My Favourite Computer, an Old Mac | Hacker News Reader

My Favourite Computer, an Old Mac

muezza.ca

390 pointsBizarreByte139 comments

...and a very cute kitty!

Most Classic II suffer from leaking capacitors which should be replaced and it's a good idea to replace the onboard battery, which is prone to leaking and destroying the board:

https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2014-05-24-Classic...

There are two different versions of the mainboard which require different numbers and types of capacitors:

https://recapamac.com.au/macintosh-classic-ii-a/ vs. https://recapamac.com.au/macintosh-classic-ii-b/

When I bought this Mac it was actually completely fubar. The internal battery ruptured and ruined the main board, so I had to source a “new” one. The new one came recapped by the seller and I recapped the analog board myself, so it should be good for a long time to come.

You can see the rest of the gang here: http://muezza.ca/cats.html

Heh I had a cat named Dog at one time (one named Rat also).

If you also had a dog named cow it would be very on topic ;)

I once had a cat named Tom and one named Jerry... both female.

I have never heard a thing half as crazy as that.

We had one named Puppy.

I also love the feel of using these old systems, but I wonder how much of it is also to do with the physical experience.

Do you think you would get a similar or diminished experience with e.g a raspberry pi and a little LCD screen etc that booted straight into a minivmac emulator? ... I must admit I get a sense of satisfaction from turning on certain old electronics, like the resonating "clung" of the e transformer in my amplifier when I flip the switch, so maybe that's all part of it, the sense of an appliance, something less fallible, and also the absence of all those layers of complexity under the emulator.

I’m really not sure honestly. I think there is something to be said about having the real thing, but I’m not really convinced in the physical hardware over emulation debate. I get the same enjoyment in emulated SNES games as I did as a child on a real SNES for example.

In this case? I enjoyed saving the Mac, fixing it, making a few minor upgrades along the way. Apple hardware and software integrates so well together and I think there’s a lot of reason to have the whole package. That said when using it I’m looking primarily at the screen alone.

I think it’s really subjective and depends on the person ultimately.

For me it's not so much any of the physical properties of the machine in question (though those can be nice in their own way), but more of an intangible sense of "realness" that's difficult to attain with an emulator. It may just be placebo effect but I think that long time computer users can probably pick up on subtle differences, and that likely shapes the experience more than is often thought.

Certainly, pulling out my PowerBook G3 Pismo is a significantly different experience than firing up SheepShaver or qemu_ppc running the same operating system.

> an intangible sense of "realness" that's difficult to attain with an emulator.

I wonder if this is due to input latency, because no matter how good the emulator, input devices have gotten waaay slower due to all of the layers in between, before even getting to the emulator... unfortunately it's not really something you can throw money at with modern computers.

> PowerBook G3 Pismo

I owned one of those, that thing is capable of frying an egg for real!

Yeah, I think input lag is a big part of it - those old machines feel so ridiculously responsive.

Came here to say this.

Personally: the lower the “action to result” latency, the more compelling and tactile something is.

We all know about the sub 100ms “golden zone”, but if something is ~10ms (custom hardware with optimized software) it’s significantly more real to me, and if something is <1ms it’s almost irresistible.

Like; 100ms is the barrier to entry and it goes up logarithmically from there.

Totally agree, ~100ms feels really subpar to me, but unfortunately seems to have become the status quo, most input devices seem to end up on the order of ~10s of ms usually closer to the 100 end by the time they affect pixels... every wired mouse i try on a modern machine and can whip from side to side and see the latency clearly, like a beat in my head, if the first beat is my hand movement, and I can clearly "hear" the second distinct beat of the computer responding, which means it's clearly perceptible... if you can perceive it in that extreme then it means it affect normal use more subtly, giving a comparably laggy feel that most people will never put their finger on.

From everything I've read it seems that this is just not going to be solved any time soon, because the latency is distributed across so many layers, each contributing a little more. Even going beyond the input bus the older computers are lower latency in terms of how long it takes for a pixel to move on the screen based on the new coordinate. It's a shame this isn't something that can be solved even in a niche way without making completely different hardware... I guess an FPGA could possibly come close, but only if you also abandoned USB input devices and had a custom (simpler) input bus.

I was so happy to see John Carmack leading the charge a few years ago, using Oculus to push for low-latency and high frame rate.

I think it’s because of him and others like him that we now have 240Hz displays, talk about OLED pixel responsiveness being much higher, and real industry progress around reducing the latency throughout the total pipeline.

I remember a time not that long ago when people were trying to argue that “the human eye sees at 60fps”. We’ve thankfully come a long way since then and I am hopeful for a future where we finally get lower latency than the old tech.

> Do you think you would get a similar or diminished experience with e.g a raspberry pi and a little LCD screen etc that booted straight into a minivmac emulator?

