Compunabula

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2009-12-22T14:06:00.000-08:00

Oh hai. I’m currently documenting recent additions and changes to the archive on Twitter. Please join me over there for the time being. At least until I start prettying up this old heap of a site again.

Vintage Mac blow out.

2005-02-02T20:20:00.000-08:00

Well, not a real blow out in the clearance sale sense. But, I did persuase a herd of dust bunnies out of a pair of IIcx cases and a IIsi at any rate. Thanks to good friend Blake, I discovered a teetering pile of beige beside my desk a couple of weeks ago. Along with the three boxes mentioned above, there was also a bad boy Mac II (which I believe is number four out of the original ten Mac II systems we had at Image Club Graphics when I started back in January of 1989), a 12 inch Macintosh Color Display, a Newton keyboard in its soft zipper case, and a clip-on modem for one of the first generation Palm Pilots.

After hauling the gang around in the back of the Volvo for two weeks, I decided to fire up the three amigos (not to be confused with my three Amigas) and see what they were packing. The first IIcx was outfitted with an amicable 8/80 configuration, a Daystar 030/50 PowerCache Card, and a surprise Supermac ColorCard/24 graphics accelerated board. After booting it up and having the sweet sights of System 7.1 meet my eyes, I discovered that this machine used to be the accounting department computer at Image Club, circa 1995. All of the customer database and accounting software was still loaded on the drive.

The second IIcx was stripped of memory and a video card, so I borrowed a quadruplet of 1MB chips and the Supermac board from the first box and pressed the power key. It had the same 80MB original equipment hard drive as the first IIcx, this time loaded with System 7.0.1 and System 7 Tuneup. Nothing too exciting appeared to be left on the drive and the floppy didn't work. Something to play with a bit later I suppose.

The IIsi stuck me with problems much sooner in the process. The chimes of death on startup weren't a promising sign. This machine came with a Nubus Adapter Board with an Asanté 5BaseT/10BaseT/AUI Ethernet card stuffed into the PDS slot. The first thing I tried was yanking all of that extra hardware out, but it made no difference. The problem persisied after unplugging the hard drive and reseating all of the various internal connectors. The last thing to try was the memory, which I should of suspected from the beginning. There were only a single pair of chips in the four SIMM slots and I couldn't recall off the top of my head whether or not the IIsi required all of the slots to be filled. I did know that the IIsi had some onboard memory and that it shared system RAM with the video. I removed the two chips and it booted, but only so far as to present me with an error message stating that 'System 7.1 requires more memory to start up.' What? 1MB won't cut it, eh? Ah well, I guess I need to dig around and find some more 30-pin chips.

Drive cleaning.

2004-11-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

I spent a few hours this past weekend going through a pile of old hard drives that had been languishing in various Rubbermaid containers and cardboard boxes downstairs. I knew that some of the drives were still functional, but I really needed to do a proper inventory and purge. Most of the drives came out of old computers and external cases, probably due to upgrades. However, a couple were brand new, bought in anticipation of getting slapped into a machine down the road. I just couldn't recall what the capacity or specs were. I cracked open a couple empty external drive cases to use as test jigs and purchased an update for my long in the tooth Hard Disk Toolkit utility. Anything that showed up in HDT got low-level formatting, new drivers and a single partition initialization before being tagged and filed back on the shelf.

Of the dozen and a half drives I evaluated, I ended up with eleven working devices - mostly 50-pin SCSI-2, a couple 68-pin fast wide disks, and one lonely old school laptop IDE drive. None of the drives were larger than 9GB, but that doesn't make them useless. Heck, the boot drive on this server is only 4GB and it seems to do the job. Of course, not every chunk of metal on the bench cut the mustard. Those poor souls that refused to spin up or continually burped due to media errors ended up as candidates for salvage: platters, spacers, sealed bearings, configuration jumpers, termination resistors, small gauge screws... all that good stuff. Bonus points were awarded for any rare earth head-control magnets that could be pried out of the housing in one piece. You can practically hang the dog up on the fridge door with those suckers.

There's still an assortment of small (less than 40MB capacity) drives to take a peek at, although I'm not expecting any survivors out of that bunch at this point in the competition. Those units came out of a series of circa 1990 Macintosh IIs from the original Image Club offices and they were yanked for a reason. I'm just a little bit stumped as to why I kept them all this time, but that's another story. I also pulled a set of three 68-pin fast SCSI drives out of the cupboard in the office. I think they're all 18GB disks, but I won't know for sure until they're up and running.

