hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3224.txt

Episode: 3224
Title: HPR3224: Adventures in Retrocomputing with the Mac Plus
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3224/hpr3224.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:07:48

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3224 for Thursday 10th of December 2020.
Today's show is entitled, Adventure in Retro Computing with the Mac Plus and is part of the series Mental Health.
It is hosted by Port Work and is about 25 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is, I talk more about my hobby with retro computing and then green sleeves.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Good day, good listener of Hacker Public Radio and welcome back to the Paul Quark Show.
Today I'm going to talk about my recent adventures in retro computing.
But first, I'd like to answer some questions about this hobby.
Number one is, why do I have all these old computers?
Well, you see, it's like this.
Back in the 1980s, after watching a typical 80s movie like, say, Ferris Bueller's Day Off or Back to the Future,
my friends and I would always sit around and talk about what we do if we had a million dollars,
and I thought it'd be a good idea to have a room full of computers just to play with.
I remember walking into a computer store as a kid and telling the sales guy how lucky he was
to get to spend all day with those great computers.
Of course, he would remind me that it would be cooler if they were his and if he didn't
have to sell them, and maybe that plan of the seed.
Some of my friends would ask me, what would I do with all those computers?
Well, I'd just play with them.
Do whatever I wanted with them.
If I was rich, I wouldn't have to do anything productive with them now would I?
I mean, I could have if I really wanted to, but I always thought that the point of the question
was to figure out how to spend my leisure time.
I also knew I wanted a really fast hybrid bicycle with lots of gears so I could spend my time
as a millionaire riding my cool bike and playing with my cool computers.
I think I had some pretty good ideas at the time.
As it turns out, I didn't need a million dollars to have those cool computers I wanted in the 1980s,
because time took care of that for me.
Now, this is a great hobby for me because not only does it provide me with a sense of joy and
accomplishment, it's also something I can dip into and out of.
Life gets real busy sometimes, so it's nice to have a hobby that I can leave for months at a time
and then come back to it, especially when the warmer weather is better suited for bicycle rides.
I think it's also probably better for the hardware not to get used too often,
but just enough to keep things moving.
The other question is, why am I still using Iomega zip discs?
To be honest, this was all about keeping things within a budget.
At the time, I decided to undertake a project preserving my library of Amiga jump discs,
because the company behind them seemed to fall off the face of the earth,
and I couldn't get in touch with anyone about replacements.
I scored a lifetime supply of unopened brand new Iomega zip discs for free from the local
community college, so I kept some for myself and gave the rest away at the free table at
World of Commodore that year. At around the same time, I found a working scuzzy Iomega zip drive
at the local thrift store for a few bucks. I had just bought an Amiga 2000 the year before for
50 bucks and put in an A2090 controller card that I had got for free many years before.
The zip disc made it easy to transfer those images between my Amiga and my desktop PC.
The UAE emulator would mount and read those discs, and I mounted a directory as a second disc
in the emulator to simply copy the images over. I had also acquired a Mac plus years ago,
but never got around to doing much with it besides getting a genuine one-button mouse and system
software discs. I decided to change that after the last podcast. I discovered that some people
have made complete Iomega disc images of old abandoned versions of the Mac OS, including 608,
with other abandoned software included. Now, I'm not going to leave links in the show notes because
I think we all know abandon where is murky waters in some regions of planet earth.
The zip drive from IPC is an IDE version salvage from an old compact. My computer at the time used
what we now call a parallel ATA connection. While I do have a PCIS scuzzy card, I prefer not
moving the external zip drive around too much for fear of inducing the click of death. Also,
there's room in the tower case for an internal drive, so why not? I've held onto that old computer
just so I could have use of that zip drive, but it has always been my goal to install it in my
current desktop PC. As much as I'd like to have computers around me, I'd like them to be of a
certain era, and that era is in the 1980s. I'm on a mission to get rid of old stuff I don't want
or need anymore, and getting that zip drive working on my modern Linux machine means I can get rid
of that old computer. At first, I tried to SATA to PATA adapter, but that didn't seem to want to
work with the zip drive. Finally, I decided to buy a cheap PCI Express parallel ATA IDE controller
card, and that did the trick. So the first thing I did was try loading in my Miga Workbench zip
disk I had made years ago to try to load that into FS UAE, but my old trick of mounting the zip
disk as an Miga drive wasn't there, like I mentioned in the previous podcast. Now that I think
about it, that might have been with Win UAE since I did the jump disk preservation project
before I really got in the Linux. After a bit of research, I found out that support for the
MigaFast file system is now baked into the Linux kernel. So I mounted it using the mount command
with the AFFS operator, and then I could see the Miga partitions on the zip disk fine. Good,
now we're up to speed on the Miga side, now it's time to get the Macintosh a little love.