With vintage hardware, you are constrained by what the machine can do. With emulation, you are constraining what the machine can do. It does make a difference. To give you an example of what I mean:

I collected vintage hardware in my university days. It was a time when you could get something like a Mac IIfx for next to nothing and still expect it to work. Well, crunch time came and I found that I was getting far too distracted. A vintage Mac provided an ideal work environment since it was great for preparing technical documents and didn't have all of the distractions of the Internet. Boot it into System 6 with Multifinder disabled, and it reduced the distraction of other software installed on the machine. Doing something similar with an emulator simply would not have been as effective. It is too easy to escape the sandbox in a multitude of ways.

Is this a physical differentiation (i.e. based upon the capabilities of the hardware) or a psychological one? I really don't know and I really don't know if the distinction matters. The outcome is the significant part, and that outcome suggests physical hardware does make a difference.

My complaint about the Classic II is that it is a degraded SE/30, with a maximum of 10MB RAM, no coprocessor, and no expandability except through the external SCSI, compared to 128MB RAM, a coprocessor and a PDS with the SE/30. Restoration isn't any more difficult on SE/30, and network cards are not hard to find. Plus it can run A/UX and a modern OS, NetBSD 9 (but without a GUI, which is fine for many purposes), so the SE/30 is well worth the slightly higher investment price for a fixer-upper, and once restored, it is worth a $1000 or more, so easy to not only recoup investment, but make a tidy profit.

The Classic II is more or less just using the LC chipset in a compact Mac form factor, whereas the SE/30 was a repackaged IIcx and came out almost three years earlier. The initial price of a basic Classic II was US$1900, whereas the SE/30 cost a staggering US$6500.

And don't remind me of the prices in Germany :). I remember seeing my first IIfx at our local Apple dealer, it cost about 35k German marks IIRC... a new VW Golf car was around 25k marks back then.

More details on everymac.com: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_classic/specs/mac_cla... https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_classic/specs/mac_se3...

Apple's initial price for the SE/30 in the US was $4369, but price came down rapidly in the first year, ultimately costing less than a Mac II with greyscale card and monochrome monitor by the end of 1989. But that was 30 years ago. Today, there seems to be a Mac mafia buying up the lower priced auctions and then jacking up prices of these ancient machines on turnaround, but you can still find an untouched SE/30 within spitting distance of the cost of a Classic II. They're both attractive machines in the compact format, but I wouldn't accept a Classic II for free, where I'd be tempted to buy certain particular SE/30 models, depending on condition, for few to several hundreds of dollars.

Interesting, the SE/30 page on everymac gives the initial price of $6500 I quoted above - but maybe this was not the price for the basic configuration.

I had an SE/30 many years ago (gave it to a friend in the late 90s) and used it to run A/UX. Good times :). Now I only have a Classic II which badly needs recapping...

Back then initial price may have had nothing to do with actual out to door price - as initial price was often set before the machines even could ship at all, let alone in quantity.

The Classic II is a low budget machine and the SE/30 is a workstation. They're not competitors in the slightest and shouldn't be compared as if they were.

When they were new, agreed, but now they're both more or less 30yo Macs that roughly cost the same.

I would be surprised if the machines are remotely similar in price these days. The Classic II isn't a cost reduced version of an older model, it has also been crippled.

For a lot of people, that's not going to matter. People seem to have the notion that old computers were only good for word processing and games. That is, more-or-less, what the Classic II was designed for. That is not what the SE/30 was designed for.

The reality is that machines like the SE/30 were targeted at organizations and professionals with deep pockets. Throw in a display adapter and a two page display, and it was used for desktop publishing. Throw in a network card, and it was used as a server. If the standard System Software wasn't good enough, there was even a option to run A/UX. Even something as simple as RAM demonstrates how fundamentally different these machines were. The Classic II was capped at 10 MB of RAM. The SE/30 was certified for 32 MB of RAM, but the hardware design accommodated 128 MB of RAM.

A Classic II can run almost any software that an SE/30 can, a bit more slowly and perhaps with an eye on the available memory. It would also be out of character for that machine. While basement tinkerers are not going to care about something being in character, collectors are going to care and collectors have a huge impact upon prices.

While the top priced SE/30 today exceed the top priced Classic II, for the unrestored machines there is a lot of variance. You can find Classic II for sale on eBay for close to $400, but at times also find SE/30 for under $200. A lot depends on condition and whether the seller is a member of the classic macs cartel. There is a lot of screwing going on in the exchange of old macs. In the early 2000s, Classic II were consistently more expensive than SE/30.

There’s also a nostalgia factor that comes in waves - many people who want to relive the glory days want exactly what they had when young - others want the hot rod they always dreamed of.

> ...and a very cute kitty!

Yeah, I guess that's actually the main advantage of a classic Mac with its built-in monitor - try fitting a cat beside a 4K monitor on that tiny desk! Plus the Mac probably emits more cat-attracting heat than a modern monitor...

