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Using Siri to talk to a Mac 512K

Remember that scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home where Scotty converses with a vintage Mac by picking up the mouse and intoning "Computer..." to it? Well, YouTube regular "napabar" has gone one better by getting Siri on an iPhone 4S to create a text file on a mint-condition Mac 512K. Talk to the iPhone 4S, and moments later a text file appears on the Mac 512K.

As with many attempts to use older technology -- in this case, a 27-year-old Mac -- a bridge between the old and the new is needed. In the following video, you can see how napabar does this. He uses Siri's capability to write and send an email using voice to move a message to his Mac, which runs an AppleScript to extract the text in the message, then move it to a bridge PowerBook that is sharing the Mac 512K's floppy drive (remember those) via AppleTalk.

Sure, there are probably easier ways to do this, but it's still amazing that an Apple machine over a quarter-century old can be integrated with the latest Apple technology. In many ways, it demonstrates the continuity of some of the underpinnings of the Mac architecture that allow things like this to be accomplished -- even if the process is somewhat convoluted.