retro mac
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Vintage Mac app About boxes show just how far we've come
Mac consultant, writer, and translator Riccardo Mori has a collection of vintage Macs, and he's been putting them to good use creating a wonderful archive of About boxes while trying to determine what apps are on some old CD-ROMs and floppies. About boxes, in case you're new to the term, and those little screens that appear when you go to the "About..." item in an application's home menu. Many of today's About boxes are small, drab little things compared to what used to happen in the pixelated black and white days of the first Macs. That "system bomb" above was actually part of an animated About box for SoundEdit from Farallon Computing. This was truly a trip down memory lane for me, as I remember most of these About boxes from the hundreds of different apps that my employer purchased in bulk for our large network of Macs. While I won't re-post all of Mori's work here out of respect for copyright laws and my desire for him to get a ton of page views today, there are a few I want to call out. In 1985 I helped publish our company's annual report in-house using a pirated copy of Aldus Pagemaker 1.0. In between crashes, I actually got it done. MacPaint was the app that a lot of us used to show off the graphic power of the first Macs. Bill Atkinson had a nice portrait of himself in the MacPaint version 1.0 About box. I still use Ambrosia Software's SnapzPro X (version 2.5.4) for screen shots. So happy to see that they're still around... but would you believe they still have the same logo (albeit much nicer-looking)? The slowest Windows in the world - running Windows 3.1 under SoftPC with Windows on a really fast Mac. I still have nightmares about this... Head over to Mori's About box page to see even more works of art. via The Loop
Video: The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh Experience CD
On January 7, 1997, Apple announced a completely revolutionary -- for the time -- Mac called the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM). The US$7,499 TAM celebrated the 20th anniversary of Apple's founding and was the first desktop Mac to use features that we now consider commonplace like an all-in-one design, a flat screen display, a trackpad, and a number of multimedia features. Australian artist and filmmaker Max Piantoni (@maxpiantoni) found one of the rare Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh Experience CDs that accompanied the computer and created the video you see below to show how the CD was used to educate buyers about the remarkable device they had purchased. While the Experience CD was primarily used to show how the many features (built-in TV and radio, external brightness controls), it's also notable for a long interview with none other than current Apple design senior vice president Jony Ive. It's fun to see a younger Ive -- with hair! -- outside of his usual featureless white box, talking about the design features of the TAM. Enjoy the video!
A nostalgic look at the Macintosh Portable, Apple's first laptop
The Macintosh Portable, Apple's first laptop and the first consumer laptop to travel into space, was released in 1989. Groundbreaking in its day, the laptop was still a bulky travel companion, roughly the size of the phone book at four inches at its thickest point. Still, it came packed to its vents with ports, modular design, a floppy disc drive, and a trackball that could be removed and replaced with a numeric keypad. Users could expect six to twelve hours of battery life, but the computer had an odd glitch once the battery was dead. YouTube user Canoopsy explores the quirks of the Macintosh Portable, and compares it to Apple's modern laptops, in this recently posted video. It's a fascinating look back at just how far we've come since the early days of laptops. Enjoy.
Browsing Flickr on a 1989 Mac
According to the owner of the Macintosh SE/30 used to capture this image, it took approximately five minutes to load a single Flickr web page. That's actually not that bad, considering the late-80s power of the computer. [Photo credit: Jeff Jackson]
Original Mac team member boots up Mac 512K stored for 30 years (Updated)
Updated: Well, when I make mistakes, I make BIG mistakes. The photos here were taken by 21-year-old grad student Ariel Fink, who posted the photos on Reddit -- which were then retweeted by Chris Espinosa. For some reason, I don't remember seeing an "RT" on the tweet, and looking at the Reddit gallery from an iPad, I wasn't able to view the source link that credited Ariel. So many, many apologies to Ariel for attributing these photos to Chris Espinosa. Chris Espinosa was a member of the original Mac team and is still an Apple employee -- with badge number 8! Yesterday he won the Internet with by retweeting a series of photos on Imgur showing a Mac 512K that had been in storage for 30 years booting up as if it had just come out of the store. The Mac belonged to Espinosa's the mother of 21-year-old grad student Ariel FInk, who was just curious if it would still boot up. The 512K Mac was accompanied by an Imagewriter printer and an Apple Hard Disk 20. That's 20 megabytes, mind you, and it was a serial bus hard disk (I owned exactly the same setup). Above, you can see the Mac running, while below is the trio of boxes that the equipment came in. More photos are available in the Imgur gallery. All photos by Chris Espinosa Ariel Fink.
