Dan Knight
- 2007.07.18
Fill Apple's Gaping Hole Yourself
Adam copied me an email he sent to Tommy Thomas in response to
The Gaping Hole in Apple's Desktop
Line.
Hello My Friend,
While I do agree with you to some extent, I believe that this is
more hype than a outright necessity, and here's why. Apple is all
about being simple, from their actual products and services, to
their lineup. Until the mini
splashed onto the scene, Apple's product matrix was a clean little
quadrant - Consumer Portable, Consumer Desktop, Professional
Portable, Professional Desktop. Very nice indeed.
While the argument can be made for a "pro-sumer" machine, as you
have rather nicely, it doesn't fit in with the general groups into
which most people fall. One group of people is those who buy a
machine, never upgrade it, and buy a new one a few years down the
road. The people don't really care about processor speed, dedicated
graphics, etc., and only ever upgrade the RAM and/or hard drive
when a tech-savvy "a.k.a. geek" friend/family member comes along
and suggests such. The other group mainly consists of those who
make their livelihood on raw processing power and the ability to
store massive amounts of data on their computer.
Then there are people like you and I (those tech savvy, geeky,
individuals), whose livelihood does not necessarily depend super
fast computers, but like being able to tinker with, upgrade, and
extend the useful lives of our computers. We can't justify the cost
and/or power of a Mac Pro, yet the
consumer machines leave us wanting a little bit more, hence we feel
our needs are not being catered to. However, in the grand scheme of
things I do believe we are in the minority. Despite this, our
rather unique position provides a caveat....
From this point on, things get confidential! Although Apple does
not give us the machine we so desire, their switch to Intel has
finally given us an advantage, one which I am positive those in the
company surely realized. Since Apple did not give me what I wanted,
I finally decided to just do it myself!
I had an old B&W tower that had
recently passed to the great computer repository in the sky. It
really was too old to spend the money needed to repair it, so I was
resigned to the fact of taking the old gal to the dump. It was just
as I was putting her in the back of our Grand Wagoneer when the
whole idea dawned on me. I went online that night, ordered all the
parts I needed through PriceWatch vendors, as well as a
secondhand copy Intel-Tiger off of eBay. A week later, after some
creative sawzaw surgery and a little BIOS/EIF tomfoolery, I had
myself a sleeper B&W Mactel, and my goodness is she fast! She's
sporting a 2.4 GHz "Conroe" Core 2 Duo, 2 GB of RAM, 128 MB
graphics, and a 160 GB, 7200 rpm drive, all totaled everything came
in at a little more than $600!
Granted, I don't get a warranty or tech support, and I realize
some people may have ethical/legal issues doing something like
this, but I am of the mindset that I purchase the license, so I can
darn well install it on whatever machine I so choose.
My point of all this is this - those who feel left out by
Apple's product line are the very same people capable of doing this
very same thing. Now I realize you can't go online and suggest that
people do this, but they can still do this nonetheless! After a
little bit of money, work, and ingenuity, I was able to transform a
once glorious machine into a brand new one. Best yet, if Mr. Jobs
were to ever come to my home (a stretch of the imagination, I
know), he would be none the wiser!
Best wishes and have a wonderful weekend!
Adam
Adam,
Thanks for writing. Yes, we're aware that there's
quite an underground in hacking stock PCs to run Mac OS X.
This is especially popular in niches Apple has ignored - tablet
computers, ultralight notebooks, and midrange desktops. As far as
I'm concerned, once you've paid for a licensed copy of the OS, it's
yours to use as you please - and that goes equally for running
Vista Home in a virtualized environment.
What Tommy and a lot of us are looking for is a
full-fledged Apple solution, not a cobbled together system. We want
something that works out of the box, no geeky hacking necessary.
And we believe that there is a real market for such a product.
As long as Apple ignores these market segments,
there will be a legitimate reason for people to hack OS X and
get it running on an ultralight Sony VAIO, a Toshiba tablet PC, or
a desktop they've put together for their own use.
Dan
Using Zip Drives to Move Data Between Old Macs
and New
Aleta Watson writes:
I've move data using Zip disks, with a SCSI Zip drive on my
older computers, and a USB Zip drive on my newer computers. I have
accumulated lots of hardware (since using Macs in 1985), so I have
both SCSI and USB Zip drives. Zip disks work well for the amount of
data transferred from older computers.
Aleta,
Thanks for the suggestion. I used to use Zips
constantly in the old days and even have my own SCSI and USB Zip
drive - but it never occurred to me!
Dan
Re: Moving Data from an Old PowerBook to a New
Mac
Chris Eastland follows up on to Moving Data from an Old PowerBook to a New
Mac:
Thanks Dan,
What kind of a Mac might act as the "intermediate" here?
I will probably go with Zip, as I have a few kicking around.
Finding the drive is the hard part - eBay? Also, would a 100 MB Zip
connect with my PowerBook? I would most likely need a vintage one,
right?
