Apple II screen sharing

This is just me thinking out loud, but back in the day I wrote a number of modem drivers basically for the purpose of running bulletin board systems, and mostly specific to the Novation Apple-Cat ][ modem. However, it occurs to me that it was also possible with those drivers to actually get to the DOS 3.3 prompt and do things. This was possible because it hooked into the DOS read and write character routines, and DOS itself was good about always using those when sending data and retrieving input.

While the days of using modem connections over the phone are probably behind us, the basic procedure for sending and receiving characters over the serial port in a Super Serial Card is probably nearly identical, and it wouldn't require much of a rewrite of those drivers to adapt them to SSC operation. Apple has helpfully archived some sample code for accessing the SSC. So, it seems like it would actually be a pretty small step to make it possible to, say, SSH into the DOS 3.3 prompt of an actual Apple II, with some mediating software on a machine that would accept the SSH connection and then just pass the subsequent data through the serial connection.

Having thought through it that far, it also occurs to me that for lo-res graphics, it should be possible to mimic them (sort of) on an ANSI color terminal as well. The colors don't quite match, but this would be sort of close:

Apple II	ANSI
0 — black	40;0m — dark black
1 — magenta	43;0m — dark red
2 — dark blue	44;0m — dark blue
3 — purple	45;1m — bright magenta
4 — dark green	42;0m — dark green
5 — grey #1	40;1m — bright black
6 — medium blue	44;1m — bright blue
7 — light blue	44;1m — bright cyan
8 — brown	43;0m — dark yellow
9 — orange	41;1m — bright red
10 — grey #2	40;1m — bright black
11 — pink	45;1m — bright magenta
12 — green	42;1m — bright green
13 — yellow	43;1m — bright yellow
14 — aqua	46;0m — dark cyan
15 — white	47;1m — bright white

With just an ANSI terminal on the other side, the Apple could send a sequence like "^{^}[[42;0m " and print a dark green block. That's still 8 characters for every block, and there are 1920 blocks in a full-screen lores screen, 1600 blocks in a split-screen lores screen. So, that's 15360 bytes (or 12800 plus 160 more for the text part) that have to traverse the wire. Over a modem, that would be prohibitive. Over the SSC, we can go at 115,200 bits/second, so 14,400 bytes/second, so we could spit out the ANSI-enhanced blocks in about a second.

At least one downside of doing it this way is that Apple II lores blocks are actually half-height, so we'd wind up with something that is twice too tall.

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ ▄ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ P O I N T S P E P A D D L E L E

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ P O I N T S P E P A D D L E L E

██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ P O I N T S P E P A D D L E L E

The only way I can see around this, if ANSI color is to be used, is to double the width, which would then result in 9 bytes per block, so now we're up to 17280 bytes per screen (or 14470 with the doubled text). Plus, without any good way to do the text except to space it out as above. I suppose one alternative would be to have a client that receives the data stream from the Apple and knows how to switch into "lores mode" and accept the bytes as they come, which would then only take 960 bytes to communicate. But doing that does kind of reduce the charm of this, since then we'd be getting pretty close to just doing emulation.

Even that aside, without a client to accept the lores graphics, it is not clear what purpose it could be put to. What would trigger it to send a screenshot? I suppose maybe a driver command could trigger sending a clear screen command, the ANSI representation of (page 1) of lores blocks, and then leave you back on the text command line. It could even I suppose go in continuous mode, but I can't imagine anything going at 1fps being acceptable in terms of animation, and it would be a major trick to allow input at the same time.

As I was thinking about this, one other possibility occurred to me: perhaps I could patch the Applesoft routines by using the upper 16k, so that any attempt by a BASIC program (or any program that made use of the Applesoft routines) to use the Applesoft GR, PLOT, HLIN, VLIN, COLOR commands would position the cursor on an ANSI terminal and output appropriate blocks. While this would be even more ANSI code overhead, it wouldn't need to send entire screen shots, I wonder if the speed would be acceptable. Doubt it, but it's another thing to think about.

Anyway, maybe dealing with graphics is not worthwhile. Probably it isn't. But it still seems that getting to the text-based DOS 3.3 command line should be relatively straightforward, and indeed it should be quite possible to run a BBS pretty much unmodified in this way, with just a couple of tweaks to the driver code to make it address the SSC instead of the modem, and to make it be able to detect what would count as a "ring."

Apple II collection goes platinum

I managed to find a platinum Apple //e on eBay that looked pretty unyellowed, had a complete set of plastic back panels, the essential cards, and even a disk drive and joystick. It was fairly clearly from the bottom of someone's closet, put up completely untested and at a surprisingly cheap price (particularly compared to what some of the quite beat-up bare-bones platinum //es often seem to fetch). It's hard to predict eBay. But, bid, paid for, shipped, and now here it is:

It was packed in some carpet padding, and with the power cable still plugged into the back of the power supply. This didn't seem great, and when I pulled the cable out, the receptacle was pretty badly cracked. No way to know whether it got that way during shipping or whether it had been like that for years.

I gathered up a monitor, plugged it and the power cable back in, and flipped the switch on.

Then off. Then on. Then off. Then on. Then I unplugged everything again. Nothing was happening. Although I doubt that the cracked power cable receptacle caused the failure, my first (and correct) guess was that the power supply was not supplying power. As it happens, I have no shortage of other power supplies inside my several other Apple II machines (and the power supply remained basically the same in specifications and connection throughout the entire run). So, I took the pan of the terrarium ][+ with its power supply attached, and hooked it up to the platinum //e to see if using a different power supply allowed the platinum //e to start.