> it never begs for your attention and its applications never try to distract you from what you are doing, begging you to look at them instead.

This.

In the modern world, it feels everything and everyone’s apps have a good reason to beg for your attention. I think it even transcends OS. On GitHub, my notifications are spammed by Dependabot. Who cares if my benchmark repos from 5 years ago have security issues.

Loved my Mac Plus back in the 80's. (Still have it - recapped it and got it up and running recently — floppy is no go — had to boot with some kind of modern flash board.)

No internet, no passwords. When you Shut Down the Mac — click — it shut down.

Eventually, I owned a procession of more modern Macs — eventually the first install of Mac OS X. Shutting down the computer now took, curiously, a minute or so. I remember my coworker showing my wife Mac OS X and she even commented, "I don't like how long it takes to shut down." He replied, "Yeah, you'll have to find something else to like about it."

I think it comes down to respect. Modern designers seem to have very little respect for users, and in some cases, it seems to veer into contempt.

No, you may not disregard what I want you to do, the most I’ll allow is for you to delay it by an hour, at which point I’ll interrupt what you’re doing again. Because I know better than you what you should do, despite my having zero context.

I think it's less about individual designers and more about the industry in general. A company that respects its users will find it harder to get money from advertisers and investors.

the industry needs better advertisers and investors, then

I don't think it is the designer's fault, it is the fault of data driven culture done poorly and picking the wrong incentives. In your example, if the dialog is say for a system upgrade, the metric would be percentage of users finishing the upgrade. An annoying, non dismissable notification would clearly boost this metric. Any decrease in user satisfaction short of public revolt on social media will not be noticed, or will be noticed over a time scale too long to be attributable to the notification change. By that time the PM has already taken credit for decreasing the number of users running old software.

Yeah, I think you’re right that it’s likely largely due to data-driven management. Brand damage is relatively hard to measure, and doesn’t seem to make its way into OKR’s.

Another way of thinking about things is that whoever is setting these incentives are indirectly designing the software, which obviously causes issues.

It’s shockingly easy for large companies to completely destroy useful software loosing out on billions per year with nothing obvious to blame.

> Modern designers seem to have very little respect for users

Tragedy of the commons. In general it’s probably a good idea to hold a healthy disrespect for your average user.

Power users used to be the norm, and as that changed, so did the design.

I solved this problem by switching to GNU/Linux on the laptop and on the phone.

Hi HN, I've been ruminating of this a little bit and figured I'd write and post my thoughts (I'm not a good writer, sorry in advance). I don't expect this to get much traffic, but if it somehow does my cable line probably won't handle it well so here's an archive: https://archive.ph/VIbMD

I really like this little computer and I'm sure some of you enjoy (or enjoyed) them too. :)

> I'm not a good writer, sorry in advance

I found your writing style to be concise, pleasant to read and certainly nothing to apologize for.

Ah memories. My first machine was a Classic ii. I think it might be in a friend's garage in Ohio, will have to check with him. Thanks for the great post!

Love this stuff! What is the tablet that is standing to the left of the Mac?

Shameless plug to a blog post I wrote a while back, where I sung the praise of my old laptop that is running Windows 3.1.

https://iskender.ee/2022/05/16/Laptop-1992.html

It’s not actually a tablet, it’s a blindingly bright white LED, one of the lights that is supposed to help with seasonal affective disorder.

I’m still not sure if it’s pseudoscience or not, but as we head into the dark half of the year I’ll try anything at this point.

I have no affiliation with Canadian Tire, but this is the exact product: https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/ottlite-clearsun-led-ligh...

As someone who’s been using f.lux and refining sleep hygiene for over a decade, if this helps you please take it:

- Chewable Vit. D3 can help, especially if taken in enough dose (studies showed minimal downside from “overdoses” of 100,000IU for months, so I’m comfortable recommending 5000-7000IU as a starting does), and at the right time (after ingesting it takes about an hour for your body to bring that all in to your bloodstream, so I like to take it around 8AM. A bit earlier if I’m trying to wake up extra early, and a bit later if I forget. The latest I’ve taken it is 12pm since afternoon sun is normal and healthy)

- Lamps for seasonal affective disorder can be a bit of a crap-shoot since there are no regulations around the term. If you get one and it barely (or doesn’t) help, it might not be any good. Things that are important here: the spectrum of light output, and the lumens. If there are any sharp peaks in the wavelength it might be as helpful as an LCD monitor on full brightness. For a true test of whether the concept itself helps, you can use halogen worklights short-term. With those there are concerns of heat and UV radiation, but they provide very bright full-spectrum light. If those work, it would probably be worth shopping around for the higher-end SAD lights.

I have a corncob 300 watt LED (not 300 watt equivalent mind you) and it works decently well for me in the winter. But I don’t think I have SAD, just want to have daylight during working hours.

Thanks for the post, for adding it to HN, and for providing an archive link right off the starting line.

