Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 29, 2019 19:12:53 GMT -8
I know this will probably be of zero interest to most, but I think retro computing is pretty cool. And, frankly, I’ve made more than a few thousand dollars with clients the last few years providing services for those who sell parts and stuff for refurbishments. I had no idea there was such a thriving industry. Let’s go from the general to the specific and get right into it. Below is my latest retro setup.  This is a PowerMac 7200 90MHz 500MB hard drive, 4x CD-ROM. It was purchased with an extra 8MB of RAM (which went for $293.00 in January of 1996). It likely came with 8MB as ram as well. This was my main work computer until I upgraded to a PowerMac G4 1.25GHz in 2004. Eight years or so is my typical cycle. I buy them and then upgrade here and there to keep them relevant. My current 27” iMac was purchased in 2011 so it’s reaching end of life. Thanks to a buddy who turned me onto solid state drives (SSD), it’s cheated father time and been given new life. But it’s end-of-life will come and will someday retire. I’ve had this old PowerMac 7200 sitting around the office in parts since it was decommissioned. It’s a perfectly good computer. But its day has passed. Upon setting it up again (I hadn’t turned it on in years), I had totally forgotten some of the upgrades I had done. Internally, you have three PCI expansions slots. One of them I had filled with a display card so that I could have two monitors. The second I filled with a USB card. At the time, Macs had a proprietary “ADB” interface for keyboards, mice, printers, etc. With USB, I was easily able to attached a whole bunch of useful stiff, including a nice LogiTech USB mouse and an Iomega Zip 100 USB drive with removable media. Those 100MB disks eventually became fairly cheap and it was a good way to transfer large files or to backup your computer. But what blew me away was that I had totally forgotten that I had added something in the third PCI slot, a Sonnet G3 750 accelerator card. The one I have is similar to the one pictured but it had a G3 processor that ran at 400 MHz not 500. This gave the old 7200 new life. And it allowed me to upgrade the memory (the board has slots for extra ram) to 256MB. That’s a lot of ram for those days. If you’re thinking this is beginning to look like a Rube Goldberg contraption, you’re right. It is/was. But it works remarkably well. If you look to the left of the photo you’ll see an expansion SCSI hard drive and then the Iomega Zip drive just to the left of it. SCSI was the fast-access interface protocol before USB or anything like that had been born. But it was often a pain to get working right. It’s nowhere easy to use as USB. (It's not hot-swappable, for instance.) If you added another SCSI device to the chain (perhaps a scanner or another drive), you’d have to fiddle to make it work or else your computer wouldn’t start up or would just freeze. Few remember SCSI with much fondness, but when it worked it was fast for its time. The monitor in the photo is a Sony 17 Color Monitor purchased for $829.00 in October of 1996. But this was a superior monitor for the time. For a CRT, it’s relatively flat. And it’s (for a CRT) as sharp as a tack even today. That little horizontal slot below the monitor is for the floppy disk. Remember those? And below that is the CD-ROM. I don’t remember offhand if it could burn or not. I think it was read only. I was playing around with my standard suite of graphics software that is still loaded on it: Illustrator, Photoshop, PageMaker, Freehand, etc. The Sonnet 400MHz G3 upgrade made it surprisingly spritely. I would have no problem doing work on this machine today But, alas, a major operating system upgrade was in the works from Apple: OSX. And this machine wasn’t going to be able to run it. That’s the major reason why I had to upgrade. This machine is running the older MacOS 9.1. It’s a great operating system despite some of its limitations. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this other than sort of having it one display. It is really cool that everything works. I was toying with the idea of stringing Ethernet from my hub in the other room. I’m just not sure about that. Any votes on whether I should or not? |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 29, 2019 19:33:43 GMT -8
Well, I've never used Apple products. This is a matter of what I'm familiar with, much as it no doubt it is with you. Whether I would like Apple better than Windows is an interesting question given how much time I devote to cursing out anyone who has ever worked or ever will work at Microsoft.
Incidentally, I actually had a collection of Rube Goldberg's cartoons about weird inventions. It was nice to see the actual ideas. There's an annual Rube Goldberg contest at Purdue that requires teams to do complex solutions to tasks that actually work.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 29, 2019 19:44:44 GMT -8
The thing I remember about Apple computers is that even 30 years or more back, people I knew who did printing, much preferred them to Microsoft.