One of the next projects on the to do list is deciding what to do with a sagging box full of 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives originally from an industrial disk duplicator.

Long time, no? See!

2004-11-17T18:27:00.000-08:00

First of all, I'd like to apologize to my faithful reader for being so obviously thin in the update department. It's not that new stuff hasn't been piling up in the hallways around here. It has. And it's not that I haven't had the wherewithal to post some news. Something. Anything. I honestly have. The point is... there's really no excuse for not mentioning even a tidbit on this site since the middle of June. None whatsoever. I won't waste the effort on attempting to explain my absence. Suffice it to say that other things have been occupying my waking hours and the unfortunate reality is, this site draws the short straw. However, expect to see a few posts over the next day or so as I play compunabular catch up.

The Mac came back.

2004-06-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

Back in 1989, members of Apple's Developer Program could still purchase up to ten computers per year at a significant discount. Image Club didn't have budget or need for ten new computers a year, so employees were allowed to use the discounts for personal systems. Taking advantage of this opportunity, my wife and I were able to obtain our very first Macintosh, a IIsi. Prior to being able to afford our own machine however, I purchased a Mac Plus and related peripherals on behalf of my in laws. They had passed down their Apple IIe to my wife's eldest brother and needed something to replace it. Well, that old Plus came back last weekend. Complete with an Apple SC20 hard drive, an ImageWriter II printer, all of the original cables, disks and documentation, which if you ask me, hardly looks thumbed through at all. After being passed along from household to household and sibling to sibling, it finally ended up on my porch, saved from being unceremoniously piled in with a bunch of other garage sale items. The screen on the Plus isn't currently working, but you get that wonderful chime when the power switch is flipped, and can hear the drive boot up. I'm assuming the dead display is due to some issue with the analog video board. Very likely it's a simple fix. Naturally, the platinum-coloured cases are a bit yellow with age and I had to replace an unsprung key on the keyboard. Otherwise, it'll be a nice system to play with. The best thing is, I know the history of this little beastie. That, and I didn't have a Mac Plus in the collection yet. Oh, and it was free. I'm going to track down that old IIsi next.

Lotus route.

2004-06-02T20:51:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was the annual 'sift through the pile of other people's junk in the church parking lot' sale. I have picked up many a compunabulish treasure at this yearly event, and this time around was no different. What did I spy this year? Why, an unused copy of the Lotus Magellan file management utility and a box full of Lotus 123 Release 2.01. Yes, I realize that they're both DOS-based programs, but they're also a part of history. And honestly, you can't go wrong for a buck. You'll also be either happy or disappointed to know that I passed up the opportunity to take home yet another Commadore Vic 20. This one looked as if it had a mouse living on top of it for quite a few moons. Thanks, but no.

Same time next year.

2004-05-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

Another e-cycling day has come and gone in our fair town, and so have a passel of electronic anchors previously weighing down my storage shelves. Off to various points beyond their life horizon were the following collected treasures. A 19 inch Conrac model 5222 rack mount broadcast monitor which I picked up at a garage sale for less than a fiver before I was married. I never got the thing to work, but thought that the solid metal housing was worth the salvage alone. When I noticed that the phosphor coating was starting to flake off the inside surface of the tube, it was time to let go. Another cathode ray monster also made the trip. This one was a 17 inch Mitsubishi color display that came with the SGI Iris 4D/310VGX graphics workstation a friend of a friend dumped off in my driveway a couple of springs ago. Again, I have no idea whether or not the monitor worked, but it had no historical significance for me and I swore on a stack of user manuals that I would continue to purge as many CRTs from my garage as possible. The rest of the drop off consisted of a sawdust encrusted HP DeskJet 500 (which I dug out of a neighbors' trash can and previously mentioned on this site), three x86 PCs of varying vintage and disassembly, and finally, a legal-sized file box stuffed full of used 3.5" floppies - mostly backups and product masters from my Image Club days. Don't worry, any disks containing data worth keeping or perusing at a later date were painstakingly copied, backed up, and burned to CD for safe keeping.

Group hug.