Unboxing a 25-year-old Macintosh IIcx
Greetings retro Mac fans. Do your kids take their iPads for granted? Do they not understand the mind-boggling glory of their now primitive iPod touch? Well gather up the little ones for an hour long, yes hour long, piece of Apple history. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh, the fine folks at the Inside TWiT web series have put together a special video showcasing the 25-year-old Macintosh IIcx. The guys crack open a complete IIcx, including shrink-wrapped manuals and its glorious inside. Watch as they install a cutting edge (for the era) video card that kicks the machine up to a stunning 256 colors. Explain to your children the convenience of the "programing switch", a plastic piece which allowed you to press the interrupt and reset buttons back when they were located on the actual motherboard. Remarkably, the machine still works, and provides a history lesson for younger Mac fans about just how easy things have become. Imagine if kids still had to listen to that terrifying floppy drive click every time they tried to install an app? It's a joy to watch the TWiT guys install the old Kid Pix art program. After all these years I'd forgotten about the "bomb" clear screen feature in that particular program. There was nothing better as a kid than drawing some odd monstrosity, and then blowing it up into artistic oblivion. If you've got a hankering for nostalgia join the TWiT guys for this hour-long look at a piece of our shared history.
Caturday: Pippin's iMac house
Some cats just hang out on the furniture provided by their owners, others have nice and cozy pet beds. Pippin, however, has one of the best cat domiciles we've seen so far -- a strawberry slot-loading iMac G3 that's been outfitted with some nice cushions. Pippin's owner, Ian Cobb, named his feline companion after Apple's ill-fated gaming console. There's a box for a non-feline Pippin in this photo as well; see that box marked "Atmark"? Ian also has a nice Mac Portable, what appears to be a PowerBook 170, a Newton MessagePad 2000 (or 2100), and an eMate. So this week, you're not only getting treated to a really cute feline, but also one of the best Apple collections I've seen in a long time. We'd love to see photos of your favorite feline soaking up the warmth of an Apple product, chasing a Magic Mouse, or just being a general nuisance while you're attempting to work on your Mac, iPad, or iPhone. Please let us know via our feedback page and please remember that your cat photo has to have some sort of connection to Apple or its products. For security reasons we can't accept inbound attachments, so you should host the photo (Dropbox, Flickr, iPhoto Journals, etc.) and send us the link. Many thanks to Ian Cobb for sharing this photo with us.
Caturday: Sasha hangin' with Steve
As one of the editors at TUAW said when this photo came in, "This man has won the Internet. You can all go home now." We'd love to see photos of your favorite feline soaking up the warmth of an Apple product, chasing a Magic Mouse, or just being a general nuisance while you're attempting to work on your Mac, iPad, or iPhone. Please let us know via our feedback page and please remember that your cat photo has to have some sort of connection to Apple or its products. For security reasons we can't accept inbound attachments, so you should host the photo (Dropbox, Flickr, iPhoto Journals, etc.) and send us the link. Many thanks to Richard for sharing this photo with us.