I have one of those Iomaga drives sitting on a shelf somewhere. I might even still have some disks. Would you like them?
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 29, 2019 20:02:28 GMT -8
I’m not a Mac evangelist, per se. I’m a retro computing evangelist. Is someone out there has a machine running Windows 3.1, let see it!
But you’d like the Mac. Windows can get the job done too. And they are a lot less expensive.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 29, 2019 20:05:47 GMT -8
Aldus PageMaker came out for the Mac at first. Most of the graphics software did. The Mac got a head start in this regard. It didn’t hurt that Windows was seen by The Golden Children as The Evil Empire. That used to be played up to obnoxious proportions.
Let me know if your drive is a USB version, Mr. Kung. I could always use a backup. You could just take a photos of the back of it where the ports are. That would be cool.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 29, 2019 20:20:31 GMT -8
I have already found three zip 100 disks. They say "formated for IBM compatibles." Is this ok? I will have to look for the actual drive. I will let you know if I find it any time soon.
I also have a Sony floppy disk drive for the 3 inch floppy disks. It is a USB drive. If you want it, let me know. It is surprisingly heavy for such a small drive.
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Brad Nelson
Administrator
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 30, 2019 7:49:39 GMT -8
Thanks, Mr. Kung. Actually, I'm full up on the Zip disks. A friend gave me a stack of them a few years ago when he retired. But if you had a USB Zip drive (not floppy disk drive) sitting around unused, I might be interested in that.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 30, 2019 7:53:16 GMT -8
Brad,
I will have to dig around and see if I still have that Zip drive. I might have given it to Goodwill and forgotten that I had.
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Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 30, 2019 8:25:04 GMT -8
Been there, done that. As to the Iomega Zip Drive (USB), I had two of those (plus a SCSI one….which I did give a way to Goodwill a couple of years ago while trying to reduce the pile). I plugged in one of the Zip drives into the retro PowerMac 7200 (super-charged with the Sonnet G3 card) and it would occasionally crash the computer. Hmmm….USB is supposed to be hot-swappable (it is). The computer should not be acting up in this way. But eventually I smeared enough chicken blood on it and got it hooked up and all seemed to be working well. And then I began to detect the faint oder of burning electronics. I figured it was just dust being cooked inside the computer after having not been turned on a for a while and thought nothing more of it. Then I went to stick in another Zip disk in the Zip drive and discovered it was very hot on one side. That’s obviously where the burning-electronics smell was coming from, and likely my problem with the computer crashing. I had another (always gotta have a backup, thus my interest in any USB Zip drive that you might have). I plugged it in and haven’t had a problem since. I threw the old one into the garbage. You notice (or rediscover) the little things when going retro. For example, I tried to plug a USB thumb drive into the PowerMac 7200 computer. That was fine, although it showed no files on the thumb drive. I rediscovered something I had forgotten about. Modern Macs (and perhaps most PCs) format thumb drives in the FAT32 file system. MacOS 9 (which the PowerMac 7200 runs) doesn’t support that format. That’s the thing about modern Macs now. Yes, you would need to buy Microsoft Word (if that’s what you wanted) to run on it. But otherwise most of the file issues are now transparent. Both Mac and PC share enough similarities that cross-platform stuff isn’t so much of an issue these days. It’s even gotten to the point where I can run Windows natively on my Mac hardware (because my Mac has “Intel Inside”).  |
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 30, 2019 11:51:49 GMT -8
Having delved into the technology of yesteryear (after all, who could possibly have time or money to keep up with the newfangled?), I got to wondering whatever happened to Iomega, the company, who made such a wonderful product (such as the Zip drive).  