2004-04-24T15:57:00.000-07:00

Gah. I hadn't realized that it had been so long since my last post. It's not as if things haven't been slide into the old crap garage. Rather than recap everything since December, I'll just mention briefly that the newest resident of the compunabular fish tank is a Digital Ocean Grouper wireless access station for MessagePad 1x0 series Newton devices. This unit is next to new in its original box courtesy of the indelible Mr Jim Cheal, whom I snagged a rare, ruggedized and water-resistant Digital Ocean Tarpon device from a few months ago. I forget to mention that too, didn't I? The Tarpon is wireless as well, and both devices seem to communicate using the same technology. Now, if I can just get the power supply on the Tarpon to kick into gear, I may be able to get these babies chatting to each other.

Mothers and daughters.

2003-12-14T11:14:00.000-08:00

A couple of new items have meandered into the compunabula warehouse over the past week or so. The first is a genuine Quadra 950 motherboard courtesy of Daniel Rubin of Superfluous Banter fame. You see, I humbly submitted a few snapshots of my collection for inclusion in his Old Technology Giveaway contest this summer, and by golly if I didn't win the darn thing at the end of the day. Go figure. Now I have a spare set of guts for my old workhouse 950, just in case the old beast in the basement needs a transplant down the road.

And how about this for a recent addition? A pair of prototype processor daughterboards, direct from the Apple/Motorola labs, are now gracing the teetering piles. One is 1997 vintage 275Mhz 'Goleta' card and the other is labeled as an Apple High Performance Processor Card Model 1100. The second card has a jumper soldered next to a 300Mhz marking, but has pads going up to 400Mhz. These are cards which can fit into pile of different Power Macintosh models included 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 8600, 9500, and 9600 series. However, they came with some additional technical information which indicates that the High Performance Card will only work in conjunction with a Kansas motherboard, so this would rule out stuffing it into a non-Kansas 7600, 8600, or 9600 machine. At any rate, I have a number of boxes that I can end up using to try these cards out in. Nice.

Six style sheets to the wind.

2003-12-12T19:28:00.000-08:00

In the midst of an mad attempt to fix a style sheet display error which was occuring in Safari and a couple of other reasonably modern browsers, I forgot to change the declaration to point to the new CSS file. That's why this site had absolutely no style for the last week. I know that this probably only affected a hundred or so visitors, but that's not the point is it? I broke something and didn't realize it until a week later. Sorry about that. Anyway, everything looks the way it should again, and in more browsers than before.

Another great big box of goodies.

2003-09-21T12:56:00.000-07:00

Some of the most generous folks I know sit right across from me. For example, Issa dropped off a box stuffed full of previously loved Mac goodies for me at the office this past week. There was also a plastic grocery bag worth of floppies and manuals, but the really good stuff was in the box. Amongst the treasures was an LCII to add to my teetering pile of pizzabox Macs, a 12" low-profile color monitor in near perfect condition, an original StyleWriter printer, a strange little external hard drive of unknown capacity, an Apple CD300e Plus drive, a pristine Apple Keyboard II, a couple of nondescript fax modem thingies, plus enough cables and wallwarts to choke a couple John Dvorak-sized technology pundits. But the absolute best thing that could possibly have tumbled out of that box was a pair of AppleDesign Powered Speakers. The original kick-ass beige ones, not the tinny-sounding black wannabees that came out in later years. I had a pair of these speakers hooked up to my Quadra 840av when I worked at Image Club and then migrated them to my G3/233 tower at EyeWire. Those speakers sounded so good - even when cranked during those late night product mastering sessions - that I really didn't want to leave them behind when I finally decided to move on to other things. They had an industrial heft to them that said 'built with love and quality, baby'. Well, I finally have another pair and didn't have to scour eBay to find them. Now I just have to figure out what to hook them up to. Thanks Issa, you're simply a gem.

Hippy dippy hard disk drivers.

2003-08-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

In my ongoing (and somewhat laughable, according to my wife) attempt to catalogue every single, freaking piece of hardware and software I've managed to collect over the past twenty years, I occasionally stumble across some simply glorious nuggets. This evening, I verified ownership of several floppies worth of classic driver and utility software from the sophomore years of Macintosh SCSI peripheral development. Anyone remember the LoDown CD drive, the first that ever shipped for the Mac? Got it. How about the TapeCrate tape backup device from Crate Systems? Got it. Ever noodle with the various utilities for a Novy Systems Mac Plus accelerator card? In spades. Surely some of you used a ThunderScan, right? Two versions of the hardware and software straight out of 1984, baby. Now, where'd I pack away that old ImageWriter? But back to the original subject of this post... one of the disks in my hot little hand is for an original Jasmine 20 MB hard drive.