And away we go. So, this one's going to need a replacement power supply. It's possible that I'll be able to get the old power supply running again, but I don't really know much about how they work, so it will take some research and surgery. In the meantime, I'll get another, and if I revive the current one, I'll swap it back and use the new one on something else (like the extra bare //e board I will soon have, for which I in fact already have the beginnings of a plan).

The keyboard, I discovered, also is not functioning as well as I'd like. There are a lot of spurious repeats with certain keys. The most apparent offenders are "K" and "W"—the last line on the monitor there was the result of me hitting "kwkwkw" repeatedly, one press per letter, but "w" almost invariably provided two and "k" sometimes did as well.

This is not something I know how to fix (yet), but for a start I'll probably disassemble and clean the keyboard and see if that doesn't just fix it on its own. I also note that the left side of the keyboard seems to be riding a little bit low in the case, which may be entirely unrelated. I'll keep you posted.

Do not discard

Today, a HUGE box arrived. In fact, it was the second of two boxes, which my sister had brilliantly shipped out to me from the other coast.

But the reason for the huge box is that, within it, was this!

Admittedly, to most, this looks like, well, trash. But it's currently my most prized office decoration.

A couple of Softalks

The Softalk magazine (1980–1984) has become surprisingly rare. Surprising because it used to actually be given for free (at least for a while) to anyone who bought an Apple. And it was a good magazine too. But although many other computer magazines of the 80s have been scanned and made it into various online archives, Softalk is conspicuously absent.

Scouring the net, I have managed to find a few. Yesterday I found a couple that were hosted in Switzerland and for me at least downloaded very slowly (by my estimate, at about 2400 baud), which prompts me to now host a mirror of those copies of those few that I have so far acquired. Someday I hope to physically have the magazines again, at which point I'll attempt non-destructive color scans. I still may have some of those physical issues somewhere (I was a subscriber from 1982–1984), but I have not as of yet been able to find them.

So far, I have the following issues sourced in a couple of different places (but I suspect mostly the work of one person). They are not great. For one thing, they are mostly black and white, and (presumably on some kind of principle, possibly legal), the advertisements have been removed. (While I'm sure that it took a lot of time and effort to remove them, I also miss the ads, they're interesting too, 30 years on.) The covers were also often not included. In at least one place I noticed, a page was duplicated. But, it's better than nothing, for the moment.

• September 1980
• November 1980
• December 1980
• January 1981
• February 1981
• March 1981
• April 1981
• May 1981
• June 1981
• July 1981
• August 1981
• November 1981 (partial, but in color: cover, one article [Brøderbund profile])

[Addition: Steven Weyhrich has a page of images of many of the covers and column banners posted at his Apple II History site, and for a couple of years has been specifically scanning some of the ads from the pages of Softalk, organized by year and hardware/software.]

Vintage hardware is big

I started moving some of the computers that are basically ready to go up into my office, since there's little point in having them all tucked away in the downstairs lab space.

But, the thing is, old computers are big. I am clearly going to face a challenge trying to make the computers visible and individually usable while not at the same time leaving them looking crammed together. And there's also the minor point that I can't make my office itself difficult to use. I need to plan this out a bit better. The desk turns out to hold fewer computers than I anticipated.

This is just a start, but even if the iMacs, LC II, eMac, and //e are usable in these positions, I certainly have not solved the problem of not having them look crammed together.

I think my current plan will be to clear out the shelves (by scanning and recycling the non-bound paper, and actually organizing the books), and then put the whole set of 800MHz iMac G4s up there (five in all, but six with another one that I'm expecting to acquire within a couple of months), with the idea of using them in tandem, either as some kind of XGrid, or as a kind of unified display system to display something useful in big fonts (weather map, RSS feeds, IRC chats, twitter feeds, something like that). The G4 Cube setup will probably also go on those shelves, though I'm going to have to re-space them a bit. Not pictured here are a number of file cabinets on the opposite wall, currently supporting a few boring Linux servers with big CRTs, but soon I think to be supporting the G3 iMacs (graphite, ruby, snow, and bondi) and maybe the eMac as well. (I will need to see how it looks, though. The whole point, I think, of the iMac G3s is to be able to see them in profile, since that's where they're aesthetically interesting. Just seeing the front of them will not do.)

All of these machines can in principle be either controlled from the modern iMac via teleport or some form of VNC screen sharing. I was planning on leaving at least the G4 Cube in Mac OS 9, and probably one or more of the iMac G3s as well, so I need to find an appropriate remote control solution for those. The monster CRT to the right of the modern iMac will probably go, with the 1GHz iMac G4 in its place, for use in meetings. Behind the modern iMac right now is a big pile of hard drives (four Drobos, two homebrew RAID enclosures, two Seagate FreeAgents), which I'd like to try to reduce the footprint of. This will mainly leave the desktop itself open for the Apples II, since those are not remotely controllable and are too big for the shelves (and not usable atop the file cabinets). But I have a lot of them (the //e shown, but also a IIgs, 1-3 Apple ][+es, a platinum //e, a clone ][+, 1-3 //cs, and possibly a //c+). Even with the desk space reserved for Apples II, they aren't all going to fit there. Plus, the LC II kind of belongs there as well, being an honorary //e by virtue of its PDS card. Also, I'm not all that keen on putting them all right up to the window (since it is the Apples II that are susceptible to yellowing, although it is not clear that sunlight is the culprit, and this window doesn't admit all that much sunlight anyway), but I think that's how it has to happen. Maybe I need to tier them somehow? I also have to get one or more SE/30s in here somewhere, once their capacitors have been attended to, an ImageWriter II in a position that it can be used by the Apples II (as well as over an AppleTalk network), and probably an iMac G5.