Zip Drive 100 I also have two of these iomega drives for my Mac.  iomega 2TB external drive (FireWire and USB interfaces) They have a 2TB capacity and come with a FireWire (another Mac connection technology) along with USB connectivity. This is not a blazing fast drive but I use it for automatic backup through a feature the Mac has called “Time Machine.” This has proven to be very useful and has saved my bacon a number of times. Suffice it to say, if you can have the computer making incremental backups automatically, you’re in business. I’ve dedicated 1TB of this drive (it’s divided into two logical partitions) to backup. I backup mainly my work files. Because it backs up only files that have changed, there’s a lot of room for incremental backups. If I want, I can go to the state of my backed-up jobs files to 4/18/2014 if I wish, accessing it easily by individual file with a folder hierarchy looking just like it did on my hard drive on that day in 2014. Easy peasy. The other 1TB partition of that drive is a clone of my boot drive that contains the entire system software as well as every bit of application software. If the main one ever goes out, I can be up and running in seconds. So I can’t say “What has Iomega done for me lately” when it’s daily (almost hourly) doing something for me. At one time Iomega also made higher capacity removable drives but they were more expensive and didn’t really catch on as well as the Zip 100. One was the Iomega Zip 250. The other was the 750.  Iomega Zip 250  Iomega Zip 750 They may have had a higher capacity disk as well. Certainly Iomega had the Bernoulli Box II which was a 5.25 inch removable disk that had 20MB of capacity (and was an upgrade to their initial 10MB Bernoulli Box). A friend I used to work with had that. The disk were expensive but they were a way to backup files and transfer them (before the internet was a practical method) to a service bureau for the outputting of negatives or to send the files directly to a commercial printer.  Iomega Bernoulli Box II These were a major step up in technology from IBM's removable Winchester drives which were prone to head crashing.  IBM 30MB Winchester Hard Drive (8" x 6" x 3") In all the times of working with a Zip 100 disk, I don’t remember one ever going bad or having any read or write issues with a file. That was a very good technology, basically the thumb drive of its day. So what ever did happen to Iomega? Are they still in business? Are they still making cool computer stuff? Strangely enough, when trying to connect to www.iomega.com I couldn’t get through. I did find a page that gives some history on them. And it seems we have a Texas venture capitalist to thank for that company: And, and in reading that history, I found the name of that other drive they had. The Jaz drive. It had a capacity up to 2GB.   The Jaz drive and disk. According to this article, Iomega is now LenovoEMC. Never heard of them. But all good things must come to an end. As A Look Back at the Fading Glory of Iomega noted: And, oh, geez, I do remember this issue: I don’t recall that ever happening to me (although it’s not impossible that it did). Obviously one of the drives I had basically burnt itself up recently so I guess they did have some issues. But my experience of them was usually good. Does the EMC Corporation (which bought Iomega in 20o8) still exist? Well, it’s now Dell EMC. |
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 30, 2019 15:14:54 GMT -8
There’s a slightly wacky guy named Dave who does an electronics blog: EEV Blog. He named his son “Sagan” so you know which side of the political spectrum he’s coming from. But he does do some interesting stuff such as a teardown of The World’s Most Expensive Hard DriveThat monster is from the late 70’s or early 80’s, likely used in a big banking institution or something like that. Consider that today you can get a 256GB flash drive for $31.00. Look how tiny that one is. |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 30, 2019 15:53:27 GMT -8
Disk packs were common then. In one of my CS courses, I had to work up the relevant data for storing things both on magnetic tape and magnetic disks, such as separations between files. One fellow programmer at Humana had a crashed disk as some sort of memento. And you're right that their capacity was nothing compared to today's drives, even for "monster" computers such as the CDC 6500 they had at Purdue.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 31, 2019 8:35:40 GMT -8
Here’s another totally useless project. This origins of this laptop have a sort of “A guy walks into a bar” angle to it. A guy walks into my office for some reason. I don’t remember what. But he had a Macintosh PowerBookG3 (aka “Wallstreet,” introduced in 1998, $2299.00) with him. It’s one of their most interesting looking laptops and I always wanted to own one but it never made sense price-wise to do so. Nor did I really need a laptop  This one is known for having an upside-down logo. Which is the right way up anyway, so it looks right when the lid is open or closed? That issues has been settled: “Right-side-up” is if the logo is not upside-down when the lid is open.  [ Original] The body of it is in really good shape. It functions more as a museum piece. But it does work. I’ve not only got it loaded up with a full suite of software but not long after I bought it, I upgraded the internals to something a little faster. So this guy who walks in (for reasons I don’t remember) has this laptop under his arm. I say something like “Oh, cool. I’ve always liked those.” He said his was for sale. How much? Fifty bucks. I had him turn it on. It has its weak points. The backlight bulb on this screen is a little weak. He had the software so screwed up, I think it would barely start. If fixed that which gave me some time to think about it. I offered him $25.00 and he took it.   