Finally, on a related note, I have a bunch of floppies that were
originally IBM 1.44 MB. I used them, in the late nineties, with one
of the original Sony Mavica floppy drive digital cameras:
<
http://chriseastland.blogspot.com/2007/07/two-self-portraits-on-train.html>
Now, when I use a SmartDisk USB floppy drive to view the pics,
it not only takes ages for them to load, but also some of the
pictures are completely dead. I pray that this is a problem with
the reader and not the data. Any ideas as to what may be
going on here? I am told by the SmartDisk website that the drive
requires no additional software: plug and play.
It seems insane that 99 percent of the files are eternally
ruined.
Any ideas?
Thanks for your time Dan.
Chris,
An "intermediate" Mac could be a Mac IIcx or IIci
with a NuBus ethernet card - very cheap when you can find them,
although you will need a keyboard, mouse, and monitor as well.
eBay may be a good source for a SCSI Zip drive to
use with your PowerBook (avoid the combination parallel port/SCSI
Zip drive, as many Mac users have reported problems with them), as
well as the special SCSI cable or adapter to connect to the
PowerBook's unique SCSI port (unique to PowerBooks, that is). You
might also try our Swap List.
I'm not familiar with the old floppy Mavica, but
my understanding is that it uses standard DOS format floppies. If
the disks are unreadable in the SuperDisk, try them in another
computer. If that fails, the images are probably history.
Dan
Newer Imation SuperDisks Work
with OS X
Cory Tobin writes:
Dan, I think you misunderstood Randy's email.
I'm currently frankensteining a bunch of my old Macs right now
(reliving my days of yore, now all I need are my 2400 baud modem
and my Hermes BBS back up and in business, har) and have been
moving data from my Power Mac G5 to my Power Mac 7600, Quadra 650, and Mac IIci I'm toying with. Above we've
established he's going 800K DD floppy -> CD.
Now you were correct in saying the DD drive in the original SE
won't recognize the high density ones. But all 1.44 meg floppy
drives are backwards compatible with the double density 800K disks.
If I remember correctly, they are not compatible with the
single sided 400k floppies from the pre-Plus days. Also, the DD
floppies don't have the high density hole punched on the other
side, so that's how the parents' Power Mac will (actually the only
way) it'll recognize its size. If someone mistakingly punched the
HD hole into the 800K floppy, then Randy would need to cover
it up.
My 7600 with its original 1996 high density floppy drive will
joyfully read my double sided disks (and even write images to them,
I just floppy'd the 800K version of System 7.0.0). In fact, it was
the easier way for me to move the data to my IIci, which of course
lacks a CD drive and me lacking any usable external SCSI storage (I
need a Centronics-style terminator to use my Jaz drive, currently
don't have one). My first instinct was to burn a CD, which I did.
Problem is, Toast 8 isn't the happiest at making HFS standard
volumes depending on the files you have in the disc you're making
(it scans each file and gets pissy on some, not sure if it's
UniCode translation issues or what, I had to many files to deal
with using process of elimination). The way around that was longer
and specific, using Compact Pro to make self extracting archives.
Reason being, I noticed that some of my uncompressed items and even
some compressed StuffIt archives were getting their resource forks
stripped even using the proper file system (HFS Standard) in Toast.
I'm running 7.6.1 on the 7600 (surprisingly it works perfectly fine
with a Sonnet 375 MHz G3 upgrade with System 7.6.1, though I
haven't popped in the cache software yet) so I cannot read HFS
Extended/Plus volumes.
But while I was dealing with all that, I was using my Imation
USB SuperDisk to put segmented self-extracting Compact Pro
archives of my goodies onto floppy. But wait, you say those Imation
drives won't work under OS X? Actually, I thought the same
with the first one I got from eBay. Turns out the earlier ones, the
big fat Imation drives that look like clear and Bondi blue Disk
Images (Finder-style ones) are apparently natively parallel while
the provided cable (that big funky looking thing) is the
parallel->USB adapter/cable combination. That's the main (and
probably only) reason there were even OS 8/9 drivers made for it.
It's not a true USB Mass Storage (heh, mass storage, on a floppy ;)
device - not even a true USB device - so the driver is actually for
the cable/adapter and, unfortunately, Imation never made an
OS X driver and it will not function under OS X (well,
Tiger for me). That's with the power supply plugged in, even. So
where am I going with this? Well, another eBay auction I happened
upon included yet another Imation SuperDisk drive, yippee. I wanted
the software, so I bid and won.