There are also some towers and beige boxes (several Yikes! G3s not currently functioning, a MDD G4, a Performa 6116CD, three Power Macintosh beige desktops and a beige Power Macintosh tower). These could all in principle be on the shelves facing sideways, but it'll be tricky to keep the badge visible and the drives accessible. And I think those will require flatscreen monitors that I have yet to acquire if they're going to be happy on the shelves.

Given what has turned into more of a space crunch than I had previously managed to comprehend, I think apart from the iMac G4s, I will limit myself to one instance of any given kind of machine in my office, and leave the duplicates out of sight in the lab or at home. I do after all need to use this as an office, though I think I will like being surrounded by this mini Apple museum more than I like the way it's been for years, where I've been surrounded by piles of papers and randomly placed books.

There's still a ways to go yet.

Press reaction to the QX-10

Here are some scans I just did of a couple of reviews from Microcomputing magazine in 1983 on the Epson QX-10.

"The quintessential computer? Epson's QX-10 hits the high-end micro market." Jim Hansen, Microcomputing, April 1983.	"Vive la difference! Valdocs: While the Epson QX-10 offers impressive features, it's the software—particularly the Valdocs operating system—that puts it a step ahead of its competitors." Jim Hansen, Microcomputing, May 1983.

I have scanned (but not processed) the entire April 1983 issue, and I'll probably do the same with the May 1983 issue. Maybe I'll also fix one page on the scan above that got too close to the edge. I don't have the following issue (which should contained the third installment of the QX-10 review), but I do have a miscellaneous later issue. Scanning these is a bit tedious, so it'll be slow going, but I intend to scan most of the documents I have at some point.

Terrarium teardown: green slots

I disassembled the terrarium ][+ in preparation for checking that it is clean, reseating the chips and reattaching the motherboard to the case. And look:

Green slots. Interesting.

iMac G4 1GHz moves upstairs

I moved the 1GHz iMac G4 upstairs and installed Leopard on it today.

Not much going on there yet, and it is on the network via DHCP (so doesn't have a stable IP address), but I can screen share into it from my office iMac, which I can screen share into from home.

I a e r t r P i t n

A small batch of color ImageWriter ribbons arrived, which were indeed still wrapped in their plastic, just as the auction had indicated. However, the plastic had holes in various places. So these were not after all the still-sealed ribbons I'd thought they'd be. I picked one and opened it, and it looked nice enough.

Then tried a print test. The ribbon worked I think, but the printer, not so much.

Now I think I may need to actually replace the print head, though I'll need to do a little bit more research on what can cause this. This looks kind of familiar, in a vague sort of way. Maybe I just need to clean it? I'll see.

What is it with people?

I also don't approve of this:

[Photo credit: macgeek on instructables.com, hosted here.]

But it is mitigated (slightly) by the fact that one of the people responsible for doing this to a G4 Cube at least put the (working!) parts up on eBay.

Here, incidentally, is my new-to-me G4 Cube. Just waiting for the (annoyingly non-standard) power supply to arrive before I can set it up, but I've seen it boot up.

(The G4 Cube is, of course, in the design collection at the NYC Museum of Modern Art.)

A modern //c-compatible external hard drive

I'd missed this in my searching around, but there is (going to be) an option for external mass storage on a //c, the SmartPort Virtual Hard Drive, which allows you to plug in a USB thumb drive, with a note from last month saying that deliveries may begin this month.

It does require a ROM 0 or greater //c, and at least two of my three //cs are only ROM 255 (I haven't checked the third), so I'm going to need to upgrade one if I want to use it. But that shouldn't be too much of a challenge, I hope.

I'll definitely be keeping an eye on that.

Well, yes, if "surprise" means "shock and horrify"

Again, do not do these things to hardware that still works. But here's what someone does with iMac G4s.

This beautiful lamp is made from an old iMac G4. Be the envy of your office. Surprise your mac lover. Be the coolest kid on your block.

[Photo credit: Randall Littleton; hosted here.]

Also, here's Don Gilet in the "Window Shopping" ad. D-[]

I don't fully approve

I'd never advise doing this to a drive that wasn't irreparably dead, and I would actually think it would be a little bit cooler if the drive retained its original look rather than just being turned silver (though I understand how much work went into turning it silver), but—with those caveats—this Disk-][-as-external-USB-drive project is pretty cool.

[Photo credit: Anthony Kouttron; cropped and hosted here.]

Though it's "//c", not "2C", and the Disk ][ couldn't plug into a //c anyway, only into one of the other models with a 650-X104 card in it.

Which, come to think of it, makes me consider the possibility of creating a modern external device (perhaps CF based) that emulates the floppy drive's responses to the signals coming over the standard disk connection. With quarter-tracked nibble images, virtually any floppy (even copy-protected ones) should be able to be simulated this way, and with some kind of external selector to switch floppies, you'd have something that would work sort of like the CFFA3000 but would also work for the //c and //c+ (which have no other real option for something like a hard drive). It doesn't actually sound all that complicated, but it's still well beyond my current capabilities.

More thoughts on HDD replacements, with boring table

I've been exploring drive replacement options for the various machines that I have and which might need drive replacements, and I'm finding a surprisingly small amount of information about exactly what all of the drive options really are. This is a much more complex task than I'd originally given it credit for, there are a lot of different drive interfaces. It's more than just 2.5" vs. 3.5", IDE, SCSI, SATA. Many of the spec sheets I've been coming across are not sufficiently verbose about the type of drives the machines take, just the sizes they shipped with. So, let me try to collect my thoughts on this in a way more organized than I undertook in my previous rambling. (This is particularly true of the Mac machines, the Apples II I think I basically grasp.) Warning, however: This is not likely to be very interesting to anyone but me.