This thing has a gazillion connection ports on the back (including SCSI). There’s also expansion slots on the left side for 2 Type II PC cards or one Type III card. Despite the gazillion ports, this was before USB. I have since (as you can see) added a Type III USB card which gives me two USB ports. One is being used for a more modern Apple mouse. It’s got 384MB of RAM in it. I don’t remember if I upgraded the RAM when installing the faster processor card. I may have. But it’s actually pretty snappy. The screen, however, is definitely a retro “passive matrix display” which had slow refresh rates. The mouse leaves ghostly trails. This would sson be replaced by the TFT displays. The details here note that the battery on the left side can be hot-swapped out for “expansions modules.” I’m not sure what those modules might be. According to this, you could swap in a hard drive, floppy drive, DVD-ROM, SuperDisk, or Zip drive for the battery. The computer does come with a 20X CD-ROM drive on the right side. You can add an external monitor (haven’t tried that yet, I don’t think) but it only mirrors the display). |
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 1, 2019 7:31:31 GMT -8
I’ve got a couple retro computers set up in the back room. None of them have wireless. So just to play around with them in regards to connecting to the internet, I bought this 50 ft. Cat 6 Ethernet Cable on Amazon. And that’s the real take-away from this post. I’d never run across this flat-wired Ethernet cable before. It’s great. This even comes with nail-down fasteners for stringing it along the wall. For 10 bucks, I always have use for a 50 ft. length of Ethernet. As for the practicality of the internet and retro computers, that’s where you hit a divide. Retro gaming is alive and well — on the original hardware, emulators, or special-built hardware with often hundreds of games built in. There is a timeless playability to many of these games on whatever system. But, alas, the internet itself is such a moving target, there is no web browser for the Macintosh (running OS 9) that is of an practical use. You can certainly connect to the internet but most websites (due to reliance on all kinds of fancy javascript and such) either won’t show correctly or, more often, will not come up at all. And now that I remember it, it was probably the need to stay connected to the internet that drove some of my upgrades, not the need for a faster processor. The old Windows XP computer connects find and I have one I use off an on. There are browsers that still exist (FireFox is one) that do a good enough job. But the security leaks with that operating system are likely so rampant, I wouldn’t recommend it for anything but casual browsing. But I love the flat Ethernet cable. Check it out. |
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 1, 2019 8:03:05 GMT -8
I have never seen a flat ethernet cable before. I can see how that would be useful in a home.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 12, 2020 12:58:21 GMT -8
I found a game for my old Mac called " Mah Jong Parlour." Like a lot of people, I've played the solo version commonly known as Mahjong where you play it like solitaire, trying to uncover the entire stack of tiles. But this is the real four-player version. And I found a wonderful set of three videos by this German Asian lady that goes a long way to explaining the game. I'm just curious is anyone else plays it and if they have any good insights on how to learn to play it....other than just practice, which I mean to do. But first I have to understand the game. I'm going to watch that third video in the series again, for sure, before starting. |
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 12, 2020 13:40:48 GMT -8
This game is very popular in Asia, particularly amongst the Chinese. I have seen a lot of it played, but have never played it myself. Sadly, I can't help you there.
Interestingly, the first time I saw Mah Jong played was in the home of a Jewish friend of my father. For some reason, it is or was popular among American Jewish women.
I wonder if that German lady is originally Korean.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 12, 2020 14:34:29 GMT -8
I assumed she was Chinese. Most of how to play the game is in the third video. The first two basically are about setting up the game.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 12, 2020 14:53:57 GMT -8
That would be a good assumption, given that the Chinese are the big Mahjong players. But there is something about her look and accent that makes me wonder if she might be Korea. At least northern Chinese from the area around North Korea.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 13, 2020 8:40:57 GMT -8
She gives a line (one that I think I've heard before): There are 1000 million Chinese. 900 million of them are playing May Jong. The other 100 are learning how.
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