So I started by downloading System 608 and 701. Both of them were Iomega zip disk images.
I used Berlana Etcher to flash these images to the zip disk, and the process could not have been
easier. I plugged in the zip drive, turned it on, and nothing, just a floppy disk icon in the middle
of the screen with the flashing question mark. I checked my connections and made sure the termination
was turned on. I thought it was, so I put my glasses on to be certain, and then realized that
on was down for this switch, so I had it backwards. So I turned the termination on, and it booted
straight in the Mac OS. I immediately went into the games folder, found Lemmings, and launched it.
As soon as I pressed the mouse button to start level 1, I got a Mac bomb, with an unimplemented trap
error. I decided to do some digging, and found out that only one megabyte of RAM was recognized.
This is a problem, because in order to run a more functional operating system like 701 through
to 755, I'm going to need the full four megabytes. Now I do remember opening this Mac at one time
and doing something with the memory, but this was a case where my own memory may have failed.
When I opened it, I found that the resistor that should have been cut for the four megabyte
upgrade wasn't cut, so I cut it. I booted again, but the Mac behaved very strangely, showing a
disk on a black screen and never showing the user interface even after going through the boot-up
procedure. I put my glasses back on and checked the modules, and it turned out that these were
256K modules. One was different from the other three, so maybe what I did was to replace a defective
sim stick with a good one. Now that I cut the resistor, I figured I might as well commit and take
it up to the full four megabytes. After looking around, I realized the expansion card of my Amiga 2000
was populated with 832 pin 1 megabyte sim modules. I could take half of them, and the Amiga would
still have five megabytes in total, which is okay, because my A288 PC card of my Amiga only works
if the memory is configured for six megabytes or less. I really don't think the downgrade to the
Amiga is going to make it any less functional since 8 megabytes was really uncommon in the 1980s,
much less four megabytes. Then I turned the Mac on, and it took a lot longer to boot up, presumably
because it's taking longer to perform a memory check. It was a little unnerving to look at a blank
gray screen for so long, and just when I was about to hit the power button, I got the smiling Mac,
and the zip drive spun up and loaded everything just fine. Now, when working with the computer
of this age, the 100 megabyte zip drive is ideal, I think. Consider the Mac SC, which was introduced
in 1987, that came with a 20 or a 40 megabyte hard drive. Even at the end of the decade, an 80 megabyte
hard drive was top of the line. Unlike parallel port Iomega zip drives, scuzzy zip drives, and its
IDE counterpart, they're fast. Almost as fast as a real hard drive from back in the day,
with a maximum data transfer rate of 1.4 megabytes per second. Okay, maybe not quite as fast as a hard
drive, but a lot faster than a floppy, and right up there with an 8 times speed CD-ROM drive.
So these behave just like a real hard drive, including the ability to create partitions.
So for example, my workbench 1.3 zip disk for my Amiga is split into 250 megabyte partitions.
One partition is my workbench system partition. The other is an extras partition,
which made it easy to represent the workbench and extra disks that came with an Amiga system
and to map them accordingly. So now I'm going to come clean and tell you that I was an Amiga guy
back in the days. The Mac Plus was being sold. I read all the magazines, new all the specs,
visited computer stores to try out the hardware, and by gosh, I knew the Amiga was the greatest
computer on the face of the earth. I just could not understand why someone would spend more money
on an inferior Macintosh. When I rescued my Mac Plus in the late 1990s, my intent was to see just
how bad it was up against my Amiga and to try to understand why the Macintosh became such an icon
in our culture. To do this, I had to put myself in someone else's shoes, which is easier said than
I had to take myself back to a time before I owned my first computer and imagine myself in different
circumstances. Suppose, for example, that instead of being an impression of a 12-year-old kid,
I was a 21-year-old college student or maybe a 30-year-old professional. Imagine if I had grown up
in an environment where the only computer I ever used was a pocket calculator. Computers offered
demonstrable advantages. Modern work processors were superior to the typewriters I would have been
using and the power and utility of the spreadsheet goes well beyond simple budgeting. Then there were
the games which became really popular because their alternative, which was television programming,
was really crap with bad jokes, candle-aff tracks, and a never-ending stream of annoying commercials.