Relive the past with Cloudpaint, MacPaint in the cloud
What's more retro Mac than MacPaint? It was the application that drew many of us to the joys of Macintosh in 1984, as there was nothing like it on any other platform. The app, which was included on the boot disks, let you do bit-mapped painting in a variety of monochrome patterns. You could even copy and paste your artwork into MacWrite, an incredible advance at the time. Well, now you can enjoy the simple pleasures of MacPaint by visiting the Cloudpaint web page and giving your inner artist a workout. Cloudpaint is the brainchild of Martin Braun, who gives a polite bow in the About Cloudpaint notes to Mac originals Bill Atkinson (creator of the code for the original application) and Susan Kare (those little icons and artwork). Now enough talk; go out and play with Cloudpaint. You'll be pleased to know that it works on your iPad or iPad mini perfectly. Hat tip to Dave Mark at the Loop
Daily Update for August 27, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
World's smallest working Mac is a tiny work of art
What do you get when you take the host of the RetroMacCast (John Leake), a Raspberry Pi computer, some sheet PVC, a handful of electronics parts and a Linux-based Mac emulator? Mini Mac! Make no mistake -- this is a full working Mac running System 6. In fact, if anything, it's a bit more impressive than the original Mac as it has an Ethernet port, two USB ports and HDMI output. Inside, there are also WiFi and Bluetooth dongles attached to an internal USB hub to provide wireless connectivity. Mini Mac is made at one-third scale, with the exterior pieces lovingly cut from Sintra PVC plastic with an X-Acto knife, filed and sanded to match the bevels and curves around the screen, and then glued together. Leake mentioned during the podcast announcing Mini Mac that it took him about 12 hours to complete assembly, and that if he decides to make more of these little Macs, he'd rather use a 3D printer to create the case. Below is a very short video snippet showing Mini Mac running the After Dark screensaver. [via CultOfMac]
Retro rarity: spring cleaning unearths a Colby Walkmac
For those of us who have been around the mobile computing space for a while, the name Ken Landau is quite familiar. Landau's currently the CEO of iOS development firm mobileAge, but he's been producing software for handheld computing devices since the true birth of the industry in 1993 with the introduction of the Apple Newton MessagePad. Recently, he was doing a bit of spring cleaning and found a rarity in his basement: a Colby Walkmac. Landau's brother-in-law, David Carnoy, is an editor at CNET, so he wrote about the find in a recent post. The 13-pound Colby Walkmac was actually the first battery-operated Mac as well as the first portable Mac with an LCD display. At the time, amber displays were considered to be much more ergonomic than those nasty green screens: This machine was officially sanctioned by Apple, and used a stock Mac SE motherboard. A later model -- named the Colby SE30 after Sony threatened to sue Colby for a trade name too close to Walkman -- used the SE/30 motherboard and had an integrated keyboard (Editor's Note: I purchased two Colby SE30s for the company I was working for in 1990 because they were much faster than the Mac Portables Apple was selling). Landau ended up with the Walkmac during his tenure at Apple between 1986 and 1992. According to Carnoy, Landau was "investigating sales force automation options when Colby Systems sent him one." The price at the time the Walkmac first appeared was about $6,000, or close to $12,000 in today's dollars. There's more about Landau's find in the CNET post, as well as information about Colby Systems founder Chuck Colby, a man who could best be described as a serial inventor. You can read more about Colby on his own website, which is chock full of amazing facts like the fact that when he was 12 years old, he built what is believed to be the first commercial transistor radio.
1985 TV show discusses the Apple Macintosh
Ahhh, the early 1980s. Those heady days when the Mac was new, computer user groups were the way that you learned about your Mac (and made copies of software), and the Computer Chronicles was on TV. Today, courtesy of Wired, we get to take a look at a 1985 episode of the classic computer geek show that ran from 1981 until 2002. The episode highlights the Macintosh, "the computer for the rest of us." In this episode, host Stewart Cheifet and cohost Gary Kildall discuss the first year of the Mac's reign, the 1985 Macworld Expo, and the lack of software for the device at that point. You'll enjoy the haircuts, the suits, the beards and appearances by members of the original Mac team. The video is a half-hour long and shows you just how far we've come since those almost prehistoric days. If you're fascinated by this trip back in time, many of the episodes of Computer Chronicles are available online.
Apple museum to appear at Atlanta computer festival
Anyone who has been part of the Apple world for more than a couple of years has a collection of favorite devices, some of which are beginning to turn into true museum pieces. Atlanta-area Apple geeks will get a chance to see a huge collection of Apple devices April 20 and 21, 2013 in Roswell, Georgia at the Vintage Computer Festival Southeast (VCFSE). The Apple Pop-Up Museum is part of a much larger display, but a full 6,000-square-foot area is set aside strictly for Apple's products. The Apple space is even divided up into rooms: Pre-Apple Room Apple I Room Apple II Room Turmoil Years Room No Founders Left Room Jobs' Come Back Room Ive's Colors Room iPod / iPhone / iPad Room The Timeline Lounge Apple's Present to the Future Room Should VCFSE give you the urge to repair that Macintosh Color Classic that has been collecting dust in your basement, there will be inexpensive "introduction to soldering" classes all day, every day. Gamers are going to love the vintage game area, where classic games will be running on computers and old game consoles. An adult ticket to VCFSE is $10 for one-day admission and $15 for both days. Kids 17 years of age and younger get in free when accompanied by a parent or guardian.