The iMac Service Source manual for the iMac G3s indicates shipping hard disks of the EIDE type from 7–30GB. My impression, given the casualness with which information is supplied, is that anything with a PATA physically compatible interface is pretty much backwards compatible, so that I can use a newer, fancier PATA drive even if the machine that's talking to it doesn't know how to use its features. Also, I learned from the PATA article that the Compact Flash interface is really just yet another PATA type (with a different physical connector), so that explains why IDE-CF adapters are so cheap.

For drive sizes under, or possibly at, 32GB, an IDE-CF solution as replacement makes some economic sense, but for larger drive sizes, the cost of the CF cards starts getting pretty steep. Although I could in principle hit or near the 128GB maximum addressable size for G3 iMacs, graphite PowerMac G4s, and the G4 Cube by getting a 128GB CF card (currently $898 at newegg.com) or an OWC Mercury Pro Legacy SSD (currently $220), I am not composed of cash. The SSD option is fast enough that it might merit some consideration, but it's still a lot. A spinning IDE drive is over three times cheaper, e.g. OWC's 120GB drive (currently $68).

There's a kind of a conundrum in deciding what to put in the vintage Macs, because although they often shipped with smallish drives, when has that ever been enough? Granted, there is a big usage difference between the times when each of these was serving as my primary computing platform, and now, when they're likely to be fairly specialized in what they're being asked to do. But do I focus on replacing the hard drive at its shipping size, or max them out?

The SCSI interface of the still-older Macs is more problematic. Since I still think getting actual vintage drives as a replacement is not a smart move, a SCSI-IDE or SCSI-SATA adapter is probably a better option. Also, the size limits on these drives is smaller; in many cases (where I'm running pre-System 7.5), I can't get beyond 2GB anyway, which makes a CF solution attractive. Something like PCD-50B with a CF-to-PCMCIA adapter (required because booting is constrained to the PCMCIA slot) looks like a pretty good option, even if it's kind of overkill, since it's (at $67 currently) about the cheapest way to get from SCSI to CF. Though it is not universally trouble-free. The PCD-50B setup is about half the price of the CF AztecMonster (page in Japanese, though he sells them via artmix on ebay as well). I bought one of the CF AztecMonsters, but shipping estimates suggest it will be a while before I see it. But SCSI-IDE for an actual drive seems like a dead-end road, since nobody is going to be making new 2GB drives.

[update: I came across some notes on Rob Brauns's page that might be useful: Experiments in IDE-CF adapters, Experiments with R-IDSC-E SCSI to IDE converter (Oct 2009), and SE/30 Storage Benchmarks (Jan 2010). A few other interesting things there, including a writeup of Remote Booting a IIgs (Oct 2009) which can be seen in action on Brian Picchi's video demo.]

For my own reference, here is a list of the machines, shipping size, and interface, that I have a chance of trying to replace the hard drives in.

Machine Year	Interface shipped size	OS shipped OS max	Max under shipped OS (Max under max OS)	Notes/ Plans
SE/30 1989	SCSI 80MB	6.0.3 7.5.5	2GB 4GB	SCSI-CF? System 6, A/UX, NetBSD?
Mac LC II 1992	SCSI 80MB	7.0.1 7.5.5[1] 7.6.1	2GB 4GB	IIe card, System 7.5.5
Performa 6116CD 1995	SCSI 700MB	7.5.1 9.0	2GB 4GB	AppleTalk/Ethernet bridge? Mac OS 7.5.5? Agonizingly slow
Duo 2300c 1995	2.5" IDE 750MB	7.5.2 9.1	4GB[2]	2.5" CF-IDE 2GB replace. Mac OS 8.6
PowerMac 7500/100 1995	SCSI 500MB	7.5.1 9.0	2GB 2TB	Mac OS 8.6? Use unclear
PowerMac 8600/200 1997	SCSI 2GB	7.5.5 9.0	2TB	Mac OS 8.6? PC Compatibility card. Upgrade HDD? Mac OS 8.6?
PowerMac G3 Beige 1997–1998	SCSI & IDE 4-6GB	8.0 10.2.8	2TB SCSI 128GB IDE	PM G3/233. Mac OS 8.6 or 9.2.2. IDE-CF seems to be an option. Replace the personality card with a Wings card? (Then what? Use the PMG3 as an external monitor for an Apple II?) Use unclear.
Bondi iMac 1998	IDE 4GB	8.1, 8.5 10.3.9	128GB	Not sure whether rev A or B. IDE-CF realistic.
iBook SE 2000	2.5 EIDE 6GB	8.6 10.3.9	128GB	Airport capable. IDE-CF realistic. Mac OS 9.2.2?
iMac DV, DV/SE 1999–2001	EIDE 13–60GB	8.6 or 9.1 10.4.11	128GB	Not sure on models. IDE-CF realistic. Airport with adapter.
Ruby iMac 2000	EIDE 10GB	9.0.4 10.4.11	128GB	IDE-CF realistic. Airport with adapter.
G4 Cube 2000	EIDE 20–30GB	9.0.4 or 9.1 10.4.11	128GB	Unsure of model. Airport capable. Mac OS 9.2.2. IDE-CF realistic.
PowerMac G4 Graphite 1999–2000	EIDE 10-40GB	8.6 or 9.0.4 10.4.11	128GB	unsure of models. Maybe Airport capable.
iMac G4 2002–2003	EIDE 60GB	9.2.2 and 10.1.2, 10.2.3 10.5.8	128GB	Airport capable. IDE-SATA maybe.
PowerMac G4 MDD 2003	EIDE 80GB	9.2.2 10.5.8	2GB 128GB	Not completely sure of model. Airport capable. IDE-SATA maybe. 10.5.8 if DP.
eMac 2002-2005	EIDE 40–160GB	9.2.2, 10.1.4 or 10.2.5 or 10.3.3 or 10.4 10.4.11 or 10.5.8	big	One is 1.25GHz/512MB, unsure of other model. Airport capable (1.25GHz requires Extreme). IDE-SATA maybe. 10.4.11 probably.
iMac G5 2005	SATA 250GB	10.4 10.5.8	big	75% sure of the model. Modern HDD.