Also thanks for posting the comment because now I get to help correct a typo: “This Mac is uncharging ...“

A slightly more modern equivalent of this is a 2009 Mac mini running Snow Leopard. You can find these machines for around $50 on eBay and they are very snappy.

I am waiting for someone to start a business turning old Mac mini's into dedicated retro gaming machines. This would be done by pre-installing OpenEMU and HaloMD on one partition, and Mac OS 9 on another partition to run old games like Lemmings, etc although emulation could also work for some of these.

If anyone is interested in this project, please let me know.

https://openemu.org/

https://www.halomd.net/

I still run a 2008 iMac, booted off an SSD over Thunderbolt. Websites are slower to load than on my M2 MBA, but for most local tasks it is perfectly snappy.

I also still have one of theese. I added more ram and ssd is comming. It's still a great device for Music, Photos, the Web. I did use it for video-conferencing, because the webcam can still hold up. And the little remote is still so great

I still have one collecting dust in a drawer. Should pull it out and put it to some use.

I don't think it makes much sense as a business. AliExpress is littered with retro devices that have as much emulation oof as a 2010ish Mac Mini. There are a lot of little emulation focused Android/Linux boxes as well as emulation focused Mini PCs out there these days.

I would love to know if any of these have the oomph for running Dolphin with hi-res texture packs. That sort of "going beyond the original experience" is the main reason I'd bother to use "real hardware" for emulation over something like a Pi or a jailbroken Switch. (Or, for that matter, a MiSTer.)

I know that the sweet spot for "enhanced emulation" of (N64|Gamecube|Wii, XBox|XBox360, PSX|PS2) is somewhere higher than "my M1 Macbook Air", but lower than "Ryzen 4 and an RTX4090" — but figuring out exactly where this sweet-spot is, seems to be left as an exercise for the player; with the assumption that anyone who wants to do this already has a beefy gaming computer laying around, and wants to play on a monitor, rather than on their TV.

It'd be nice if there were prebuilt appliances for playing enhanced early-3D-era games, that had been tested and shown to achieve a smooth 60FPS playing them at 4K or 1440p.

for emulation a midrange graphics card and a i7 or i9 intel chip with high single core speed from the last few years is best - you can get something second hand for very cheap that will perform emulation as well as the ryzen 4 4090

An M1 macbook is actually extreme overkill for emulating those consoles, it is on par with a GTX 1660.

To be clear, I'm not asking about just "emulating these consoles", but rather emulating these consoles with injected 4K assets; three-pass RDMAed 8K stencil-buffering for emulation of GPU-unified-memory in compositing of shadows + reflections; 16x SSAA to smooth off all the jaggies; etc. Y'know, all those options that, when turned on, make a four-generations-old game into a game that looks like it came out yesterday.

You still don't need a 4090 to do all that — but you need more than a 1660, I promise you. (For one thing, just for holding all those 4K assets, for a game that never unloads anything because it thinks it has rather small assets!)

That’s the thing about the 2009 Mac mini in particular…it came with a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M whereas most of the other models have integrated Intel graphics.

I actually used to have a 2009 Mac Mini (long since sold); I promise you, it didn't run Dolphin well even at 1080p. It barely kept up to 20FPS on some games.

The 9400M is still an integrated card. It was better than what Intel had at the time but it still lacked it's own memory and is still terrible by today's standards. Only the G4 Mac Minis and some models of the 2011 Mac Mini have a dedicated GPu.

I read "Ryzen 4" and did a double-take. Confusingly Zen 4 is the CPU generation, and Ryzen 3/5/7/9 is the performance tier (core count and price) within a generation.

But can they run 32-bit Mac apps?

For what? For Classic Mac OS gaming you could probably get Sheepshaver or Basilisk II running. Why you would need OS X 32bit apps on a retro gaming system I have no idea.

There are different degrees of retro.

For example you might want to play Halo, Portal. Even though Microsoft bought it before it was released for Mac, there was still a decent size community which extended the original Mac demo: https://www.halomd.net/

> A slightly more modern equivalent of this is a 2009 Mac mini running Snow Leopard. You can find these machines for around $50 on eBay and they are very snappy.

I just did that, last Mini that still has a optical drive, the Core 2 Duo is fast enough for a lot of things. If the optical drive isn't important, I'd go for the 2012 mini. Last one that still was user-upgradeable.

I assume it has a WiFi card? Snow Leopard was a great OS, and as long as this Mac Mini is ethernet-only, this sounds like exactly what I want (computing productivity without internet-age distractions).

Yeah it has WiFi (802.11n draft) but you don’t have to use it. It has an Ethernet port up to 1 Gbps

I had a 2011 i5 Mac mini sitting in the closet after it stopped getting OS updates. By 2018 I figured it was long in the tooth even though I'd added more RAM and swapped the hard drive for an SSD. I pulled it out one day not too long ago, wiped the drive, and installed elementary OS and was surprised at how well it ran. I almost regret buying a new daily driver since the speed difference is barely noticable.