The online world also delivered the promise of up-to-the-minute news and stock quotes with various
online services. A young person without a computer would become out of touch with the rest of the
world in due time, so the case for owning a computer was pretty clear and it's easy to understand
why home computers became so popular in the 1980s. So that only leaves one question. Why Mac?
When I think back to those early days, it wasn't very easy to learn how to use a computer.
If you're a lucky, you had a friend who knew a few things about computers who could teach you,
but by and large, the computer enthusiasts at the time tended to stick to their clicks. A computer
back then required a large desk and was complicated enough with all the wires and cords that you
wouldn't just temporarily set it up at a kitchen table or writing desk like you would a typewriter.
Rather, it would occupy a fairly large place like a home hi-fi system or television and VCR
and be permanently on display. A student living in a tiny dorm room would certainly struggle with
even an Amiga 500 due to the fact that even small-color monitors would take up a lot of space
because they needed as much space behind them as they needed side to side. So here would have been
two problems that needed to be solved before I could have bought a computer. I had to find
or create a space for it and I had to learn how to use it. It's easy to forget about these things
that I had learned about my computer, but imagine being a student already crushed with a ton of
things to learn and then suddenly I would also need to learn how to use a computer. A busy
professional may not even have the time to learn how to use a computer properly. I came to realize
that as a 12-year-old boy, I could have been very flexible in how I was going to live my life.
I had all summer to learn about computers and how they worked because I had no other
responsibilities besides delivering the newspapers in my neighborhood. I didn't own any furniture
yet on my own and so as I matured, I could make that choice to buy a computer desk instead of
a writing desk. Today I have my Mac Plus set up right next to my Amiga 2000 and it immediately
becomes clear that the Amiga 2000 looks very imposing while the Mac Plus quietly blends in.
I can set up my Mac Plus on my writing desk quite comfortably and use it. This is the same writing
desk I struggled to set up my VIC-20 on. A good writing desk made out of solid wood, not the glue
and sawdust manufacture computer desk a traditional computer would have demanded. This is because
monochrome monitors didn't need as much depth as color monitors needed and the max monitor was
smaller than most while still delivering a very usable resolution of 512x342 pixels. The monitor
is still stacked on top of the disk drive and motherboard which does put the monitor at an
ergonomically correct height but the components were designed to fit a small footprint.
So while the Mac Plus was a computer of compromises, these compromises are what actually made it a
better computer. A person buying a Mac Plus over an Amiga Atari or PC in the 1980s didn't have to
go out to buy a new furniture for their new computer nor did they have to rearrange their home,
apartment or dorm room to set up a functional workstation area. Nor did they need to read a
thick user's manual or take a night school course in computers to learn how to use it. They could
bypass learning a bunch of commands and get straight to the business of learning how to use the
applications that they wanted to use. Now let's think about those applications and how they looked
on the screen. One of the issues we had to deal with when it came to computers in the 80s was
the Amiga's monitor was effectively a television with the same 50 or 60 hertz refresh rate depending
on where you were in the world. This made it great for doing video work and it was fantastic for
video games but there was a barely perceptible flicker that was made more pronounced with the
dark horizontal lines that would appear across a blank light colored window. For this reason,
many people myself included preferred a dark screen background with light colored text.
Some even resorted to sticking a mesh overlay on top of their monitor screen to help reduce the
eye strain. It's also probably the reason why Commodore included a composite port on the Amiga
so one could connect the monochrome monitor. Monochrome monitors in the 80s didn't have these lines
and they didn't have a noticeable flicker. In contrast to the Amiga's display, the Mac Plus is
crisp and solid. When it came to productivity, most printers couldn't even print color so this is
actually a pretty smart compromise. I now believe my aversion to the Mac back in those days
must have been similar to the reaction to the automatic transmission when it was introduced to a
world that only knew how to manually shift gears. Someone like me would not have seen it as liberating
people from the task of shifting gears and freeing us from the demands of the machine. I would see
it as a loss of control. However, to the person who never had the time or the opportunity to learn
to shift their own gears, the automatic transmission would have been very liberating. We have taken
the time to learn what we've learned in order to use these machines and so it's easy to become
resentful as something that can give another person similar capabilities without needing to put
in the time or effort to learn. As it turns out, many people who bought an early Mac were using
their own valuable time learning something else that had greater value to them. Perhaps they were
studying law and seeing a Mac in the office of a professional sent a signal to everyone that
they're so focused on their profession that they have no time to learn how to use a computer.
