Douglas Adams's Mac IIfx | Hacker News Reader

Douglas Adams's Mac IIfx

vintagemacworld.com

146 pointsyankcrime39 comments

I met Douglas just once, in the summer of 1996. I was in London and I was visiting a friend and former co-worker who, after the startup we'd been in together in Edinburgh collapsed, had moved on to become one of the syadmins at The Digital Village, Douglas's game production house. (At the time they were working on Starship Titanic.) So I dropped round at TDV to say "hi" to my friend C. and a couple of other former acquaintances, and was taken aback when I was ushered into the boardroom, given a cup of tea, introduced to the MD, and then this tall, gawky fellow was wheeled in to shake my hand.

(I was so overawed I couldn't string enough words together to embarrass myself. (So that's okay then.) I only figured out afterwards that they were expanding and looking for new hires, and C. or another acquaintance (the UK internet scene was rather small in the mid-90s) had suggested seeing if I'd bite. As it would have involved moving to London and I'd just bought a flat in Edinburgh and high speed internet meant 56K modem dialup at £3 per hour, the answer was "no, but thanks" ...)

Anyway. Anecdote time:

Back around 1996-8, Apple went through a spot of bother with the Powerbook range -- during the Amelio years, the number of models proliferated and the build quality fell through the floor. In particular, Douglas had been toting around a Powerbook 1600cs or similar, and the blessed thing was exhibiting a tendency to halt and catch fire.

C. got a bit annoyed about this, because Douglas was about to depart on a speaking tour of the US, and C. was responsible for ensuring his laptop worked. And this machine had been sent back for repair about three times, and replaced twice. So he phoned TDV's Apple technical support contact.

"Hello? It's about this Powerbook 1600CS, serial number blah, that we keep sending back. Our CEO needs it fixed, urgently, but every replacement you send us is dead."

"Uh, well, there's a bit of a problem with that model. Send it in and we'll get a working one to you next week, I promise."

"I don't think you understand. Our CEO is about to go on a speaking tour tomorrow."

"Yes, we'll get you a replacement next week --"

"Our CEO is Douglas Adams, one of your company's leading evangelists. Do you want him to spend the next month going up on stage and explaining to everyone why he's carrying a Compaq?"

...

Three hours later a motorcycle courier turned up with six Powerbooks.

Now that's what I call AppleCare!

That's what I call Apple Caring for itself ;)

I started reading, then looked at your username and had a recursive hero-worship moment :p

I just started reading The Laundry Files two hours ago, the first of his books I've read. I never would have noticed the username there if you hadn't pointed it out!

Same, cstross...C Stross..it can't be the Charles Stross...holy crap it is the Charles Stross.

Only tpratchett would have elicited the same response.

Wish I'd been able to get the same service... my 5300cs was off somewhere at applecare for 6 months... those were some seriously dark days for Apple.

I am from Brazil and read a lot. But had never heard of you.

I've just added "The Laundry Files series" to my reading list... The description of the series on your site is great!

I just finished "Do androids dream of eletric sheep?" so I am in the right mood I guess.

Cheers

You'll love the Laundry files.

Also check out Accelerando.

Do NOT attempt to breeze thru Accelerando. It's so concept and information dense that you will suffer a brain aneurysm.

It's strange, but it seems kind of fitting for Douglas Adams to have had a computer that would tend to "halt and catch fire".

It's as if the poor thing was depressed and was trying to put itself out of its own misery. As usual, the pesky humans kept pushing it to do things it clearly did not want to do.

Typical.

I remember the IIfx...it had a 68030 with an FPU, which made me jealous because I had a Performa 475 with a 68LC040. The 68LC40 was a deliberately crippled 68040 with no FPU, which made it in some very important ways worse than the 68030, a previous generation processor. This left me with the unfortunate inability to run NetBSD, which I desperately wanted to do as I was just getting into computers at the time and wanted to use an OS that, unlike the friendly classic Mac OS, was closer to bare metal and let me do things like write my own programs ( which I couldn't really do in classic Mac OS because the main development tools were either insanely expensive or had critical features disabled, such as the ability to create new projects. ) So all the IIfx owners were flooding the NetBSD users mailing list with their successful boot-up stories, and I couldn't get beyond the bootloader prompt. I eventually had to take the 68LC040 out and replace it with a 68040 so I could use NetBSD and other powerful software like Infini-D...