^[1] I will use the LC II at no higher than system 7.5.5 so that the Apple IIe card will function.
^[2] LowEndMac passes on warnings that ATA-6 drives are not compatible with the 2300c, which may need to be a consideration in replacing the hard drive in the 2300c with a CF contraption.

That took a while to work up, and I'm not completely sure I got the max capacities right or what the precise relationship I need to worry about is between IDE and EIDE and the different ATA levels. But it is interesting to see this list spelled out this way, it suggests to me that I have too many machines to realistically update them all. It reinforces the idea that I should mainly be concentrating on replacing hard drives that have already failed, and stick with the hard drives that are installed if they still work. Also, I am really leaning toward flogging some of the non-unique (or just uninteresting) ones off on ebay or something once I get them to start. And, sorry to say, those I may well consider putting cheap vintage drives in.

Brainstorming about the iMac G4 as an auxiliary display

So, I have a number of 15" iMac G4 machines, some of the 800Mhz/512MB variety and at least one of the 1GHz/512MB variety. The 800Mhz machines are capable of booting Mac OS 9.2.2, and are among the last machines Apple made that can, although my G4 MDD is about the fastest (1.25GHz) machine I have (and that exists) that I could boot Mac OS 9 on. However, I think I'll reserve the power of the MDD for Mac OS X, and so I will designate one of my 800MHz G4s as being a Mac OS 9 machine. The iMac G4s are certified for Mac OS X up to 10.4.11, though 10.5 is possible to do. I don't actually have very much nostalgia for Cheetah, Puma, Panther, or Jaguar. Absolute no way would I run any of these machines on Cheetah now, that was terrible. For the most part, major upgrades to Mac OS X have been big enough steps forward even in performance that I don't think I'll install anything less than Panther unless forced. The iMac G4 is modern enough that it can take an AirPort card, too, so I could use that to get it on the network.

One of the things I have been doing with my modern iMac is hooking up a second monitor that I often use in advising appointments with students as a screen that I can point at them without necessarily revealing everything that I have on my own main screen. But the second monitor I have is a big old gargantuan CRT, and the iMac G4 seems like it has a better physical design for this sort of use.

There are two approaches to this. One that might be a sort of feasible option is to run something like Air Display (which I love for making my iPad a second monitor for my MacBook Pro) on the iMac G4, but unless there is another competing option with lower minimum requirements, I would need to push the iMac G4 up to system 10.5.8, which is well beyond what it's supposed to run. It can be done using something like LeopardAssist, but it goes against my principle of trying to keep the older machines snappy by sticking with their shipping OS. This would most closely match my current usage, though. Perhaps this is enough of a reason to use the 1GHz machine, too, though I think I'll want to try to kick up the RAM as well, since 512MB is also not really going to cut it under 10.5.8. I suspect that the iMac G4 would still wind up being very slow when not acting as a second monitor. The hard drives are only 60GB or 80GB big, so there's not a lot of room to maneuver, but I might try to make the machine dual boot into 10.5.8 and 9.2.2 and use it in 9.2.2.

The second approach is of course just to leave the iMac G4 on 10.4 and use its native processor to do the displaying of the PDFs and web pages and screen-share into it, since 10.4 includes a VNC server. This might work well also due to the fact that I have a somewhat higher number of machines than I have keyboards and mice. One thing I am not sure about is what versions of what browsers function acceptably under 10.4. I need to be able to browse through the university's data pages in order to get to transcripts, which does involve a certain amount of modern JavaScript, but I think I should be able to find something that can do this acceptably. I also would ideally link my Dropbox folder on the iMac G4, which would make all of my PDFs available (though in fact my Dropbox folder in total is bigger than the hard drive on the iMac G4, so I'll need to take advantage of their relatively new selective sync ability to sync just my PDFs folder and not the rest of my Dropbox folder). But at least as of now, Dropbox still supports 10.4.11.

Not quite sure where I'll go with this, but I'm sure I'll report it here.

Rambling about modern usefulness of vintage machines

So, I've been collecting a bunch of vintage machines, mostly because of the nostalgia value, but practically speaking, what good are they? What realistically might ever lead me to turn one of them on? Some of these are just visually appealing (the G3 and G4 iMacs, the G4 Cube), or have very strong nostalgia value (the Apple ][+), but some of the others are sort of interesting but I'd still kind of like to explore the possibility that they can still be actually used for something.

As a sort of prerequisite to that, there are a couple of considerations. One is that if they are going to continue to work, they need to not have dead hard drives, and they will also probably need to connect in some way to the modern machines.

For the most part, I think I will probably run the old machines on the operating system they shipped with, or at least not with the absolute maximum operating system they can support—the newer the OS, the more demanding it will be on the hardware and the slower the experience will wind up being. Which will mostly guarantee that I wouldn't use them. Plus, at this point, capabilities are not as much an issue as usability—if there's something that the LC II can't do because it's running too old of a system, the next computer over should be able to do whatever it is.