This is how the Macintosh achieved its place as a status symbol and could demand such a high price
take. Sure, computers were a status symbol in and of themselves, but the Mac was clearly a
functional status symbol. Or perhaps the buyer of the Macintosh discovered the need to live in
minimalist lifestyle. For some people, it is important for them to only own things that bring
value to their lives. Steve Jobs himself was a minimalist and this Mac was speaking to his kind
of people. When you think about it, if you eliminate everything that is unnecessary in your life,
it becomes much easier to focus on what is needed for your ideas of first success. While I believe
that Steve Jobs may have been a deeply flawed man, his minimalist ideals were the antithesis to
the absurd excess that represented everything that was wrong in the 1980s. Over the decades,
we've seen the Mac capture the market of creative artistic people, and now it's easy to see why.
To become great at any aspect of the creative arts, whether it's music, photography, graphics,
it takes a considerable amount of time and effort for someone to become great at what they do.
I know this all too well, even with a professional camera and many years of experience,
my photographs today still don't come close to those of a season professional. Their reason for
paying for professional tools like Lightroom are the same reasons why I would only want to use
professional tools in my trade. We both want to deliver a high quality product in as little time
as possible and good tools contribute to an efficient workflow. There are elements of dark table
that would be familiar to a seasoned graphics artist that I know nothing about, but I can compile
a kernel for whatever that's worth. Even in my own life, I question my need for a computer.
I didn't need one to complete my three years of trade school, and even today, I'd rather go for
a long bike ride or take my camera on a hiking expedition if the weather's fair. So now we've come
to the real reason why I have this collection of computers from the era of my teenage years.
It started out as a thought experiment that has grown to help me to open my mind and see things from
different perspectives. I finally got Lemmings to run on the Mac Plus, and the gameplay was dreadful.
Honestly, it's better on a Commodore 64. Then again, the type of person who would buy a Mac
back then might not have had enough time for video games, or maybe they already owned a video game
console, or maybe the strategy and textile games that play very well on this computer were more to
their tastes. Whatever the case may be, I can now see the reasons why the Mac was so revolutionary,
and just like that, I indoctrinated myself into the Cult of Mac. Well, not really, because Apple
today is not the same revolutionary company that made the Mac Plus. See, the original Mac Plus was
introduced in 1986, and sold well into the year 1990 as a consumer level premium computer.
It was built to last, and this shows. The last supported OS for this Mac was System 7.5.5,
which was released 10 years after the Mac Plus was introduced. I tried Jigsaw running System 7.5
on my Mac Plus, and it ran just fine. It really justifies a higher price tag considering the build
quality and length of support. I think we know that today's Apple isn't like that. The closest
thing we have today to this sort of design philosophy is in products like the Raspberry Pi and the
Pine Book. So, no need to worry about me. I'm beyond the Cult of Mac. I'm now indoctrinated in the
Cult of Open Source. If there's enough of us, maybe we can turn it into a religion. My Pine Book
reminds me of this philosophy, and this experience makes me think there's a market for a high-end
premium minimalist open source, open hardware based computer with 10 years of support.
I believe there's an opportunity to develop open source software into premium professional
grade software. I would hope that it wouldn't become so obtuse as to set up something called
a genius bar. Yeah, that was another wrong term for Apple. Well, looks like we're getting into
the holiday season, so let's listen to one of my holiday favorites. The name of this song is Green
Sleeves, which is a traditional English folk song from the Renaissance era. While this song is
often regarded as an anonymous piece, many English composers are on record for having claimed
authorship. The leading theory today is that it was created by a Spanish composer named
Santiago de Mercia, and this performance was performed by Paul Arden Taylor and Carol Holt. Enjoy.
Well, that's it for this episode. I hope everyone is doing well, and I'm certainly enjoying your
podcast contributions to HPR. I don't know how much longer I can keep doing a weekly show for,
as my calendar for the new year is starting to fill up. But hopefully more people will record
their own episodes. I think if everyone listening records their own shows, we can keep this going
and have a lot of fun doing it. So, as usual, please remember to drive safe and have fun.
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