I think I have the same. the only thing that stops me using it more is I do a lot of threejs dev in the browser. I'm not sure if it's the GPU itself or the browser drivers which i can't update now, but it crawls. Favor - if you go to threejs.org are you able to run example sketches?

Early 2010s iMacs are extremely underpriced, given their high quality screens and generally good hardware - you can get 27" models for $300ish and ones with retina screens for maybe $400. I stumbled across a jealousy-inducing low price on a late model with very minor cosmetic issues recently and am still pinching myself. But with these machines so cheap, I have contemplated picking up a second lower powered one just to mess around with, install different Linux distros etc.

I presume this is because so many Mac users are moving to the M-series CPUs and away from Intel, though I haven't done a detailed comparison with Macbook and older pro models. Mac minis still seem overpriced (to me, but after building computers for 30 years I feel entitled to be opinionated).

Any it won't last forever so if you have ever wanted the nice Apple hardware but were put off by the steep prices now is your opportunity. I went for an iMac because I wanted a machine that looked nice and was nearly silent, though to my surprise I am enjoying MacOS much more than I expected.

No mini could boot OS 9 natively, and only G4 minis running OSX 10.4 Tiger could run OS9 apps in classic mode (removed in 10.5 Leopard). There are some who have reported some success booting OS 9 using a custom ROM[0], but last I tried the process was finicky and missing some important features like USB mouse support. Of course this only works on G4 minis (2004-2005) which wouldn't be able to run OpenEMU, but there are other emulators that run fine on PowerPC macs. I've played a lot of Stella (Atari VCS) and KiGB (GameBoy) on G4 macs. The original Halo was PPC-native, and I spent a lot of time playing it on my Power Mac G5.

I'm still kicking myself for getting rid of an iMac G4 that could boot OS 9. I kept the faster of my two not realizing I would be stuck with classic mode only, and lost that as well when I upgraded to Leopard.

A 2009 mini has been my HTPC for years. That one does pretty well at retro gaming though I haven't tried Dolphin. It's barely playable on my 2011 mini (with integrated graphics). I might have a bit of a mini infestation...

0: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-os-9-on-macmini.211...

Snow Leopard really was the peak. Is there a list of all the Macs that can run it?

Thanks for sharing, enjoyed this. I tend to approach retro computing stuff from a nostalgia perspective, sort of assuming there's not much practical reason for using it. So it's refreshing to hear all the good qualities of the thing in its own right, from someone who isn't just reliving old memories.

The modern world of incessant trivial updates (interrupting what you were doing), surveillance, distractions, etc. is a bit sad, a far cry from lovingly engineered products intended to improve your life. Hopefully the market will curtail some of this BS in time, once we all collectively get sick enough of it.

It’s very amusing to see “young people” be into retro computers. At 71, I’m the opposite. Because I deal with actual (slow) functional degradation, I can’t be bothered with old computers. That’s a young man’s game. 2017 iMac Pro, soon to be supplemented with an M1 something.

By any chance are you selling the iMac Pro and live in the bay area?

My 2014 iMac has a failing system fan and repair seems like throwing away money.

Not selling, in Tucson. Get a screwdriver. Or a shop will fix it fir $50.

Thank you. I had not really thought about how much notifications hurt my computer enjoyment / productivity. I'm reconsidering my home computing strategy in light of this. I have one machine I'm most productive on. Reading your article made me realize it's the only one I have configured without notifications.

At work, I cannot turn off the apps that pollute my day with notifications. The firm got rid of their phone system - there is only <popular corporate messaging app>. Previously, I could turn it off and tell people to call me if there's something important. I suspect others are stuck in this position as well.

>I can even chat with friends on it via IRC

With Bitlbee you can connect to far more services with just an IRC client:

https://bitlbee.org

Public servers:

https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/servers.html

On each server, join the "&bitlbee" channel (not a typo), and run the "commands" plugins in order to see the supported protocols.

Usage upon connecting:

https://www.bitlbee.org/user-guide.html#quickstart

You can also put a RaspberryPi in your LAN with Alpine Linux "diskless" install (the best solution to avoid wearing out the SD card) and the bitlbee daemon. Then you would just connect to your RaspberryPi IP instead of the public server one.

Finally, I forgot: sites like http://68k.news, http://frogfind.com will run on legacy browsers for System 7.

And if you get a Gopher browser, head to gopher://hngopher.com

MacLynx works: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/11/maclynx-beta-2.html

Open it, press g, enter gopher://hngopher.com and have fun. Also, gopher://magical.fish and gopher://gopherddit.com

There is Crypto Anciennce, TLS for legacy systems, but I didn try:

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/11/fun-with-crypto-ancienne...