A history of Apple print ads
During a lot of the early history of Apple, printed ads in magazines and newspapers were about the only way that the company could get the word out about whatever new technological advance they had just developed and wanted you to buy. Retronaut has a wonderful page full of many of those print ads from 1976 through 2002, perfect for viewing the evolution of the company from a one-product (Apple I) hobbyist-oriented firm to a consumer electronics giant seeing a resurgence under the leadership of Steve Jobs. There are a few notable slow-sellers in the ads; there's the Apple III, the Newton MessagePad, and the much-loved but star-crossed Power Mac G4 Cube. All in all, it's a fun walk down memory lane.
ThinkGeek offers retro Padintosh Case for iPad
Have an iPad 2 or third-generation iPad? Do you love retro Macs? If so, then you need to order the cool Padintosh Case for iPad (US$24.99). While it's the front of an original 1984 Mac pictured on the case, the Padintosh actually protects the back of your iPad. You can use a standard Apple Smart Cover to protect the screen on your iPad. The Padintosh is just too cool, and the use of MacPaint to make the screen of the "Mac" even more authentic is perfect. I couldn't help myself -- I just ordered one.
TUAW TV Live: Attack of the emulators on Retro Mac day
It's time to sit back with a glass or mug of your favorite beverage and enjoy an hour of time travel, back to the days of the early 1990s when dinosaurs roamed the Earth in the guise of Macs running System 7. Regretfully, I have to let you know that I will not be sitting behind the console of a state-of-the-art Quadra 950 -- instead, I'll be showing you all of the highlights of System 7.5.3 through the magic of emulation. If you decide that you'd like to try this at home, I'll be providing some helpful URLs and tips during the show. It's a lot of fun, and serves as a reminder of just how far technology has come over the past 20 years. Below, you'll find a Ustream livestream viewer and a chat tool. The chat tool allows you to participate by asking questions or making comments. You can also choose to watch the show on Justin.tv if you wish, by visiting our portal at http://justin.tv/tuawtvlive. In either case, you'll be watching the show in glorious HD! If you're driving somewhere and would like to watch TUAW TV Live while you're stuck in traffic, please don't -- keep your eyes on the road! However, if someone else is doing the driving, you can watch the show on your iPhone and join the chat by downloading the free Ustream App. It's a universal app and is wonderful on an iPad, both for viewing and participating in the chat. We'll start at about 5 PM ET, so if you're seeing a prerecorded show, be sure to refresh your browser until you see the live stream. For those of you who are not able to join us for the live edition, you'll be able to view it later this evening on our TUAW Video YouTube channel and as part of the TUAW TV Live podcast viewable in iTunes or on any of your Apple devices.
TUAW TV Live at 5 PM EDT: Retro Apple day
If you took a look at my post Monday about turning a Kindle Fire into a System 7 Mac and a Newton MessagePad, you know that I've been playing with emulators for about the last week. It's been fun, and today I'll take you on a journey to the early 1990s of Mac computing. While last weekend was wasted playing with Mini vMac on a Kindle Fire, the last few days have been all about hot Mac-on-Mac action with Basilisk II. As usual, I'll be starting the show at 5 PM EDT (2 PM PDT / 10 PM BST) sharp, and we'll take a few minutes to chat before the fun starts. To join in on the chat and watch the live streaming video, drop by TUAW about five minutes before the start time to get your instructions on how to participate. If you're unable to join us for the show, remember that you can always subscribe to the video podcast and watch the show at your leisure in iTunes or any other favorite podcatching app. The past shows are also available on the TUAW YouTube channel. The chat is on IRC: join us on server chat1.ustream.tv, chat room #tuaw-tv.
