively, and I guess literally) was LISA- the $10,000, 50lb. landfill-fodder version of Raskin's stripped down, lighter-weight and affordable Macintosh.
Forgetting that Raskin was the one who convinced him, post PARC visit, that the Graphical User Interface was the key to making computers easy for the layperson to use [maccpu.com].
Of all the faces deserving to be celebrated in Apple's "Think Different" campaign of a couple years back, Raskin should've been tops. (Jobs' idea of thinking different is paying himself $1 in annual salary while taking hundreds of millions in stock options and a $90M GulfStream Jet as compensation... Trés different!) If Raskin hadn't convinced Jobs to "Think Different" about Apple's computers, Bill Gates' would have ended up dictating the future of computing, interfaces, and standards...
(wait a minute...)
Screw that. While it would be tempting to end this post with a sardonic quip, I just can't let myself.
It kills me every bloody time I have to see Steve Jobs in the lotus position, levitating across the covers of Fortune or Forbes, letting reporters and historians heap-big-praise on his vain, lucky ass as they mismember history and misinform the population at large about the history of computing. Surely when Jobs dies, those in charge of his estate will have hundreds of millions of dollars they can appropriate to the ongoing perpetuation of false history- while Raskin will end up downgraded, trivialized and ultimately consigned to Tesla's fate of historical irrelevance.
It has to be this way of course, because that is the way that things work- history is written by the winners...
But The Truth Is Out There [slashdot.org]. Read it.
Apple I specifications? (Score:4)
Jef on Jobs (Score:3)
Mmmmm... that floppy sound (Score:3)
Not really *Mac* nostalgia (Score:5)
Apple ][ ad infinitum!
The low end (Score:3)
A couple years ago, I was strolling through the new central branch of the San Francisco public library [lib.ca.us]. It was famous being heavily wired (too wired according to some [salon.com]), so I was curious about the gadgetry. I saw the usual array of web workstations -- and the usual long line of people waiting to use them. But I also saw a huge mass of ancient vt-compatible text terminals, mainly used to access the card catalog, but also configured to access the web, using Lynx. No line here, or time limit, and a fair number of people were leisurely cruising the non-graphic web.
If you're involved with upgrading the technology in your public library, think twice before you toss those old terminals.
__
Re:Man, if there was any justice in this world... (Score:4)
Tesla has an SI measurment named after him (magnetic density, if I recall). Maybe we could name some measurement, like GUI usability, after Raskin.
"Yeah, that system looks pretty, but it has a real low Raskin Rating, you know."
Dammit! (Score:5)
It's not all memories (Score:5)
Re:8K was enough back then! (Score:3)
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
Re:OS-X's troubles (Score:5)
When I hear this shit, it nearly makes me sick. With all due respect, I can name no single OS on the market other than OS 9 that has has support for DVD players. Windows has API support but no actual player. Windows doesn't ship with CDR support. WIndows doesn't ship with a intergrated mp3 player that can burn CD's. Windows and Linux don't ship with advanced gaphics layers that each individually have more buzzwords in them than I could ever hope to understand (Colorsync and Quartz come to mind). The shit people complain about can't be found in the upgrades that Microsoft offers, which btw is Apples ONLY competitor. If you are gonna complain, get real. How about finishing up Classic's printing support, or the speed of Quicktime and OpenGL on non-G4's, or maybe the lack of showing inititive and actually shipping nice GUI support for NATD, NFS, et al, or maybe the fact that I have to go to a damn menu to mount an OS 9 HD, that doesn't even mention the fact that OS X ONLY supports AppleTalk over TCP/IP, which although is off by default is a fucking MAJOR secuirty risk in the hands of newbies (will your Mom use hard to guess passwords?). Get real people. If you bought OS X and then bitch about no DVD or CD-RW support, you are an idiot. It never claimed to have it on the box, you were told in advance it would not ship in the initial final release, and Windows users pay money to upgrade thier CD-RW and DVD software after they upgrade...
One of my old friends worked on them (Score:3)
I've still got an Apple II+ with dual floppies and a 172K RAM card (so you can do a RAM disk and speed up your programs to about 1000 times faster than floppy R/W will allow) in my garage, as well as an old Mac SE (with dual floppies and one of the first external 20MB hard drives), which I took to Burning Man last year. One of these days I'll gut them and use them for some art project, but haven't got around to it yet.
And somewhere I've got my old floppies with AppleWriter II and French and English version of Microsoft Word for the Mac.
8K was enough back then! (Score:3)
"8K Bytes RAM in 16 Chips!"
Tell us what you really think... (Score:4)
OS X is the greatest OS we've ever seen. Steve Jobs is wonderful. We're going to buy it again and again.
Damn Jobs Reality Distortion Field...
Dancin Santa
Re:OS X - Could it be Linux and BSD's nemesis ? (Score:5)
while drinking a bottle of chilled Dom Perignon 73.
Aha! If you really were a Mac user, you would know that the '88 was better.
--Blair
"Can't fool me, boy."
Now hold on a minute... (Score:3)
Oh, never mind.
OS-X's troubles (Score:5)
OS-X's biggest problems are in multimedia support. One person on the panel indicated a lack of support for color syncronization. OS-X didnt come with DVD support. Doesnt matter to me that I dont get DVD support, I just boot into OS-9 instead.
However, I use OS-X at work and it is absolutely brilliant for my work as a researcher and Java prorgammer. I love how Apple has fully implemented Java and the Darwin kernel so I can get down to my UNIX roots. Even though the OS-X itself is not well documented, the presense of Java and UNIX makes up for it. I have yet to run into OS-specific issues with the OS-X platform.