Where great old Macs live again!

February 2008 Blog Posts (15)

"Welcome to Macintosh" Screening

Mac fans and documentarians Josh and Rob, who are getting ready to release "Welcome to Macintosh", invited me to attend an early screening this week in Los Angeles. Since the operating budget of the podcast doesn't include round-trip flights to California, I was fortunate to to be in the LA area thanks to a trip for my job. The screening was held in a small theater on a lot at Paramount Studios. The audience were coworkers and friends of Josh and Rob, many of whom screened the film in… Continue

Added by James on February 28, 2008 at 7:28pm — 1 Comment

A weekend with OS 7

This weekend I decided to get started on 'rebuilding' the Powermac 8500 I got from a friend. It came with the original manuals, CD and stuff in the 'Look here first' box, so I ran the install CD. It installed Mac OS 7.5.3. I had found a nice ISO image with lots of Classic Mac software, and used the CD I created to install System 7.6.1 on the system's second hard disk. Next I upgraded to 7.6.1 (how nice you can do all this without rebooting or having to run something first!). Via the *excellent*… Continue

Added by Marijn de Jong on February 25, 2008 at 1:23pm — 1 Comment

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Added by Mel on February 24, 2008 at 9:00am — No Comments

Pismo: Eight years later...

As my trusty Pismo (Powerbook G3 Firewire) turns eight years old, I reflect not only on how I've made use of it over the past eight years, but also on how it has altered my overall expectations of what a great notebook computer should be. I suppose it's worth noting that eight years is an incredibly long time for any computer, much less a portable, to remain viable. That said, my Pismo has in no way come close to calling it quits.…

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Added by The Mac Observer on February 23, 2008 at 7:30pm — No Comments

Hollywood, meet Computer...

After revisiting the commercial flop that was 1995's The Net, I was sadly reminded of the fact that Hollywood has yet to deliver an accurate portrayal of computers in film. The "masses may be asses," but trying to convince any audience that Sandra Bullock is capable of debugging a software program with a few keystrokes borders on insult. While films may generally require one to suspend their…

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Added by The Mac Observer on February 22, 2008 at 1:00pm — No Comments

Conversational German for the Mac User III

• Ein Modem? Was zum Teufel ist ein Modem?

• What the devil is a modem?

• Das Akronym RTFM hat keine richtige deutsche Übersetzung.

• The acronym RTFM has no real German translation.

• Die Schnittstelle von Leopard ist leicht auf den Augen.

• The interface of Leopard is light on the eyes.

• Hast du deinen Steve Jobs Rollkragen mitgebracht?

• Did you bring your Steve Jobs turtleneck?

• Computer Problemen? Haben Sie ein Macintosh als ein Upgrade… Continue

Added by Ken on February 19, 2008 at 12:30pm — 2 Comments

Apple Remote Access Server Card

Picked up a rare NuBus card today from eBay here in Melbourne, Australia: An Apple Remote Access Server Card complete in box with all manuals and software.

I've taken a few photos of the box and contents for those who are interested:

Apple Remote Access Server Card photos

Essentially this is a four port RS-232 serial port card for a NuBus… Continue

Added by macdownunder on February 19, 2008 at 4:25am — 7 Comments

Old Apple gets a workout

A slightly loony Canadian has managed to get his Apple //e hosting web pages to the internet using an ethernet card and the Contiki OS. It's actually running as a server and is delivering a page with a few links and some images. I'd have put the link in this earlier but I wanted to ensure that you guys knew that this machine is WOEFULLY unsuited for delivering content. The tiny image of the //e, is actually 1/3 of the entire memory space of the machine.

One really useful piece of… Continue

Added by Wholly Mindless on February 18, 2008 at 11:36pm — 4 Comments

About "Non Existent Theme"

So this is what "Non Existent Theme" is. The song was written by me on sheet music when I took a piano class long ago. Around 1990 I found a discount music program called MUSIC WORKS that ran on my Mac Plus. I re-noted the entire song on the music works program and had it saved as a Music Works recording. After that the song sat on a floppy disc, syquest and other media for years.

Last year after installing Mini vMac on my Power Mac G4, I had the contents of my Mac Plus hard… Continue

Added by Mel on February 18, 2008 at 9:20pm — No Comments

That's not retro. Now THIS IS RETRO...

I saw this and thought of RetroMacCast...

This is a quick blurb about the computer used on the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) betwen 1969 and 1972 on http://dvorak.org/blog

A Brief Look At The Computer That Helped With The Lunar Landing

From the posting:

It’s cycle time was 1 Mhz, 11 instructions. It had 1K of 16 bit words of erasable (RAM) core memory and 12K of read-only memory (ROM). The ROM held… Continue

Added by Wholly Mindless on February 14, 2008 at 8:30pm — 4 Comments

The Power Mac G4 Jukebox

(taken with my iPhone) Someone in the family decided to upgrade from a Power Mac G4 quicksilver to an octocore Intel Mac Pro. In exchange for getting him set up with parallels I got the G4. I could just put it somewhere as a decorative piece (the case is like new), but I wouldn't be part of the retromac gang if I didn't think of a way to put it to work. So how did I set it up ? The machine was still running 10.1, at first I wanted… Continue

Added by ApplefanBE on February 12, 2008 at 10:00am — No Comments

Danish Police confused by iMac

I found this article while monkeying around:

Danish Police Befuddled by 1G iMac

I thought you guys would enjoy the fact that police everywhere are just a bit thick when it comes to these things. Strange that we give them guns....

More details are here (from a link in the article above:…

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Added by Wholly Mindless on February 9, 2008 at 9:44pm — 2 Comments

MY EYES!!! MY EYES!!! I've gone BLIND!!!

OK, normally I wouldn't have any issues posting a picture here for you guys to see, but in this case the problem is the picture itself. T-Mobile thought James was a serious Apple fan but I feat this guy's more willing to humiliate himself.

This picture at http://dvorak.org/blog is disturbing.

James, John - I must ask that you NEVER go that far and please don't bother interviewing him.

(On a side note, I think it's… Continue

Added by Wholly Mindless on February 7, 2008 at 7:06am — 6 Comments

eBay Raising Prices Feb. 20

From my own blog:

Newsflash: Already profitable US Company raising prices to increase profits.

Okay now take a guess which one it is? Oil company? Cable company? Nope. It is eBay.

On January 29, they sent out an e-mail to all members heralding the lower costs of listing items on eBay. Nowhere in the communiqué did they mention that, in fact, they were raising prices. It is true that initial fees to… Continue

Added by Ken on February 5, 2008 at 12:12pm — 3 Comments

Cheers for a Macintosh Fanatic

T-Mobile Big-5 Conference Denver, Colorado 28-31 January 2008

This week I got to participate in something I would have never guessed could have resulted from collecting a bunch of obsolete computers. It all started because T-Mobile had contacted Jeremy Mehrle to see if he would be interested in speaking to T-Mobile managers from the perspective of a product/company fanatic. You might remember Jeremy's name because of his amazing collection of Apple computers showcased in his… Continue

Added by James on February 2, 2008 at 2:00pm — 8 Comments