Kindle Fire transforms into a Mac Plus and Newton MessagePad
Last year when the Amazon Kindle Fire first hit the market, I bought one for US$199 to do research for a book. Since the book was published, I haven't touched the Fire at all -- until now. Based on a story I posted the other day about running an old version of the Mac OS on a Nook Simple Touch, I decided I just had to try getting Mac OS running on the Kindle Fire. I'm happy to say that the experiment was a success, and that I now have a 14 ounce equivalent of a Mac Plus running old-school apps like HyperCard and MacWrite. Later on in this post I'll also talk about how my cohort Erica Sadun found a way to turn the Kindle Fire into a Newton MessagePad. Loading the Emulator The experiment I'm about to describe uses the Mini vMac emulator for Android, a free and easily available app. You will not need to root your Kindle Fire to get this to work! If you want to emulate a color Mac, you'll want to root the Kindle Fire, get the Google Play app store running on it, and then purchase Mini vMac II ($1.99). You also need a Mac ROM image and disk images of old Mac System Software. Mini vMac isn't available in the Amazon App Store, so you'll need to download it from the link above, and then sideload it onto the Kindle Fire. How do you sideload an app? Easy. Once you've downloaded the .apk file, plug your Kindle Fire into your Mac with the USB to micro-USB cable and wait for it to mount. When it's visible on your desktop, you can double-click the Kindle to see what's in there. I created a folder on the Kindle named "Apps" and did a drag and drop of the Mini vMac application file into it. Next, I ran AndroXPlorer (free) to find the app file and install it onto the Kindle. There are more hints about sideloading of apps in Erica Sadun's Kindle Fire Sparks: Adding Third-Party Content to your Kindle Fire. Loading the ROM and System Files At this point, nothing much will happen if you try to run Mini vMac. You need a system ROM image, and in this case I was able to search around and find one. Since Apple still owns the ROMs, you must legally own the computer that you're trying to emulate (koff). Sure, I just happen to have a Mac Plus sitting next to my desk... I'm sure that there's an old Mac archive (hint) that might have the droids that you're looking for. Once you've legally acquired that ROM image, you're one step closer to booting your Kindle Mac. The file needs to be named vMac.ROM and placed into a folder named minivmac, and that folder needs to be dropped onto your Kindle Fire as well. If you launch Mini vMac at this point, you'll be welcomed with the familiar "ding" startup tone of the earliest Macs and what you used to see on those Macs when there was no startup disk -- a floppy disk icon with a flashing question mark on it. The next step is load a version of the Mac operating system onto the device. The trick here is to find disk images of any System Software up to version 7.5.5 that is in .img or .dsk format. Unfortunately, a lot of the images out there are in .toast format, and although it's easy in OS X to open those .toast files and see what's inside, I can't figure out a way to save them onto a .dsk or .img file. Looking around, I was able to find a copy of System 7.0.1 that was in the proper format, so I loaded the .dsk files into my minivmac folder and then started up Mini vMac. When running, a tap on the Kindle menu button brings up a few other buttons, one of which is Insert Disk. I used the Insert Disk button to create a new disk onto which I wanted to save the operating system and other files. By default, a 20 MB disk is created. Next, I had to go through the 21st-Century equivalent of swapping floppies. I "inserted" the Install 1 "floppy" and was rewarded with the familiar "Welcome to Macintosh" start screen as the emulated machine booted. The installer loaded, and to install the operating system, I ended up doing a lot of "floppy swaps" as the installer asked for one disk, read information from it, then wrote to the 20 MB disk I had created. At one point, I thought the installation had failed when I repeatedly had to swap disks as the Symbol font was being loaded, but perseverance paid off and the installation was successfully completed. Operating the emulated Mac At this point, I had the equivalent of a Mac Plus with no software. What's great about the emulator is that it uses the screen taps as mouse clicks and there's also a virtual Mac keyboard that appears when needed or called up. You can reset the device or interrupt it; my suggestion for shutting down the Mac is to use the Finder's Shut Down menu item to put everything away neatly. When the system prompt asks if you wish to restart the Mac, you can safely return to the Kindle Fire's home screen. Now it was time to search around for some software. Fortunately, there are some good archives available online that