an earnest blog post about the old mac I just bought
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Discussion
@decryption Nice!
I had the very first 128k Mac when it was new so I didn’t miss out on early Macs. But I couldn’t afford a G4 iMac when they came out and was thrilled when I managed to inherit and refurbish one many years later.
I had the very first 128k Mac when it was new so I didn’t miss out on early Macs. But I couldn’t afford a G4 iMac when they came out and was thrilled when I managed to inherit and refurbish one many years later.
Unfortunately after sitting unused for a while it won’t boot up. No sign of power. Could be a learning opportunity for me to diagnose but I haven’t had time. I still like looking at it though.
@matt_diamond the G4 iMacs are becoming very popular with Gen Z kids who have the same relation to it as I do with the SE/30 (i.e: they were toddlers when it came out), so try and rescue the iMac before it gets too decrepit and can't be salvaged!
@decryption This is spot on for me. Really enjoyed reading this. Thank you!
@decryption Make sure you open it up and remove the battery, if it's still installed and intact. They explode due to age and splatter battery acid all over the board, destroying it. Unfortunately mine came to an end that way, because I didn't know at the time.
@decryption You’re going to love that computer. I have an SE/30 sitting in my office and enjoy firing it up every so often. I was just looking for Ethernet cards for it the other day.
@thereisnocat ooh I would like an ethernet card too - do you have any particular card in mind? I think I saw someone make a modern PDS ethernet card, but not sure if they got it reliable enough
@decryption I think there were only a couple available for it, and I don’t have any actual experience with either of them.
@decryption do you like Tetris? It was never better than the original http://macintoshgarden.org/games/tetris
@mattrobertson fucken love Tetris
@decryption lovely text. Mastodon is a nest of people in that same path, myself included. I really look at and after my quadra 700 as a classic car in my garage. Curiously, our generation look back at things way cheaper than a car…
@decryption Now is a fantastic time to get into classic Macs!
For the past year and a half we've been running a global AppleTalk network called #GlobalTalk where you run some ancient Apple Internet Router software on your Mac and get connected to people’s retro Apple networks around the globe, letting you share files, printers, chat, BBS, etc.
@decryption Some of the madness includes wiring up a PowerBook to a barbed wire fence in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland and printing to an ImageWriter II in Japan…
An ImageWriter II with tractor feed paper coming out of it that says
Hello from Orkney, Scotland!
This is the first GlobalTalk printout over barbed wire.
-dan / billgoats
A screenshot of a Mastodon post of a PowerBook with two cables with alligator clips going to a barbed wire fence
the post is by @billgoats@bitbang.social and says
#Marchintosh may be over, but the #GlobalTalk shenanigans continue...
@decryption "That whole era of the classic Mac totally bypassed me". You've been deep into modern Macs for a long time, do I'm really interested to see what your impression of these early systems is. I grew up on early Macs, never using a PC until just before university. It's amazing what they could do, how well they were designed (esp. software), and up until recently how much of that legacy persisted in the jump to Mac OS X. Of course they could also be super unstable, which sucked.
@wezm I'm really keen to check out HyperCard - I never used it, only ever read about it and heard people talk about it so lovingly.
@decryption @wezm I think you’re going to have a lot of fun trying out software from Macintosh Garden. Their servers are a bit shaky though.
@georgeharito @wezm maybe I should start a MUG and we can swap floppies of shareware
@decryption @wezm You could call it MacTalk?
@georgeharito @wezm hmm I think someone took that name!
@decryption Love it! The only time I used a 68k Mac as a kid was at school, our primary school was very small, the principal had a mac (I think a classic? It had the hard disk as a separate module under it hooked up via a scsi cable) that he'd do the weekly newsletter on, and he figured out that me and my friend were such big nerds that he could fob most of the work off onto us in exchange for letting us on it at lunch. 😂
Likewise it would be the 2000s before I had a mac of my own.
@fwaggle I got bribed into more computer time (on a Mac Classic Colour hooked up to the internet!) by a teacher who said if I shut up for an entire morning I could use the computer at lunch - it bloody worked
@decryption Certain teachers just saw you comin' eh?
@fwaggle the original nerd snipers
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