One concern I have about operating these machines in the modern world is that they need to have access to large storage, preferably replaceable large storage. There are a couple of categories of problems to address here. The oldest of my machines, the Apple II series computers, didn't ship with any permanent large storage, but primarily used 140K floppies. It was possible, however, to buy hard drives for these machines. This was all done with expansion cards, and the earlier operating system (DOS 3.3) was pretty limited anyway in how large a space it could keep in mind at one time, so larger storage had to be split up into "volumes" since the largest disk DOS 3.3 can imagine is 400K. The newer operating system, ProDOS, can see partitions up to 32M, and GS/OS (which I can of course only use on the IIgs) allows up to 2GB partitions. These are of course laughably small data spaces by today's standards, but of course one doesn't need a lot of space for the software to run these old machines. So, with respect to "authenticity," I think it's fair to say that, since hard drives were made for these machines, introducing a hard drive (or something that works like a hard drive) retains the authentic experience. And, really, I don't have much nostalgia for constantly swapping floppy disks, having bad sectors crop up, etc.

For these systems, there are a few different modern solutions that involve using Compact Flash cards in newly creating interface boards, and this seems ideal. First of all, CF cards are cheap and they have no moving parts. The only problem I foresee here is that finding CF cards small enough might wind up being a problem in the future. But, even if one were outright given to me, I'm not sure I'd want a true vintage hard drive for these machines. First of all, hard drives just fail. Using a 25-year-old 20MB hard drive is likely to very soon lead to tears. And while it's working, it's going to be loud. The CF card solutions, on the other hand, use a medium that's modern enough that it's trivial to connect them via a USB CF reader connected to current Macs (or even to the built-in SD reader in my MacBook Pro, though I haven't yet been able to locate such an adapter). Which solves one of the other big issues with working with the vintage hardware: getting data in and out of them. I plan to eventually put CF drives in all of my Apple II-era machines. I'm eagerly awaiting the second run of the CFFA3000 card, which I will certainly get at least one of. I've already ordered a Focus IDE HD + CF controller card, I'm just waiting for it to be built (currently I'm guessing it'll still be a couple of weeks away). Another option in this realm is the MicroDrive IDE controller, and perhaps I'll consider getting one of these too, just to compare them. These are not an option for the //cs and //c+, but for my three ][+-type machines, my //e, and my IIgs, one of these storage options will really make it much more likely that I'd actually use them.

One complication in the Apple II area is that many disks were actually copy protected, to make it difficult to just hand around copies to all of your friends. This led to a pretty active cracking scene, and most things were reverse engineered or imaged in various ways that led to copyable versions, although this means that the only way you can run a lot of these programs/games is to use the version with the crack screen. And also, some things could be copied using specialized copy programs (Copy II Plus, Locksmith), but the resulting copy was still just as copy-protected as the original. The issue with all of this is that in the context of a hard drive that is supposed to have the contents of many disks on it, there's a large chunk of the software that simply can't be used that way. The only way to use these things is to boot the floppy disks. The CFFA3000 does have some compatibility with "nibble" images, but it is still stated as being incompatible with protected floppies. I'm not sure what the best solution to this will end up being. It might really be that the best solution for these is to just use real floppy drives, but for everything else the hard drive will be a big help. There's a considerable cost, of course. The new cards are all in the region of $150, which is in many cases more than the entire machine is worth to an ebay audience. But the usability improvement probably justifies it. I also like the CF solution better than a real hard drive solution because CF cards are cheap to replace and easy to read/write on modern machines, and even though CF drives do have a limit on the number of writes you can do to them, the Apples II are not likely to come anywhere near those limits.

This does still leave the //cs and //c+ out in the cold, however. The options here are really limited. The compact form of these machines means that there are no expansion slots in which any kind of CF or hard drive card could go, and there is no external connector other than the serial connections for the printer and modem. Given that there is also no AppleTalk, they're really stuck with floppy disks, possibly transferred over with ADTpro, but still ultimately stored on floppies. The //c+ is capable of using 3.5" floppies, but at least two if not all three of my //cs are ROM 255 versions, which did not have support for 3.5" drives. The best I could hope for here, really, would be some kind of front end file transfer program that could bring in a program over the serial port from a hosted catalog (like what ADTpro does) and then run it in place (ADTpro only allows for downloading disk images to be written to physical disks). As far as I know, there is no hardware solution available to the //c that can get me any closer than that for larger non-floppy storage, and the serial loader I'm imagining here probably has yet to be written.

There is a similar issue once we get to the older Macs, at least with respect to the life expectancy of the internal hard drives, though at least these all shipped with hard drives installed and know at least something about how to deal with them. The oldest Macs I currently have are three SE/30s and an LC II, which originally shipped with an 80MB SCSI hard drive. That's a small hard drive. If the internal drive fails, which it will surely do at some point, finding a drop-in replacement will not be easy. Furthermore, the OS prior to System 7.5 had a limit of 2GB that it could see. But even a 2GB SCSI drive is going to be hard to locate. CF cards, on the other hand, quite easily get to 2GB. A CF card in a Mac worries me a little bit more than in an Apple II, because it's more likely to start using swap space for virtual memory, and so more likely to hit the write-limit. But artmix on ebay (the manufacturer) currently sells some SCSI CF card interfaces, and I might just go for some, at least to try. Advantages I see here primarily is that even if the CF card dies, it'll be much cheaper to replace the CF card than it will be to try to replace an actual hard drive. And, I can periodically, if I so desired, crack open the Macs and take out the CF card to transfer data to/from them or back them up (although this doesn't sound like a great idea for the SE/30s. The hard drive in the LC II is trivially accessible, but in the SE/30 the hard drive is tucked away under some hardware that would need to be removed before I could get at the CF card inside. I guess I could get something like this SyCard CFextend 182E and position the cable in some way so I could get at the card without disassembling removing the video board, but the thing costs over $100, so I'd have to be really sure I'd actually want to change the card often).

