If I had to name the single person who has had the most impact on both my personal and professional lives (besides my family), it would have to be Steve Jobs. I was wowed by the Macintosh from the first time I saw that 1984 commercial – during the Super Bowl – and became a Mac user soon after. That computer and the company behind it saw me through college, a professional career using Macs, then a subsequent career supporting Apple products. That’s astounding – and I am but one of many who feel this way.
Few people directly or indirectly brought more innovation to the world and touched the lives of so many people. Apple has changed the face of personal computing many times over. The legacy Steve leaves will live on for decades.
As part of the tributes we ran at Cult of Mac, I compiled this page of memorable demos and presentations Jobs has given, including the introduction of the original Macintosh, MacWorld keynotes, interviews and excerpts from his very moving speech at Stanford University in 2005. Worth a viewing:
Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve found many of my old Macs at the MIT Flea in Cambridge, MA. This geek flea market happens April through October on the third Sunday of the month in a parking garage on campus. It’s not an official MIT sponsored event, started out as a ham radio swapfest decades ago. These days you can find old tech of all kinds and ages, from vacuum tubes to SSD drives. I decided to take a few photos today of some of the old Macs around to give a flavor of what you can find.
One fellow had quite a range of things, a few compact Macs (including a 128k, which was unfortunately already sold), a Cube and some PowerBooks. People have tables and boxes full of cables, cards, RAM and peripherals; some work, some don’t, most are dirt cheap. iBooks of all kinds always seem to be popular, as do iMacs, books, software, cases. It’s hit or miss, but usually something to find. You know a particular model of Mac has hit the point of no resale value when they begin to show up at the MIT Flea in large quantities. These days G5 systems are nearly valueless on the market.
$5 for G3 towers – how can you go wrong? I try to hit this whenever I can. If you’re ever in the Boston area when a Flea is happening it’s worth a trip. But be warned – some people here really don’t get out much!
Back at the turn of the century everyone was worried about the Y2K bug, the potential for our computing infrastructure to go awry and wreak havoc when the year 2000 arrived. Dates coded with only two digits would roll over from 99 to 00, resetting the clock back to the year 1900. Catastrophe did not strike but the problem was a nuisance, requiring updated software to deal with the date change.
For those who still work with older software, the Y2K bug has not been entirely eradicated. I recently worked with a client who replaced his iMac G3 running Tiger with a new Intel iMac running Lion. The older iMac had replaced some even older Mac systems, and carried along for the ride in the Applications (Mac OS 9) folder was a copy of Filemaker Pro 2.1, along with a few databases maintained since the 1990s in that format. Classic Mode was a wonderful thing.
We purchased a new copy of Filemaker Pro v11 but this version does not support opening v2.1 files. Instead I opened the files on my PowerBook Wallstreet running Filemaker Pro v3, and saved in .fp3 format. From there I could open the files in Filemaker Pro v9 and resave in the (current) .fp7 format. Easy enough, and I gave my client the converted files.
A few days later – after catching his breath at the change from a PowerPC G3 to an Intel Core i3 based iMac – I got an email from my client that all the dates in one of the databases had jumped back 100 years. Things entered in 2000 were showing as 1900, 2001 were showing 1901, etc.. The Y2K bug had struck again!
Fortunately the fix was easy, just a Find and Replace on each year in the date field to update things by a century. But still a good reminder that for Vintage Mac fans the Y2K bug will never fully be eradicated!
Old Macs hold many charms, for both their original owners and Macintosh collectors. However it’s risky to run your business on decades old computer technology. A recent combination of a working Mac IIvx, an electrical storm with nearby lightning strikes, and a subsequent flashing question mark at startup were all the ingredients needed for a Vintage Mac Crisis.
The IIvx had lovingly been in use for over two decades by its original owner, keeping track of her farm which breeds miniature Falabella horses. The Mac held years worth of business, breeding and medical records, and the system hadn’t been backed up in over five years. Some panicked calls and emails followed, could I help save the Mac and the data?
I received the system a few days later, blew out lots of dust, and removed the hard drive. In an external SCSI enclosure I found that the drive spun up – a good sign – but that was about it. It wouldn’t mount on the desktop, and no volumes could be found.