Turns out the Imation drive supplied was the newer, slimmer
model that was natively USB. Cable integrated, no drivers
needed. How do I know? I've been using it for over a month with my
Power Mac G5, plugged into the front USB 2.0 port, and moving my
68k and old PPC goodies to and fro. Thanks partially to Spotlight,
mounting and unmounting of the USB floppies (which are considered
regular removable media, not floppy disks, by Mac OS X) takes
much much longer than usual. Usually 10 seconds or more until an
inserted disk (800K or 1.44 meg) appears in the Finder. Much longer
than that to eject, sometimes including a message about the volume
still being in use (Spotlight) and unable to be ejected. A second
eject does it, but still about 10 or more seconds until it's truly
unmounted and safe to eject without the USB Disconnect message.
Yeah, that was a lot, but this really should help lotsa folks.
I'm rebuilding my collection of Classic Mac software (mostly the
games but also utilities and HyperCard junk), and I've practically
got all the necessary compression and imaging software if people
need (I mean I even found a copy of DART 1.5.3, remember that?
First compressed disk images!), feel free to utilize me as a
resource. The Classic Mac shall never die; these machines will
probably outlast my PM G5 and PM G3. Their old SCSI drives have
already outlived the SCSI and IDE drives I had in the G3 that's now
a SATA beast. Actually, it seems disk I/O is the main bottleneck on
the 100 MHz bus machines. It runs 10.4.10 like a dream with a gig
of RAM and is no longer a total slow poke like it used to be (under
the same conditions, but running off the ATA/33 bus).
For splits and grins, the three "happy" machines right now
are:
- Mac IIci 8/210 MB, Radius
Rocket 25 with 32 megs of interleaved RAM, RasterOps Prism GT video card, Asante
serial/BNC/RJ-45 ethernet card. Running System 7.1 with System
Update 3.0, but the Rocket seems to not be too happy with it, going
to try 7.0.1 and keep backtracking down to 6.0.8 til I find its
happiest spot (for my games, of course!).
- Quadra 650 36/1 GB, has a tray-loading CD-ROM in it,
unfortunately all the NuBus slots are empty. It's currently running
System 7.1 with System Update 3.0, basically what it would have
originally shipped with. I'm going to try System 7.1.1 Pro on it to
bring me back memories of PowerTalk.
- Power Mac 7600/132, 544/4 GB, running System 7.6.1, Sonnet
Technologies 375 MHz G3 Crescendo card. Its PCI slots are empty for
the time being.
With a standard extension set, the Quadra boots fully from the
Happy Mac to the Finder in about four seconds. The IIci, even with
the double-reboot due to the Radius Rocket, still boots faster than
my Power Mac G5 (which is booting from a RAID 0 off of a PCI card).
What a difference time makes; networking and communication have
really bloated our operating systems, don't ya think?
Last tidbit, After Dark is
still my all-time favorite screen saver. Nostalgic modules of yore!
That's all for now, hope the info helps, Dan. Oh yeah, and forward
all old Mac gear ya don't want to me ;)
-C
Cory,
Thanks for writing. Randy was reporting two
problems - being unable to read 800K floppies with his USB floppy
drive and the Mac SE no recognizing high-density floppies in its
800K drive, offering to reformat them, and then formatting them
using the 800K format that his USB floppy can't read.
His parents' Power Mac should be able to read the
800K floppies, but if they are created on high-density disks, he
needs to cover the HD hole or the Power Mac will not recognize them
and will want to format them - just like the SE.
The other half of the problem is that vintage Macs
and modern Macs don't share any ports. In the old days we had SCSI
for drives, ADB for mice and keyboards, Apple Serial for printers
and LocalTalk. Today we have FireWire and USB for drives, USB for
mice and keyboards and printers, and ethernet for networking. By
using an intermediate Mac with a HD floppy drive, Randy can copy
his files from an 800K disk that the USB floppy drive can't read to
a 1.4M disk that it can.
Sounds like you have some nice computer systems up
and running.
Dan
Networking Power Mac 9.1 and 9.2 Machines
Ken Freeman writes:
How can I network the two together?
Where can I find the old AppleTalk connector?
Also, where can I find a power cord for the Apple AirPort Base
Station (circular base with power, USB, ethernet ports)?
On an iBook G4 that starts having classic start up issues, is it
safe to reinstall 9.2 from the original disc on the iBook that has
all my applications and data? I have nearly 30 Gigs of stuff on
this 40 gig hard drive, and my classic start up now hangs up and
freezes.
I was told to remove the System Folder reinstall 9.2, and
reboot. Is that safe for my other files?
Keep the Focus on whose you are,
Ken Freeman
Ken,
Any Mac running OS 9.1 or 9.2 should have ethernet
as a standard feature, so there should be no need for the much
slower AppleTalk connectors. First generation Power Macs has an
AAUI port on the back - marked <··> - and
require an AAUI-to-ethernet adapter. You should be able to find
both on our Swap List, which might
also be able to help you with the power cord for the AirPort Base
Station.
I would recommend against removing your System
Folder completely, as there are probably some preferences, fonts,
and other things you'll want to keep. Instead, open the System
Folder and delete Finder and System, then run the installer. You
only want to completely delete the System Folder if it doesn't work
after that.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