On the utf-8 issue for Lynx visiting this site over HTTPS, just choose the Mac Encoding in the options (press "O" under Lynx (capital O) and then configure it for the Mac Encoding and save your settings). It might solve it.

Very cool, somehow I’ve never heard of this, but it looks like it could be very handy. Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll look into it and try it out on my home server.

Yeah, bitlbee rocks, I use it under an i386 OpenBSD netbook (Atom CPU), it's much faster than Pidgin. Also, I use m68.news everywhere, as it can be read with no issues.

Lynx on Gopher protocol will work "as is" for Mac OS 7 I guess, and it's very fast. 68k.news it's over HTTP and not HTTPS, so it will work as is too.

This is the most recent version http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/mac/lynx/download.html

The interface it's weird and not so Mac like, I know, but it will fly for sure. And, well, you have Turbo Gopher too, but for your Mac version you would need the Threading extension.

Gopher URL for Lynx:

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/gopher/clients/mac

Proxied for the rest of machines (send it to the Classic Mac via AppleTalk or FTP or whatever).

https://gopherproxy.meulie.net/gopher.floodgap.com/1/gopher/...

Gopher it's the perfect "web" for your legacy mac in order to find alternative media. No ads, no trackers no MB sized pages. You can even find news mirrors with ease.

For instance: gopher://magical.fish:70/1/news

Recommended portal for lots of Gopher "holes": gopher://magical.fish

Blog aggregator: gopher://i-logout.cz:70/1/bongusta/

Old software for classic Macs gopher://i-logout.cz:70/1/software/Apple/Software_MacOS

As you can see, if you can connect to the internet your Mac, you are far from obsolete. You can chat over IRC+Bitlbee to a big chunk of protocols, browse news, read "phlogs" from tech people, and even visit HN and Reddit over Gopher. HTTPS would be another issue, but you might be able to contact the Crypto Ancienne folks for help.

EDIT: Well, now I focused into your shot, you already knew over Gopher. Still, Lynx with HNGopher (and a potentially well configured cryptoancienne) makes a seamless HN and Reddit browser over Gopher+HTTPS.

I’ve got the Mac hooked up via an esp8266 running a SLIP server. Most of what I do on it web wise is through Gopher, it’s just the best overall solution for a computer of that age imo.

Things like HNGopher and 68k.news are great, those kinds of services make it very usable even in the modern world. I had no idea lynx ever had a 68k release, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

I have an HTTP proxy setup[1] which will downgrade https to http so that Netscape on the Mac can load sites, if for some reason I need to do so.

Thanks again for the links. Someday I’d like to get a version of my site on gopher too.

[1] https://github.com/atauenis/webone

What I miss from Gopherpedia it's math support. It if had some support thru aamath it would be heaven.

https://github.com/gchudnov/aamath

Also: https://github.com/cy384/ssheven

You connect to SDF.org and power boost that MAC to the extreme :D

https://github.com/cy384/ssheven/releases/tag/0.8.9

Ah, paradoxically I made a typo on my comment. The correct command for bitlbee it's "plugins", not "commands". But as I pointed a link to the Bitlbee wiki at the Quickstart section , I think everyone would figure it out.

What you said can also be true with a modern linux or bsd install. Use something like arch linux or nixos and only install the bare bones like a windows manager, text editor, irc client and a web browser. You'll have no notifications, it's all up to you and you'll also have an updated and secure machine.

Or even more extreme, perhaps, TAILS on a stick and you just yank the stick when you're done. As long as you don't connect via Tor you're all alone.

I will say the form factor of the classic Mac (in my case a Mac SE/30) was amazing for writing. The height was perfect without the ability of the text to go to just above the keyboard like a conventional monitor on a stand. I end up duplicating it by using half a window or finding a text editor that holds the current line at a certain height. It was also a very portable design. I have an old Color Classic II case that I sometime think I might mod into something a bit more modern (since it is DOA anyway).

I remember in college in the late 80s (when laptops were mostly exotic and expensive) seeing someone walking across campus, carrying his Mac by the handle on the top and thinking that it was so cool to be able to transport a computer like that.

I taped a tote bag to my imac and traveled with it as a carry on once. https://twitter.com/alana31415/status/1578492366201098240

The original Mac mini fit perfectly in a camera case I had. That thing probably had more miles on it than some of the portables I've owned.

At our Mac user group meetings, it was routine for most folks to bring their machines. We all had these similar Mac tote bags.

It was an interesting ambassadorial event when we’d invade a pizza parlor with a dozen Mac, especially after Phone Net showed up and we started wiring them up with technological equivalent of cans and string.

I was practically a poster child zipping around with my Mac bungeed to the back of my scooter.

At first I thought the original Macintosh screen was too small to use for meaningful work, until I fired up MS Word 5 and started writing. The display fits half a page at nearly 100% scale which made it perfect to just write, and the printed page would look pretty much exactly as it did on the screen.