Once we get to IDE Macs, such as the G3 and G4 iMacs, we start getting into Mac OS X territory (potentially, though as I stated at the outset, I'd probably be running Mac OS 8 or Mac OS 9 on many of them), where disk access gets even more intense. An option here is to just get a SSD drive like the OWC Mercury Pro Legacy, but they are expensive too. They're likely to be more resilient for this kind of use than a CF-based solution, but if they fail, an entirely new drive is required. And the ability to just extract the "hard drive" to read on a more modern machine is lost. Also, on these early Macs, the first partition of a big drive has to be no larger than 8GB, and the whole drive can't been seen past 128GB. And even those are pretty small to expect to find these days. I think the 1MHz iMac G4 can see bigger drives, but I don't think the earlier ones can. The MDD Mac is supposed to be able to.

Of course, the expense here starts to pile up. In the case of the Mac machines, I may well hold off replacing their hard drives until I need to do so, since many of them do have working drives in them. For those that lack hard drives altogether, though, I may consider some of these CF or SSD options.

On to the other main obstacle I can see in making these older machines usable, which is connectivity. The newer Macs have ethernet capability and, some have Airport capability, so I will probably try to ensure that those connect in the modern way. I even have an ethernet card for one of the SE/30s, but I'm not sure how useful it will be. I do not anticipate putting an ethernet card in the LC II, because it has only one PDS slot, and that slot is reserved for the Apple IIe card. Most of the older Macs can speak AppleTalk, so I expect that I'm going to try to set up a small AppleTalk network among those machines so that they can talk to one another. And, the IIgs should also be able to participate in this as well, since it has both the port and the ability to use AppleTalk in ProDOS and GS/OS. None of the prior Apples II have AppleTalk ability, although an enhanced //e can use a Workstation Card to get on an AppleTalk network (and I am not sure at the moment whether my //e is enhanced or not).

The connectivity of the Apples II is most in question at this point. I have modems for two of them, although they don't really have anyone to talk to over the phone line these days. I suppose it's possible that if I could get them to ignore the lack of a dial tone I might be able to get them to talk to each other, though it seems a little bit silly. Still, I have these programs written for the Apple Cat that it might be nice to see running again, but it would require a second Apple Cat and I'm not sure that it wouldn't actually require two phone lines as well, since phone lines did provide some power that the modems may be sensitive to (meaning that just running a phone cable from one modem to the other directly most likely won't work). I might be able to rig something up if I ignore those modem cards and convince the Apple II that it's talking with an external modem over a serial connection when it is actually talking to one of the Macs, emulating a modem. I can't have been the first one to think of this, some kind of solution like this may well exist out there. This would require getting Super Serial Cards for the //e and ][+es, but they are still pretty cheap and plentiful at the moment. Though I might also want to stop and ponder what exactly the connectivity is useful for, too, in these cases. The Apple Cat is capable of turning things on and off (I think—I have the expansion card that allows for this, but I'm not sure that I have or can easily get the right interfaces that would get it to an actual power outlet), so perhaps if I could make the machine with the Apple Cat in it to be somehow addressable on the network I could get it to turn things (e.g., neighboring computers?) off and on. (That would be excellent if I had it set up so that if my modern office iMac freezes badly [as it sometimes has due to some kind of lockup of the Firewire ports], I could send a signal to the Apple ][+ and turn the iMac off and on again.) The biggest file transfers will probably really happen via CF cards, though, not serial connections with the modem port. So, what else would connectivity buy me? Mainly just the ability to save small, incremental files (perhaps for use in a disk image) somewhere they could be retrieved without pulling the CF card. And so maybe it isn't really worth it, though I have to say, the thought of an unconnected computer does really make it feel isolated and lonely.

But on to the plan, what could these things be useful for? I have pondered the possibility of using the iMac G4s for art, and writing a screen saver that runs on all 6-7 simultaneously, but that doesn't really seem useful. However, I think there is just no way that I'm going to be able to come up with something that six machines will be useful for. Perhaps I can get some form of XGrid working on them, so they can look for extraterrestrial signals or compute fractals. Maybe if I can get a fast enough connection with them going that screen sharing is possible, such that it's effectively six extra monitors of some sort. Even if they aren't actually sharing the screen, it would be easy enough to put PDFs I'm trying to read up on them, and they are pretty compact. The SE/30s are capable of running A/UX, and maybe I'd set one of them up running that, or, more likely, NetBSD. Once I've done that, the ethernet-connected one can be a little server of some kind. Though the strength of these old machines is not going to be found in fast transfer of large amount of data, it would need to be something useful that it could do just kind of directing traffic or handling low volumes of text. Apart from that, some of the vintage machines can be used to run games of their era that no longer run on newer machines—although I don't really have much time to play them. Microsoft Word 4.0d or 5.1 is probably really super-fast under System 6, there might actually be a use for that, except that I don't tend to use Word, and I have to be able to get the resulting files over to a modern machine.

I think there's some work to be done here to try to find actually useful things that these old computers can do. I'd like to think of something clever that they do better than modern machines, though I suspect much of it will just revolve around interacting with other vintage machines in a way that modern machines no longer support.

Polishing the lamps

Things that come from computer recyclers tend to be a little on the grimy side. So, I spent a little while cleaning up all five of the iMac G4s and checking to see if they worked.

A couple of them appear not to have hard drives in them. Really, none of them should have had hard drives in them (but I won't reveal who it was who gave these to me, this was a bit of a data security lapse on their part). A couple weren't properly wiped, but I'll Do the Right Thing and wipe them myself.

I also got a couple of install disks, which happened to be in the drives (though they weren't really appropriate—one had a PowerMac G4 disc, though this is an iMac, and another had a install disc for MacOS 9, into which most iMac G4s can't boot). However, I was not able to start them up off the CDs, which I'm not that pleased about, I think they should have at least reached a "this machine is not compatible" screen. I didn't investigate this, though, and I was at least able to read the disc on another machine that booted onto its own hard drive. But they all started up, at least to a blinking folder icon. So, they all work.