have plenty of old Mac apps. As I hinted about earlier, there's the Old Mac Archive or you can go to the Macintosh Garden or System 6 Hell for your retro software fix. Apple is even in on the act, with an Older Software List that includes everything from drivers, old Claris apps, and tons of drivers. The emulated Mac Plus is speedy! I am amazed at how quickly it loads everything, and it works quite well with most of the old apps. The only negative I can find right now is that there's no easy way to transfer files directly from my iMac to the Mini vMac folder on the Kindle Fire, since Mini vMac really only wants to see .dsk or .img formatted files. If the files aren't in either format, they won't load. My solution to the latter error is quite simple; I'm installing the Basilisk II classic Mac emulator on my iMac simply for the reason of running apps that can be used to create the .dsk and .img files that Mini vMac desires. I found that my fingers are a bit too big to use the emulators very well, so I've taken to using a Adonit Jot Pro stylus (US$29.99) as a way to get more accuracy. Was this entire exercise worth the effort? Hell, yeah! It's fun to boot up the old Mac on the Kindle Fire and play with some of those old apps that I remember from the mid-80s. The speed of the emulator makes it a joy to work with, and at least I'm not flipping floppy disks in and out of the drive to load software. As I was playing with the Kindle Fire Mac emulation, my publishing partner Erica Sadun started looking around and found another emulator that's in the works -- Einstein, an emulation of the Apple Newton MessagePad. Einstein on the Kindle Fire Erica found out that there was an Android 2.2 version of Einstein available for download, so she quickly got it up and running. Running Einstein on the Kindle Fire requires the Einstein .apk file (the actual Android application), a Newton ROM image, and the Einstein.rex ROM extension file. While I was writing up this post, Erica got the Newton emulator running and then sent me the necessary files over Dropbox. To me, the fact that the emulator runs so slowly on modern devices is a testament to the Newton MessagePad design team. They were able to get the Newton OS and pretty darned good handwriting recognition (at least later devices) running on quite antique equipment 20 years ago, and it was very responsive. Having a vintage working Newton MessagePad 2100 means that I really don't need to run Einstein, but it's good to see that someone appreciates the history of this groundbreaking device and operating system enough to create this incredible emulator. I did install the Lion version of the emulator, which works much faster on my iMac. If you've ever wondered why Newton owners were so upset when Apple killed the product in 1998, I suggest that you load Einstein onto your Mac and give the emulator a try. When you consider the state of PDAs and personal computers at the time, you'll appreciate just how far ahead of its time the Newton MessagePad was. So, what's the point, Steve? While some of you might see the attraction in setting up a new device to emulate some equipment and software that is now a piece of history, others are probably shaking their heads and asking "why?". For an older guy like me, part of it is just the sheer fun of being able to re-live the days of 20 to 28 years ago when the monochrome screen and startup beep of the old Macs were something new and state-of-the-art. It's the fun of seeing applications that you loved (or hated) again, and seeing just how crude those applications were compared to what we have now. I'd love to hear from others who have successfully used apps like Mini vMac, Einstein, Basilisk II, and Sheep Shaver to emulate an old Apple device on a new piece of equipment. Leave your comments below.
Mac classic OS emulator on Nook Simple Touch
So, your clueless Uncle Rob sent you a Nook Simple Touch for Christmas last year, and it's been sitting around collecting dust. Well, here's something you can do with it -- turn it into a Mac running OS 7.5.3. Last November, blogger Mike Cane had the dream of running the classic Mac OS on a Nook Simple Touch. His dream was based on the reality of someone who got the old Mac OS running on an iPhone, but he wanted to have a touch-enabled Mac that would run on a thin tablet device with 256 MB of RAM and a 600 x 800 screen. At the time of Cane's post, someone had begun work on moving the Mini vMac emulator to Android, Now, that work is complete, and Cane is the happiest camper in the world. He has a gallery of screenshots taken by Mini vMac for Android user FlyingToaster that include the flat Mac running MacPaint and a number of games. I'm excited -- this means my Kindle Fire may finally have a purpose if I can get Mini vMac for Android (free) or Mini vMac II ($1.99) running on it. First I've got to find a valid Mac ROM image, though...