I did wish Apple had released a Mac in the original form factor with an 15" screen (9" width by 12" height). It would have been fun to have a machine that could show a whole page.

They did just that in 1989, with the Macintosh Portrait Display [1]. It was designed to fit snugly on the Mac II. Like other CRTs with fixed resolution and refresh rate, the phosphor persistence was perfectly tuned for comfortable, fatigue-free document viewing.

Curiously, tho, I don't think it was a perfect 72dpi like the 9" CRT in compact Macs, so it's not precisely scaled with printed output.

[1] https://lowendmac.com/1989/macintosh-portrait-display/

> I can edit my website and manage my servers from it...

Ironically, isn't an old Mac even more secure than today's computers? Because it's so old that so much of the attack surface (e.g., libraries) just don't exist on it. If there's no code, there's no exploit either.

Moreover, hacker groups might have a much less practical knowledge of dealing with these old machines. In contrast, a 2015 MBP might be even less secure than the one used in this post.

You're telling me you don't fire off a PHF exploit at random machines just for old time's sake? I was under the impression we nerds could be more honest with each other.

The OP manages their servers on this mac, but the mac itself isn't used as a server.

I do remember that viruses on Macs back in the 80s were a huge problem thanks to the fact that the Mac would automatically run code on any disk that was inserted in the drive.

Nah. The old mac has no disk encryption, so even if it's airgapped and sitting there off when unused, someone could still break in and steal it and gain access to all your secrets stored on its hard drive.

That said, big deal? I always hated the rabbit hole security people get into anyway lol. There's lots of charm with using old machines like that Mac Classic II.

If an adversary has physical access to any machine, all bets are off. There were definitely vulnerabilities and viruses for this era of Mac but as far as I know nobody's actively targeting them any more.

people in Berlin, Germany, fyi: Vintage Computing Festival Berlin (VCFB) October 8th and 9th, 2022

The Vintage Computing Festival Berlin (VCFB) is an event about historic computers and computing technology. In exhibitions, presentations and workshops, participants from all over Germany and beyond present many different aspects of Vintage Computing. In addition to retro computers, also historical operating systems, programming languages, network technology as well as pocket and mechanic calculators will be shown. Most of the exhibited devices are in working condition. Established in 2014, the VCFB has steadily grown and has attracted nearly 3000 visitors in 2019. In 2020 and 2021, the VCFB took place as an online and hybrid event respectively.

source: https://vcfb.de/2022/index.html.en

Aaargh! Too late!

Why wasn't this a top-level post like a week before? :'(

I have no nostalgia for System 7 as my first computer was a Windows 95 PC, however it is my favorite OS ever made. Whenever I have to use a new computer, be it Mac or PC, I always aim to make the OS look and feel like classic Mac OS.

My favorite old Mac has to be the iMac G3. IMO it was the first truly user friendly computer, requiring almost no setup or technical knowhow. I know people who are hard core Mac/Apple users for life because the G3 was the first computer that ever clicked with them.

Still have one sitting in my house. I will die defending translucent plastic and the platinum UI.

I still quote the ancient iMac ad [1] when I explain something that seems complicated but isn't: "There's no step 3"

[1] https://youtu.be/2iyMf3tlKpU

I really should get one of these these. I sadly never owned one, though I had an Apple IIe and an Apple IIc.

My favorite though would have to be the G4 Cube.

I bought one of those refurbished in 2001 and it was a fantastic machine. I used it for live recording setups, transporting it in a suitcase along with keyboard, monitor, mouse and 8-track A/D system, padded with towels. I only gave it up when I bought my first PowerBook.

This was a quality web log! Wholesome simple computing. The quintessential glass of milk filled 3/4th high on the kitchen counter.

My current favourite computer is a Fitlet2 that runs Debian. I have two of that computer: one server and one desktop. It's tiny, silent, beautiful and with an operating system that doesn't try to do anything other than letting me do what I want. I can get the same feeling about that computer as what I read in this article.

I want there to be more nice computers.

Thanks for mentioning this, fitlet looks neat.

> It will never receive another software update

Well... in 2021 we binary-patched Bolo to fix a bug and make it more convenient to use with our new Bolo game proxy server, enabling Bolo games to be played over the internet again. Some of us at 68kmla occasionally play together.

http://bolo.astrospark.com/

(Universal NAT broke Bolo internet gaming. The original network protocol was for ring-tppology serial networks (local talk, econet), and when UDP was implemented it was ported over with very little change. So the fact that the protocol depends on embedding network addresses of players meant that it completely breaks when NAT is involved.)

Oh man, I’m so happy people are keeping Bolo alive. Thanks for doing that.

I hope the author has found their way to joshua stein's blog: https://jcs.org/

I still have a 2012 MacBook Pro as my main laptop :(

This is why I am a Mac devotee. They are the Toyota of the computer world. Sure there’s a premium, but it’s worth it for peace of mind.

> They are the Toyota of the computer world.