Of the three that booted off their own internal hard drives, two were 800MHz models, and one was a 1GHz model. Don't know about the other two (which didn't have internal hard drives), and I still haven't started up the other one I already had.

Though I still can't quite see out what I'm going to sensibly do with six of these. I think it's quite possible that I'll clean them up a little more and install an appropriate blank system then see if somebody on ebay wants them. These are a little new to be properly "retro," so I wouldn't expect to turn much profit. Still, the main thing would be to put them in an appropriately appreciative home.

The nice thing about the iMac G4s is that you can squeeze them into pretty small spaces. Here are three of them sitting on my shelf (above a couple of iMac DV/SEs, a Bondi iMac, near a couple of SE/30s, and a couple of different generations of PowerMac).

All in all, I do think that I'd be wise to resist further urges to visit computer recyclers. This room is about at capacity now.

iMac population explosion

Before today, I had a graphite iMac DV/SE which got pretty badly cracked during shipping.

And I had a iMac G4 (which is currently kind of cutely perched atop my IIgs, Snoopy-style).

Today's trip to the computer recycler (a different one from the one I visited last time) yielded quite a few more. I got a snow iMac, which I somehow failed to take a picture of, and two more graphite iMac DV/SEs, to make up for the cracked one.

And I wound up with five more iMac G4s. The reason I wound up with five more of these is that they were basically on their way to the crusher. If I didn't take them, they would be destroyed. And I felt like I couldn't let that happen. The recycler gave me the whole set for $8 per machine.

Browsing around computer recycling places is pretty interesting. But I don't think I could ever (even if there were any chance of a career change in my future) work in such a place. Because their main mission is to destroy these things, ecologically. I understand that it probably has to be done. But it seems like it would be rather like working in a slaughterhouse for someone who really loves pigs.

I should audit that terrarium ][+

Having just learned a little more about how to identify old pieces (from parts of Tony Diaz's retr0blasting talk from KFest 2010), I'm now seeing that in the pictures I have of the terrarium ][+, it is actually pretty old. I didn't think the serial number looked that old. True, it was originally sold as a 16K machine. But now I don't understand the serial numbers. This old one has an old sticker that says A2S2-1497165. My own Apple ][+ has a newer style sticker and a lower number, A2S2-542439. Yet I think there is no doubt at all that the terrarium ][+ is significantly older.

The RAM chips I can see here, that were added later (given that the label says model A2S1016), are all dated from the early-to-mid 1980's, and the 74LS257 is from early 1979, and the 75LS51 is from late 1978.

It also has 16K memory select chips in there, which my newer ][+ does not have.

The board indicates that it was assembled in December 1980, and the ROM D8 and ROM D0 were manufactured in mid-1980.

So, everything I can see from the limited photo set that I already have indicates that this is mostly as originally assembled in early December 1980, with the remaining RAM banks filled not long afterwards. According to the Apple II history site, the Apple ][+ ran from June, 1979, to December, 1982. The board date on my Apple ][+ is mid-November, 1982, which confirms my belief that my own Apple ][+ was one of the last ones made. And apparently, the terrarium ][+ was one of the early-middle ones.

I still don't understand the serial numbers, that's just weird. Maybe they started over (or started lower, anyway) when the model number switched from A2S1048 to A2S1048A?

The Apple ][+ takes a shower

Frustrated with the extent of the goop on the motherboard of the Apple ][+, I started pulling out the chips, with the idea that I would just take the motherboard home and stick it in the dishwasher. There are a lot of chips. Eventually I got them out, with no new casualties beyond the broken pin from before.

It took a long time and a lot of effort to get the keyboard disconnected from the motherboard, the keyboard connector having been very close to goop ground zero, and once I got it out, it seems to have very goopy pins. But at least I didn't lose any.

I put it in a big static shielded bag and was preparing to go, when it occurred to me that there is a shower in the basement men's room in my building.

Oh, what the heck. One thing I am not (and this could wind up being the death of some of these machines detailed here on this blog) is patient. I'd have to bring the board home, then bring it back, keeping it from being damaged on the T in the process. Why not just put the thing in the shower? That's a rough approximation of a dishwasher. So, off I went to the shower.

Before:

After:

Interestingly, that goop that just wasn't coming up through long, annoying scrubbing with alcohol and Q-tips washed right off in the shower. Oh the time I wasted. The SE/30 boards are going straight in the shower next time I crack those machines open, at least assuming that the Apple ][+ winds up ultimately working.

Unfortunately, I also discovered after the board shower that I somehow missed a chip. So, maybe that was a casualty too, though I don't know how specifically this would have damaged it. I pulled it out anyway.

The little lab space I have all this stuff in, being in a basement, has been equipped with a dehumidifier, so, I set the motherboard upside down on some paper towels to drain (after having shake-dried it and patted it down with paper towels), with the blower of the dehumidifier pointed at it. And went home.

Next time, I'm going to have to start dealing with the chips, a few of which (near the original home of the goop) have some pretty dodgy-looking legs. Maybe I'll just soak the legs for a bit in alcohol to loosen whatever it is and try to wipe them off. Hoping that will work. The amputated leg from the 74LS194AN is still sitting in the socket, and I may have to try to get that off. Oh, and actually, there was one socket (why did I not record which one??) that I actually accidentally pulled slightly off the board as well. It slid up in much the same way that chips slide out of their sockets, and there was no visible damage when I pushed it back down. It felt as if it were sliding back into place. So, I'm hoping that I didn't permanently break some necessary connections. I think there may still be a bit to do with this machine even after I put the chips back in, particularly with respect to the broken 74LS194AN and its socket, but I feel like the time when I can actually turn this machine on and see if it powers up is now within sight.