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Back in Mac time

I am in the process of turfing out old computers and equipment. It’s time consuming and painful, I’m not enjoying it but some of it is quite enlightening…

It’s always interesting and surprising to see just how much things have moved on, or not. I recently attempted to start up an ancient Mac Quadra 630, the oldest Mac I still have. It wouldn’t start. I just got the Floppy with question mark icon denoting it couldn’t find a System Folder to boot. It was also making some funny noises so I thought it best put to one side for another day.

Next it was the turn of an old c1996 Motorola StarMax MacClone If anyone remembers the dark days when Apple was happy to license MacOS to PC makers to knock out Mac clone towers? The hardware looks crude, all beige plastic and pressed steel. Industrial design from an earlier time. But having said that, the internals are well laid out and accessible. I found an old Apple keyboard from an even older Mac Color Classic The first Mac I owned and the keyboard still has a better typing feel than the current ‘flat’, minimal travel keyboards they sell today. The mouse was one of the original single button ones, still works and still feels good in the hand.

My Mac Clone ran a bunch of external SCSI disks which I used to store all my design and photography work on. SCSI was a parallel interface for accessing external disks and peripherals. The cables were thick and chunky and the whole thing looked like it meant business, lots of noisy fans. The big downside was that starting up a chain of these devices required you to remember the order of the chain. Starting at the far end and working towards the Mac before booting that plus the last one in the chain had to have a ‘terminator’ plug on it or the whole thing could expensively break or just not boot at all. For this exercise I didn’t have a terminator, somehow I’d lost or thrown them all away but I did find an Apple CD and photo disk player which was terminated. SCSI Disks were small by today’s standards in capacity but big in price and by the time this machine was moved on I’d maxed out the number of things you could hang off a SCSI chain. They must have cost a fortune.

I bought the StarMax because I needed to upgrade and the Motorola offering seemed to be good value at the time. To be fair it was a pretty efficient machine and became quite a work-horse for a few years. There was lots of expandability for drives, cards, RAM and all the things you can’t put in new Macs any more this side of the pricy MacPro.

The bottom line is, years and years on having sat on the floor with its case off it started first time and ran just like it did back in the day. As long as you remember to press the CUDA switch on the mother board after applying power but before booting. They stopped making the backup batteries some time ago and this appears to be the only way to fool it in to starting. Booting the StarMax up was really was like going back in time, even down to the Mac Boing which seems to have subtly changed over the years, or perhaps it’s just the tinny speaker in the steel box. The last time the machine had been used in earnest was around 2000 with a few jobs running up to 2005. I found a BBEdit document dating from 2009; 14 years ago, the last time I started it and back then it warned me I needed to back-up the drives as it was getting old! Now in 2023 it’s very old.

Looking at the dates between all the computers in the list for disposal I definitely got through machines more frequently than I do now. I can squeeze many more productive years out of iMacs MacMini’ and iPads now.

For the real masochists running Windows 95 in VirtualPc yikes that was a miserable experience!

The mid 90’s was also about the time I began installing Linux and BeOS. I had partitions and drives just to boot into these OS’s. I’d be interested to find those if I can remember the key sequence to boot the alternative OS’s.

Both BeOS and Linux offered great speed especially when accessing the internet via painfully slow dial-up modems. Linux had a much better TCP/IP stack at the time over Mac 7, 8, 9 series. Running KDE 1 on some variety of PPC based Linux, it was tricky, crashy but worked and I’ve been a Linux fan ever since.

To be continued…