The hardware lasts, but the software compatibility stops way too quickly. So for people who aren't willing to install linux, etc it isn't known for longevity.

Oh, I was happily happily using my 16GB mid-2012 15" MBP as my main machine until the motherboard developed some issue with power and died a month ago.

I fired up a 15" 2008 MBP to run some non-CS Photoshop and you know, it works great as long as I'm not using the Internet! It's a solid machine, and I miss it.

Now typing on my work machine, an 8GB M1 13" MBP. I wouldn't say I've been blown away by this and it's probably because I need 16GB to deal with Chrome and its zombie Electrons.

2012 MacBook Pro gang! Mines 10GB RAM though. Had to switch to neovim from VSCode and it's still sorta snappy for my normal workflow, just can't open tons of apps at the same time. Also I avoid any electron-based apps

Me too!

No shame in that! My SO has one which replaced an '09 MBP a few years ago. I had one too and miss it dearly, should really fix it up so I can use it again. My main laptop is currently a 2014 MacBook Air which is definitely a downgrade. (Plus I have to keep my '07 MacBook handy in case I want to watch a DVD.)

Ah, memories. I worked at Apple BITD, and it was fun to pick out a computer to get with my annual employee discount. My favorites were the IIci [1], with its very clean and compact design that was the result of lots of user research into making the II easier for people to open up and upgrade, and the PowerBook 140 [2], one of the first Apple laptops, just because it was so damned cute. And for the original Macs, I still have a padded case with a shoulder strap, which made my SE/30 [3] a credible luggable.

[1] https://apple-history.com/iici

[2] https://apple-history.com/140

[3] https://apple-history.com/se30

> This Mac is unchanging in a world where things change by the minute. It will never receive another software update and is thoroughly obsolete, but it's comforting to have something that you know will stay the same forever, remaining in a known state every time you return to it.

I knew I was not the only one feeling this. I hate that things which aren't broken change so much on a whim. There are certain software that despite no additions in functionality seem to have to change their design, button placement, workflows, etc, every 6 months or so (looking at you Signal).

My favorite was a IIci, with 8 megs of ram, a fast scsi drive, and System 6, with the 13" Trinitron screen. Warm boots in a couple of seconds, cold boot was longer due to the memory checks.

I don't use one anymore, but I remain extremely fond of my now defunct Acorn RiscPC from 1994! I have similar feelings about the software and how powerful and simple it felt then!

Mine is my Amiga 500.

I fire that thing up and... it seems to have most of the UI affordances of a modern computer, but everything is so simple and straightforward. And of course there's no telemetry, no intrusive notifications... it just does what I need it to do. It can't do things I expect of a modern computer, but it is symbolic of a time when microcomputers were designed to be fun and useful for their users, not to funnel them into some bigtech marketing pipeline.

As far as it goes, one can make a modern Mac or Linux box behave itself. Disable automatic updates and notifications and either is suddenly much more enjoyable.

Of course, if you really want the tactile experiences as well, this can be achieved with effort. ADB to USB exists, and it’s possible to get an empty shell of a classic Mac and put newer components in it. For my part, I love my turbo XT, my Mac Classic II, and my Compaq Portable 386. I prefer one of them to any other machine.

MacOSX 10.4 Mail working right now!

ssh needs the RSA key-exchange enabled

forget the web-browsers, just enjoy the personal applications.. almost as good as Macs previous to that IMO

Does MacPorts have newer SSH?

Yes. https://ports.macports.org/port/openssh/details/

I never had one of those but came across them at school and friends houses - I could never get past that damn 9" monochrome screen.

One of my favorite parts of the machine — that crisp display.

Something that is super easy to do nowadays too is to get various XP-era software and run it in windows XP in a VM.

Honestly I feel like trying to connect to the net on some of these devices feels a bit silly, but you can get lots of work done and wear nostalgia goggles. All at blazing fast speeds

Most XP software will run as is under 7 and older OSes.

One day, someone will make great bucks recreating these machines with modern components.

There's just something about that 68000 series processor with all those registers that seems very appealing. The silly part is I've got 16 64 bit registers in the machine I'm using right now.

I tried to boot up on my iBook 2003 Mac OS 9 unsuccesfully. It seems once I installed OS X this computer went for this OS forever.

maybe less fancy, but my old 15 inchs, mat screen, i got second hand maybe 12 years ago, handled 5 years of intensive work, live acts in forest rave parties, fell several times on the floor, got splashed many time and was mostly upgradable. if it wasn't for the gpu id be still using it.

too bad they traded reliability for a few millimeters of thickness.

This is about how I feel my Pop OS! pc works. Except that it’s more modern, and has a high resolution display.

This story feels so wholesome.

Mine is my favorite computer that I never use. Hasn't been plugged in for about 35 years.

The SE/30 is basically like this, but faster, 32-bit bus, and supports Ethernet. So same charm, but even more useful.

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