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Watch a vintage Mac 512K talk to an iMac via Siri
Niles Mitchell has a variety of Apple devices, including an iPhone with Siri, an iMac and a vintage Mac 512K. Using a combination of the old Speak program, AppleScript and iCloud Notes, Mitchell was able to send files from his iMac to his Mac 512K via Siri. It's a clever mix of old and new technology that's worth a watch, even just to hear the antiquated sound of a floppy drive working hard to copy files. You can check out this Siri-mediated conversation in the YouTube video embedded below.
Siri talks to Mac 512k, plays telephone with intermediary computers
Possibly fueled by the same geeky instinct that pushes our kind to build SD card readers for ancient game consoles and port Doom to just about everything, YouTube user Napabar recently bridged the 27 year gap between the Macintosh 512k and the iPhone 4S. That's right, Siri and the Fat Mac are talking. Sort of. Most of the heavy lifting is being done by a pair of intermediary machines, an iMac that's been configured to run an AppleScript upon receipt of a Siri dictated email, and a bridge computer that passes on the resulting text file to the Mac 512K's floppy drive. Result? Dictate an email to Siri, get a text file with its contents on the Mac 512k. Old and new technology, talking like old pen-pals. And to think, all it took was two middlemen.
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.