We've come a long way. Now I'm running Mac OS and it is BSD. And all i have to do to create a new programming project is type git init in some unsuspecting directory.

That's the second Infini-D reference I've heard in the past couple of months after not hearing it mentioned once in the past 10 years. Warm fuzzies.

Back in the 90s macs had a serious virus problem. Two of the things apple did to address it were pretty effective — most importantly they gave a tiny bit of support/encouragement to John Norstad who wrote Disinfectant -- a very good and free virus checker -- and they put virus checking into all of their Claris-branded software (including Resolve, MacWrite Pro, Filemaker, and so on).

I had a Mac IIfx I got for free from my office (it was six or seven years old at the time) with a radius pivot display. Two once awesome pieces of tech that aged very badly...

To this day I cringe when the orientation of my iPad or iPhone changes. There were lots if apps that didn't cope well with orientation changes when the pivot first came out, early 90s timeframe and I expect to find myself dropped into tmon (at which point I would probably advance the PC and try to recover from the crash.)

Actually most apps on the mac coped pretty well — the big exception was Finder (ironically) which would screw up your desktop and window layout every time.

>Back in the 90s macs had a serious virus problem.

Yes, as did Amigas and Ataris. And they had 1/30 the market share OS X has had the last 10 years, and 1/50 the share of early Windows/DOS at the time.

Which goes to show that all those people claiming OS X didn't have viruses because "it had too few users" compared to XP so writers weren't interested were full of crap.

It didn't have viruses because it made it more difficult than Mac OS/Amiga/Atari to have viruses, with those UNIX permissions et al (basic as they are).

I don't understand this argument. Windows XP has the NT security model. The file permissions are more granular than the Unix equivalent. If this is what is supposed to make the difference it should be the other way.

Um, have you ever seen a WinXP box with anything but 'allow all' for every permission on every file? Running with everything as administrator? Simply having a permissions model is not enough if it's never used. If OSX had everything chmod 777 by default then it would be equivalent to WinXP.

Yeah actually, I have.

Unfortunately it let you boot from FAT which doesn't have permissions. But if it was using NTFS you would have non writable system files by default.

>Windows XP has the NT security model

Which it enforced badly, since the user was 99% of times the "full blown do anything without any password" administrator.

Are you sure you are not thinking of the Windows XP that exists in your mind? Because the one I used had permissions and never forced you to log in as admin.

If you had said Windows 98 there would be no argument, but XP had real permissions and real accounts.

I used to set up XP machines with restricted accounts for family members. They could not write to just any path. They would need to call me to install stuff. They still got malware. Hence, the existence and enforcement of file permissions: not the only factor, not by far. (You'd also be naive to think privilege escalation bugs don't exist or haven't existed in OS X as well.)

>Are you sure you are not thinking of the Windows XP that exists in your mind?

No, I'm describing the Windows XP that existed in practice in the real world.

That it "had" accounts and permissions is besides the point. Most people didn't have "restricted accounts" but full blown admin ones, and they could install anything without any "sudo" style mechanism.

What I still read here is a ridiculous claim that Unix permissions prevent viruses (https://www.google.com/search?q=os+x+privilege+escalation -- to say nothing about the damage that can be done just compromising the local user) and a clear demonstration that you don't know how Windows security works. When confronted with counterpoints you just say something along the lines of "I never knew about that so I must have been right all along."

>What I still read here is a ridiculous claim that Unix permissions prevent viruses

Not ridiculous, scientific. Perhaps you can't think straight. The fact that you can write viruses taking advantage of mechanisms such as buffer overflows to create privilege escalation, doesn't mean that permissions don't prevent the kind of viruses which are based on simple copy propagation. You know, like all the popular viruses back in the DOS, early Windows, Amiga, Atari etc era.

