How old a system could you run and still be able to work?

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Phil O
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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by Phil O »

I could still run reel-to-reel if I had too. Getting good tape is a problem nowadays, though.
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terrybritton
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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by terrybritton »

Phil O wrote:I could still run reel-to-reel if I had too. Getting good tape is a problem nowadays, though.
Heck, I can still rewind or fast-forward a reel-to-reel tape or cassette and from the "feel" stop it at exactly the right spot between songs.

A talent that is rather worthless today... and so I linger on... sorrowful for the past and reminiscing... and I won't even recycle my old Mac Plus! :cry:

Terry

[EDIT: Yes, pitiful. I know.]
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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by mikehalloran »

terrybritton wrote:... and I won't even recycle my old Mac Plus! :cry:
Nothing got me as excited about the future as my Mac+ :headbang:

My Beige G3 was purchased with DP 2.7. That was pretty good but not nearly as exciting.
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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by Shooshie »

mikehalloran wrote:
terrybritton wrote:... and I won't even recycle my old Mac Plus! :cry:
Nothing got me as excited about the future as my Mac+ :headbang:

My Beige G3 was purchased with DP 2.7. That was pretty good but not nearly as exciting.
• My 128K Mac did that. First, just the whole Mac thing. It was amazing and unprecedented.
• Then, I found a local company that was making memory boards for that Mac. I'd already upgraded to 512K with the Apple board, but this company gave me 4 whole megabytes of RAM.
• Then, I bought a General Computing Hyperdrive, which gave me 10 Megabytes of storage. Unbelievable.
• And to top it off, Andy Hertfeld had created an app called Switcher, which enabled you to run several apps at once, which you would "slide" from one app to the next on-screen. It was brilliant. I was running 4 amazing apps at once, all day every day, and making my living with that machine. I can't tell you how futuristic it felt, because I have no words. It was my first experience with feeling like I was on top of the world in a business sense. No computer could do what mine could. (except for other Macs with the same stuff)

When the Mac Plus came out, it was almost as powerful as mine. A huge step in the right direction. I waited for the SE-30, which was much more powerful.

Wow, what a ride it was.

Shoosh
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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by terrybritton »

mikehalloran wrote:
terrybritton wrote:... and I won't even recycle my old Mac Plus! :cry:
Nothing got me as excited about the future as my Mac+ :headbang:

My Beige G3 was purchased with DP 2.7. That was pretty good but not nearly as exciting.
I still have my Beige G3 as well. (SCSI AND IDE Hard Drives!) I cannot figure out who to give it to in my will. :|

My Mac Plus has a $500 (used) Novy accelerator board soldered to the original CPU that upped the RAM to 16 megs and the speed to a whopping 25MHz. It is faster than an SE30, due to the floating point math processor also on board. Oh, yeah, I still have my SE30(s) as well. 2.

And a barely functioning (wire frazzled) mouse and extended keyboard for the Mac Plus. You are right, Mike, nothing felt quite as exciting since as that Mac Plus did. (I even was online with it via Genie! And Performer, of course, with a MIDI interface (still have that, too). Aldus Superpaint. Etc. Heaven.)

Terry
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Shooshie
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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by Shooshie »

terrybritton wrote:I even was online with it via Genie!
Terry, did you ever use that Hypercard-based browser for Genie? I guess you could use it for any online service, or maybe it had to be customized, I don't remember. It was like a complete browser, long before there was a WWW or Netscape or Mozilla, or whatever was the first one for the Internet.

As a browser, it would:
• do searches for anything on Genie
• it would allow you to post in any group and follow those groups,
• live chat with split-pane for posting and reading
• email (Genie mail, really)
• Plus, it would allow you to archive or retrieve offline all your activity on Genie, including mail, posts, chat, notifications, and anything else.

It did all this with lightning speed, with complete transparency. Beautifully laid out, it outclassed every browser or email client I've seen since with the possible exception of Eudora. Netscape was pretty good for a while, too.

It took those awkward online services and turned them into pleasant places to be. Instead of terminal-based typing and memorization of codes, it gave online services a true point-&-click interface. Way ahead of its time. Of course, Hypercard was preternaturally fast. The brainchild of Bill Atkinson, he programmed it so that significant chunks of code would fit in the caches of the Macs of the day. It didn't have to refer to disk for everything.

I was more than happy to leave behind Genie, CompuServe, AOL, and the like, but I wish we could have brought along that Hypercard based browser. Even today it would probably outclass most of the online apps we are stuck with.

Shooshie
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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by mikehalloran »

Hypercard... that takes me back.
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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by terrybritton »

Shooshie wrote:
terrybritton wrote:I even was online with it via Genie!
Terry, did you ever use that Hypercard-based browser for Genie?
Absolutely did! It was a major reason for loving that service!

I even dabbled in some Hypercard authoring and was convinced it was "the future". Heh-heh... WWW and HTTP - HELLO!!! :)

Great times. I was glued to that Mac Plus, I'll tell ya!

