Positive things:
- Walked the dogs
- Fed the dogs
- Played video games
- We all had lunch
- Walked the dogs again
- Did most of the cleaning
Negative things:
- Never, want, to, clean, again
Yes, I think it’s time for a break.
Year: 2021
Somehow the thing that really bothers me about transferring files this way, is the speed.
Not because it’s ridiculously slow by modern standards, but because it’s nearly twice as fast as my last dial up connection in the ’90s š¤£
When you end up transferring files over a serial port between computers made in 1992 and 2021, I’m not sure if you’re crazy or have a strange concept of relaxing.
That said my PowerBook Duo’s Printer-modem port seems to support a whopping 57,600 baud. Which works out to about 4.5 ~ 5.2 KB/s using ZMODEM between TeraTerm and SITcomm. Perfect for listening to music or making a sandwich as files transfer.
In my life: I have had relatively few dependable encounters with adhesives. If there’s a good way of joining pieces together that doesn’t involve adhesive, I’m probably going to choose the other method.
Deciding to Velcro a USB hub to the side of my monitor, I decided to also go ahead and Velcro the switch to the other side. Which I had meant to double sided tape or Velcro to the wall, but have had on a humble picture hanger until I could get some of either.
Well trying to get the backing paper off this shit, I’m now pretty convinced I won’t have to worry about the Velcro not sticking to the monitor or the hub and switch. Because as far as adhesive goes that shit works!
Misc thoughts on System 7.5.0
Poking around the classic MacOS has been an interesting experiment.
One of the things I find remarkable, brilliant, and rather lovely is getting the old Macs to boot! Seems like just about anything with a usable system folder and a means for achieving block I/O from it will boot. Compared to mucking with MBR based chain loading schemes and infernally buggy BIOS this has been a good plus. Offsetting that is how Apple’s partitioning tool refuses to initialize SCSI disks without some kind of ROM identifying it as one of theirs, which seems to have been dropped by the later IDE days.
For the most part I have chosen to ignore the desktop on PCs in preference to a home directory. I’ve known people who cover the Windows desktop in icons all over. Mine has largely been spartan since I focused on UNIX systems, and since XP tried to make multiple users suck less on shared home PCs.
Classic MacOS on the other hand makes it curiously inescapable. It actually feels more like a “Shelf” to me than a desktop. Because its behavior is not like desktops that I am used to. On most “Desktop” operating systems that I’ve used: the actual desktop was simply a special folder. If you stuff a file on it the only difference from any other is not needing a file manager or a bunch of tabs or clicks to reach it later because you’ll just be moving windows out of the way to see it or using a shortcut to navigate there.
I’ve found that moving files from floppy disk to desktop doesn’t move the file off the diskette, so much as it seems to flag it as part of the desktop. Moving it somewhere else then generates the kind of I/O event other platforms do. Further when booting from other media: the desktop is subsumed into the current session. I.e. boot off a Disk Utils floppy and you’ll still see the desktop, but the icons for your HDD and floppy will have switched positions. That’s actually kind of cool in my humble opinion.
On the flipside the trash seems to work similarly. Trashing files off a floppy does not return the space, but unlike some platforms does send it to the trash rather than forcing a unix style deletion.
When working with the desktop and your hard drive: placing data on the desktop seems to be treated like the root of the drive. Opening a file info dialog will show a path like “MacHD: My Folder or File”, and you won’t see it in the actual drive: just the desktop. One thing that made this apparent to me is the option to default to a “Documents” folder for the file open/save dialogs. System 7.5 created a Documents folder on my desktop but it doesn’t appear in MacHD despite the path shown in Get Info. I opted to leave an alias on the desktop and move the original into the HDD view, reflecting how I found the file system from my Wallstreet’s MacOS 9.2.2 install.
At a more general level is the feeling that Apple’s designers really did not believe in the keyboard. There are shortcuts for many common tasks, but when it comes to manipulating text the system UI has been use the mouse or piss off. Even simple behaviors we now take for granted like shift+arrow to select text do not exist in System 7.5. Fortunately, I actually like the trackball :P.
There’s a web abbreviation that I took a long time to learn, called “TIL” or “Today, I learned”. Well, I’m gonna call this one closer to “Today, I giggled” :P.
Trojan Room coffee pot – Wikipedia
And somehow this makes perfect sense to me.
Things that make me mildly sad:
- That when I got my first CD-Burner, CD-Rs were so expensive we could only do backups about once or twice a year.
- I bought a spindle of like a 100 DVD-Rs less than a decade ago, and I may not be able to use them up before I did without stooping to using them for Frisbees and coasters.
- How I rarely need to use CD-ROM or DVD-ROM but inevitably
- Need CD at home because the drive won’t do a DVD, of course I only have DVD-Rs.
- Need a DVD at work because the data won’t fit a CD, of course I only have CD-Rs.
- That at this point the only reason to care how many discs I use (or waste) is the wear and tear on my BD burner.
To which I’ll add that time I saved $5 to $10 and got a CD-ROM only external drive instead of a DVD-ROM one was probably one of the dumbest ways I ever tried to save a few bucks š. The irksomeness of hauling it out of the closet aside, the USB enclosure my old Blu-ray drive has been in kind of…rocks.
Thus far, I have found System 7 rather interesting.
On the PowerBook Duo 230 AKA 30 year old Mac, I’ve got 7.5 running off a BlueSCSI mounted internally. Tech by Androda has a PowerBook configuration that comes with a lovely 3D printed bracket, which was easily mounted using the rails bolted to the original Quantum drive. The only real problem that I had was initializing the drive, in the end I opted to download a prepared blank image. As far as I can tell the difference versus dd’ing my own is Apple Partition Map, Eventually I need to find a nice disk utilities package that fits on a floppy, as the Disk Utils disk offers me little value beyond it boots and has a system folder.