And I don't really appreciate the strawman you resorted to use (using "unix permissions prevent viruses" as if I said they make them impossible, instead of prevent certain classes of them).

>When confronted with counterpoints you just say something along the lines of "I never knew about that so I must have been right all along."

Are you kidding me? What counterpoints? I know everything you said about Windows XP. How about actually quoting what I said (it's just above your comment), instead of putting strawmans in quotes and pretending it was mine?

FACTS: Windows XP has a default admin account. Most people had full permissions to install and touch anything, and nether bothered, neither did the OS nagged them, to create a restricted account. Heck, the admin account even had empty password in most installations (as was the default).

That you could set up restricted accounts and permissions doesn't mean a thing. And I never said that I didn't know about them (another strawman you had to resort to) -- I said they were irrelevant because most users didn't use them and the OS didn't force you to.

In his autobiography, Stephen Fry mentions about Douglas Adams in a chapter. He mentions how they stayed close to each other and whenever he was free, he used to go to Adams house and "play"(in his own words) with Adams' mac. He wrote that they were the only two people who he knew had macs. He also mentioned that unlike regular users, they hacked away at their macs. They used download some small programs and tried running them till their computers crashed. He also writes about his disdain towards the ibm machines of that time. His autoBio is a wonderful read and he talks about his love for tech a lot.

This post brought back some memories. Back in the early 90s, I put together a maxed-out IIfx for use at my job at a prepress service bureau. The bare IIfx alone was $11,000, and the complement of 16x 16MB SIMMs, for a then-staggering 256MB of total memory, added another hefty amount. Add in a couple top of the line graphics cards and dual 21" CRTs (the largest generally available at the time) and the whole thing came to some $30,000.

Adjusted for inflation, that's around $50,000. Something to keep in mind for anyone who might complain about the cost of the latest Mac Pro.

"When switched on for the first time, it was clear that the last user had little understanding of how to store files on the hard disk."

In the early 90's I was helping a high school student (son of a relative) [1] with problems he was having with his Mac Powerbook duo 210 [2].

Noting that he had no files on the desktop or anywhere I said "hmm looks like you don't use this computer much!". To which he replied a bit snottily "You mean I don't use the hard drive. I do use the computer".

[1] He is now a Physician with a high end dermatology practice and several offices. He went to a 7 year MD and undergrad program and graduated first in his class. He always had to appear smarter than the rest as displayed by his comment to me (much older and using computers for quite some time at that point).

[2] http://support.apple.com/kb/sp154

So... where did he save his files?? Network drive?

Duo Dock floppy drive, likely (Howdy! -- friendy@Freenode)

Maybe he was just under the impression that files on the desktop were not in the hard drive.

I just fired up sheepsaver to check: in the olden days of mac the desktop appeared to be the root of the filesystem, so the hard drive was just one level inside the desktop.

A side point, the desktop was cleverer about that: it was supposed to be a temporary working space somewhat outside the filesystem, rather than its root.

Files from a volume still knew where which folder they were supposed to go in on that volume - if you dragged them to the desktop to work with, the "Put Away" menu command would put them back there (sadly lost in OS X). If you ejected a disk that had working files on the desktop they'd vanish, of course.

Oh my gosh, you just gave me some serious flashbacks to college.

Nice. I used to run A/UX [1] on one of these. Could never get networking working though; figured it was a bad Ethernet card or something.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX

I gave Mr. Adams a 2600 shirt that had been inadvertently printed backwards and he was amused (only a dozen of those existed!). It was after a reading in Charlotte, NC, 20 something years ago. I miss him a lot.

[2003]

How is that important in a story about a 1990 computer used by an author that died several years ago (and last used said computer 15 years ago)?

He's going to come back using an improbability drive though. I expect him to pop up when the Vogons leave.

Normality restored in 642842942424842424284328...

One reason is it gives people an idea if they've read this before or not.

"Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly ... , we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.”

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