Terry
Computer: Sweetwater CS400v7 Intel Core i7-10700K CPU @ 3.80GHz | 64Gigs RAM | Windows 11 Pro x64 |
MOTU 828 mk3 hybrid

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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by Shooshie »

It was Hypercard and that browser that made me acutely aware of differing programming styles and skills. The online services started offering their own "environments," they didn't call them browsers then, that were almost mandatory. If you used them, it would almost crash your computer, and sometimes did. Every move took what seemed like minutes. You became aware that someone coded this to spec, using the fastest pro-level machines of the day, probably a Silicone Graphics machine or something on par with that, and they were not the least interested in making their code efficient.

There was a database that I worked on for a while, and was employed to fix (don't ask; it's a long-forgotten sidetrack in my life that I'd rather forget). I found a set of nested "if/then" routines 88 pages long, and no telling how many levels deep. Nearly every action went through that bottomless pit of code. A great programmer was working with me, and I asked her to recode it with a "while" routine, which took all of about 16 lines. Suddenly this sodden, sullen, crashworthy database leaped into action and would perform all your tasks in a fraction of a second! Secretaries all over the country were calling me and crying on the phone in thanks. (Also, I'd written them a manual that actually explained how to use it) Their bosses had been blaming them for doing everything "wrong." Turns out it was just a lousy pile of crap-code that lousy programmers had tortured into faint, barely-breathing operation. It had billing code that couldn't do arithmetic, and printing code that could not format a form. And much more. The owner had been a slick salesman who knew how to make them salivate without actually running real data during the demo. He sold them for $5000 a pop, and this was in the 1980s. I led a team that fixed it in 60 days and made it a wonderful database. To show his gratitude, he fired me. Bosses don't like keeping people around who know where all the bodies are buried.

Anyway, those online service "environments" were the same kind of crap code, lazily made to spec without care about the user. Bill Atkinson's Hypercard, along with the browser someone had programmed in it, put them all to shame and showed what a difference good code can make. To this day, I can tell a lot about its programmers by the "feel" of an app.

Shooshie
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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by mikehalloran »

More than you ever want to know about HyperCard including this:

HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson following an LSD trip

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by Shooshie »

mikehalloran wrote:More than you ever want to know about HyperCard including this:

HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson following an LSD trip

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
That's a good article. Brought back a lot of memories. My first game on Hypercard was "Inigo Gets Out," about a little kitten who got out in the world for the first time, and came across lots of adventures, such as a snake, a birdbath, a waterhose, a rabbit, and lots more. The game was expanded into multiple adventures. We named our first family cat Inigo when my kids were little. People thought I got the name from The Princess Bride, but no, it was from Hypercard! Then there was Manhole! Wow... The concept grew into Myst, Riven, and more. To think that the Miller Brothers were just regular guys who used Hypercard and let their fantasies run wild. That brought them tens of millions of dollars in just a few years.

I'm still blown away by Hypercard. It literally changed the world, practically for free, while Microsoft sat on its lawyers thumbs and sued anyone with an idea. There were definitely two powerful groups in the tech revolution: those who thought apps should sell for hundreds of dollars, and that each tiny addition should be an upgrade that also cost hundreds — in other words, the greedy group; and the people who believed the tech revolution should be a populist movement that empowered people. Good programmers worked on both sides. Bill Atkinson deserves a Nobel Prize for his work. He was the heart and soul of the Mac, no matter what anyone else did, though others certainly enhanced his work. Andy Hertzfeld deserves more than a byline. He was responsible for much of the nuts and bolts of the OS, Finder, and interface. The whole Mac team gave us so much, but Bill was the one who set the tone.

Shooshie
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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by bayswater »

Shooshie wrote:The sad thing is that I remember being ultra-productive on all of these machines.
I was thinking about that a few days ago. I remember getting more done, and enjoying it more when I had an Atari Falcon and a PM8600. But what else was different; I had a 500 meg audio drive, 8 tracks max before a bounce, one reverb plugin, a couple of EQs, a couple of compressors and a loudness plugin. That forces you get the tracking just right, make irrevocable decisions, get things finished and on to tape, and so on. Now I can spend a day auditioning 32 EQ plugins, work on a dozen projects at once, and let a song sit unfinished and forgotten on a 3T drive.
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Re: How old a system could you run and still be able to work

Post by terrybritton »

bayswater wrote:
Shooshie wrote:The sad thing is that I remember being ultra-productive on all of these machines.
Now I can spend a day auditioning 32 EQ plugins, work on a dozen projects at once, and let a song sit unfinished and forgotten on a 3T drive.
That NEVER happens to me. :roll:

Terry




(I have a 4T drive...)
Computer: Sweetwater CS400v7 Intel Core i7-10700K CPU @ 3.80GHz | 64Gigs RAM | Windows 11 Pro x64 |
MOTU 828 mk3 hybrid

DAWs & Live: MOTU Digital Performer 11.31 | Cantabile Performer 4
Keyboard Synths: Kawai K5000s, Korg Wavestation
Controllers: NI Komplete Kontrol S-88 Mk3 & S-49 Mk2; Maschine Mk3 & JAM;
Akai MPK249 & 225, Alesis QX49, Behringer BCF2000 & FCB1010
Rack Modules: Ensoniq ESQm, Yamaha TX81Z, Wavestation SR

Tutorials: https://youtube.com/@CreatorsMediaTools
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