Installing was fairly straight forward since I was able to build floppies using the PowerBook G3 AKA 20 year old Mac. No idea of how, but disk one appears to be bootable but ha sno system folder visible like the Disk Utils disk. The installer however kind of sucks. Attempting an easy install takes about 20 – 40 minutes of swapping 7 floppies, and then dies and deletes the entire staging area off the disk. So I went about doing a custom install piece by piece and determined that its the Apple Guide on diskette 7 that causes this. Also for some reason it follows a pattern of eject disk 1, ask for disk n, eject and ask for disk 1, eject and ask for disk n; whenever I first start installing some item from custom install. Making this whole process a pain in the ass. Once in a while it decided to want to floppies at once. So, while I kind of love how easy it is to get classic Mac OS to boot: I think the 7.5 installer sucked. It is however quite simple and easy to use, if you can get it to work :P. At 7 floppies plus a Disk Utils, it’s not too large a set either.
Beyond that however, it works superbly and for a machine old enough to have school aged children of its own, I find the Duo 230 quite snappy. The real pain was trying to get Stuffit Expander loaded, since getting the images to mount on my G3 was mostly an exercise in futility. Once I finally got the disk made, I both set the write protect tab and wrote a message about not losing the disk because it’s a pain to build. When I was putzing with Basillisk II on my OpenBSD machine it was fairly painless because I could just mount the image directly. In System 9.2.2, I ended up using grabbing the Virtual DVD-ROM/CD Utility off Macintosh Garden. Disk Copy and ShrinkWrap told me to eff myself. Trying to mount in Toast just froze the G3 such that not even the mouse could move. Never liked Roxio on Windows, and don’t think I care for it on Mac either. Needless to say I wasn’t happy getting StuffIt Expander onto my Duo!
One thing that remains to be determined is whether or not I care to migrate to System 7.5.5, or a larger internal image.
Testing 7.5.3 -> 7.5.5 in the emulator was a fairly painless experience. Give or take that it takes forever to unstuff large files compared to my Duo. The StuffIt archive is 70~80 meg. More general stuff in the emulator seems to suggest 7.5.3 improved performance on 68k processors, not just on the younger PowerPC processors. But overall seems less important without a PPC based Mac. Given the size is something like net install + 19 floopies + 3 update floppies, I’ll probably defer that until I have a working RaSCSI where I can just place the files rather than imaging a ton of diskettes.
Regarding the disk images, I’m less decided. I chose to setup BlueSCSI with a 250 MB image. Partly because I just wanted to see it work, and partly because I intend to have RaSCSI be an external drive to shuffle between systems. Considering the Duo came with a dead 160 MB drive and they apparently were sold in 80 MB and 120 MB configurations, I’d like to think 250 MB is a nice balance between the hardware’s era and large enough not to care. Between system folder, basic software, and copies of the floppy loaded setup files, I’m only using about 30 MB. I plan for RaSCSI to present a large 4 GB volume, possibly several; but I could just as easily use that internally.
One oddity: the maximum date. Despite HFS having a limit of 2040 for its max date, I couldn’t go past 2019 without the date wrapping around to 2019 in the control panel. Apparently this was a bug in the date/time control panel, and someone wrote a nifty control panel app that lets you set the date correctly.
While I will admit that I didnāt have high expectations for a USB floppy drive, I had expected itās life span to be measured weeks, or at least days of I/O time. Over the past 3 weeks Iāve probably had disks in use for less than 6 hours. The MTBF had been much poorer than Iām used to for floppies, but relatively effective.
On the positive side thanks to 20 year old Mac and 30 year old Mac, I actually have points of reference without having to drive to work and borrow my āOldā machines internal IDE floppy drive. The Wallstreet series seems to have a really great floppy drive compared to the Tendak USB drive, even if the PowerBookās drive is old enough to walk into a bar and buy a beer.
The real question I suppose, is do I want to try and get a replacement while the drive is within Amazonās window (as well, as should be under warranty from the manufacturer). Or do I just want to take it apart and putz with it, since the replacement will probably be just as awesome.
Simple solutions to simple problems
When I moved, I ran two cables around the room. One to behind the headboard as a spare in case I re-arrange the room someday, and another to the corner my desk is on. My desk and bed being along the same wall with desk and headboard at opposite corners.
One of the things that has irked me all these years is how much of a tight fit this is. To pull my desktop forward to access the cables: I’ve had to yank the Ethernet. Very annoying. On the flipside when screwing with old computers, sometimes Ethernet is a better deal than Wi-Fi. Thus the cable under the headboard has been handy. Give or take that I usually end up wearing out my knees since the headboard isn’t handy, and the dog takes my spot while I’m putzing with computers.
Finally I’ve caved in any decided there shall be a gigabit switch at my desk instead of a direct connection to my gateway across the room.
Since the $20 TP-Link 8-port gigabit switches I replaced some old HPs^, I opted for one of these TP-Link Lightwaves, It’s rare that I need more than one port at my desk, and space is at a far greater premium than ports^^. Damned thing is tiny as can be. I envision its mounting place to be Velcro to the back of my monitor, but for now a simple picture hanger provides an immediate solution.
And for good measure of testing: Rimiru streaming Netflix from its 1 Gbit/s Ethernet while my PowerBook G3 runs off its 10 Mbit/s Ethernet for grabbing some floppy images for the ‘ol Duo.
^ HP makes some good switches. These worked great as long as you didn’t do a lot of multicast, but had a bigger problem. Turn off a computer and all ports would experience batshit packet loss until you turn that machine back on or unplug it from the switch. Weird.
^^Unlike at work where there’s more space and far more equipment. My home is a more wireless network centric place :P.