The versatile SCSIProbe desk accessory showed the disk showing up as a device, but without any logical volumes. This is where the user data lies, so it meant the disk directory was damaged, possibly unrecoverable.
I tried to fix via everything I had: Disk First Aid, Drive Setup, Norton Utilities (several versions), DiskWarrior, APS PowerTools, repeatedly rebooting with drive connected, trying the drive on a second Macintosh, etc., etc..
After two hours I was ready to recommend a drive recovery service. I decided to try one final reboot using the old Anubus Mounter utility and its option to force-mount volumes at startup. Restart and this time I heard some extra drive activity from the disk. Then voila! – the volume appeared on the desktop. Wow! There’s usually only one chance at this, so I immediately copied all data to my work drive. I’m amazed it worked.
It was now nearly midnight, so I called it a night. The next day the drive again wouldn’t mount on any system. It had shown one last burst of life to save the Miniature Horses. Very poetic – and extremely lucky!
Having a copy of the files was the most important thing. The next request was could I get the IIvx working again? Using my PowerBook Wallstreet running Mac OS 9 I formatted another old SCSI hard drive as HFS standard. The included Drive Setup does not support these ancient disks, so I used APS PowerTools instead (I always liked that software). Once formatted I copied over the IIvx data and original System 7.5, reinstalled in the old system, and rebooted.
Chime, happy Mac face, disk activity, then Bing Bong Bang Bong – the Chimes of Death. Single tones during startup mean a hardware problem on these old Macs. I switched off and repeated several times, pulled the battery, reset the PRAM, no help. I pulled the added RAM in case that had gone bad and just used the motherboard memory, same problem. Something else had failed on the IIvx, just replacing the drive would not be enough.
My client was disappointed but understanding. We switched the job at this point to data conversion.
The important data was in two programs, an old application called Address Book (not the Mac OS X version) and Microsoft Works 2.0. I was able to convert everything to MS Excel .xls and MS Word .doc formats, but not easily. The Address Book data could be exported as tab-separated text files, and then imported into Excel. The MS Works data proved trickier, very few other programs can read this. Eventually I found that the amazingly useful MacLinkPlus can read these legacy files and save them as Word or tab-separated text files. From there I could manually convert to Excel again, and get all the data returned in useable formats compatible with modern Macs.
My client is very relieved, and now well aware of the need to keep regular backups and use newer computers for important business operations. But their love for old Macs is still strong, and they are going to find another Mac II to get working again on the farm.
How’s that for brand loyalty?
Ten years ago back in 2001, Apple released its long-awaited new operating system Mac OS X. That summer I picked up a Mac Plus at the MIT Flea, and downloaded some early Mac system disk images. Soon, across from each other in my small apartment sat the past and present of the Macintosh lineage: a classic Mac running System Software version 1, and a modern Mac running Mac OS X. For a geek, this was very cool.
The Vintage Mac Museum was born.
In the decade since, through a series of purchases, donations and hand-me-downs, the Museum has expanded into a nice working history of the 68k and PowerPC Macintosh eras. Over three dozen different models (with spares), with period versions of the Mac OS installed to trace the evolution of the Mac System Software. I drew the line at collecting Intel systems in order to still live in my house with all this equipment! Thus the Vintage Mac Museum is a pre-Intel Macintosh collection.
In 2004 the collection got a public exhibit in conjunction with MacWorld Expo Boston. This was written up by Wired in the Cult of Mac column, and the visibility of the site grew noticeably.
(more…)
The mid-1990s were low point for Apple. The Mac’s market share plummeted, a series of CEOs came and went, and the company was routinely referred to in the press as Beleagured Apple Computer. It was a tough time to be an Apple developer.
How quickly things change. By 1998 Steve Jobs was again at the helm, the iMac was released and the Mac was Back! Apple wanted to promote its developer community and show the breadth of software available on the Macintosh platform, and created this two minute Developer Showcase Reel (for WWDC?) highlighting the offerings of the day.
Adobe, Microsoft, and Bungie join such forgotten friends such as MacroMedia, Connectix and Cassady & Green in this retrospective look at the state of Mac software in the late 1990s.
More old Mac ads and videos can be seen on the VMM TV YouTube Channel.