The fact that I still have this software in my possession is a side-affect of my compulsion, and not necessarily hippy or dippy in any way. The aforementioned hippy dippiness presents itself in the form of the strangely poetic slogan found on the obverse side of the disk label - and I quote: "The flowers of yesterday, the fruit of today, and the seeds of tomorrow are one." Finding any connection between this text and second generation Macintosh storage technology is a bit of a stretch - even for me. What on earth were they smoking at Jasmine Technologies back then? In retrospect, it might explain their unfortunate demise via Chapter 11 proceedings in the early nineties.

Our operators are awaiting your call.

2003-06-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

You would all have been proud of me last weekend. Besides scavenging some wonderfully obscure 1960s analog synth vinyl from a church parking lot fund raiser, I rescued a lonely Cardco Universal Centronics Parallel Printer Interface for use with either a VIC20 or a C64. I have at least two of each of those both machines, but no printer adapter amidst the quiver. The outcome of this chance encounter was obvious, and the adapter would be mine. I suppose I could have dickered on the price, but it felt good laying down full sticker for it - and whole loonie. As I was handing over the coin, the lady running the garage sale said to me, "So you know what that's for, eh? Give me your phone number, I know we have more treasures like that somewhere in the basement..." Grin.

The good samaritan.

2003-06-01T20:48:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, I received an email from a fellow Newton user looking for help. His Newton has just been stolen along with a few other bits of equipment, including a Sony Vaio laptop. The loss of the hardware was one thing, but the loss of all of his valuable contact data was an entirely different affair. He had been meaning to transfer the data to another platform at some point, but had obviously not done so prior to the unfortunate event. He did have a reasonably recent backup of the Newton data, but without a Newton to restore it to, he was essentially screwed. I offered to see what I could, but made no promises. He sent me a 5MB Windows-based archive file via email and I set to work. After installing the Windows compatible version of Newton Connection Utilities under Virtual PC, I was able to see the backup archive and restore all of the important data back onto one of my spare MessagePads. From there I exported a tab-delimited text file, which he could then import into any number of other information managers. Needless to say, he was ecstatic with the outcome. Even the European accented characters in his contact file came through intact. As a way of saying thank you, he said that once he finished moving from Sweden to his new job in the states, he would send me whatever bits of Newton paraphernalia that hadn't been swiped. That was back in March, and I had completely forgotten about the whole thing until last week. That's when a box arrived with a vaguely familiar name scrawled upon it. Inside were the following 'bits': a European edition Newton Keyboard; a Newton 9W power supply complete with a European two-prong plug adapter; an infamous Newton interconnect port dongle; a rechargeable battery pack for the MessagePad 2100; a PCMCIA card slot blank (you can't have too many of those); a TDK DF2814 v.34 fax modem card; a MessagePad 2100 software disc; a rare edition of the AMUG Totally Incomplete Newton software collection disc; a boxed copy of Xport for Newton; a set of Sony Vaio product recovery CDs; and probably the best thing in the box - a next to new Mar Software Executive Newton Stand - in hand-polished mahogany, no less. Quite the haul for a little bit of good samaritan work.

E-cycling day.

2003-05-11T18:49:00.000-07:00

Once a year, the city of Calgary sponsors an electronics recycling day where you can drop off your obsolete, cranky, and otherwise abused computers, stereos, and other sundry plug-in-ables. While I didn't get a chance to slog through my infamous piles of crap last year, I definitely made sure I added a few select chunks of digital flotsam to the innumerable shipping palettes floating around the Anderson Station parking lot this past Saturday. I managed to stuff a total of five monitors into the backside of the Volvo, including a vintage 1988 Apple High Resolution RGB Display that only had a red gun firing the last time I used it, and my infamously weighty Multiple Scan 20 which finally petered out this winter after several home brew repairs. I made sure that I reminded the grimy recycling elf who was helping me unload the car that "...the big one is a beast, watch yourself." I'm not sure if he heeded my warning prior to manoeuvering into his hefting position, as I'm fairly sure I heard something pop - and it wasn't the plastic housing on the monitor.

Thanks mate.

2003-04-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

I've neglected to mention that prior to my birthday at the end of March, my friend and co-worker Jon handed me a box. A box containing his previously-loved eMate. Back when we both worked at EyeWire, I somehow indirectly convinced Jon into purchasing a used eMate off eBay. Shortly after I recieved my own, Jon began to appreciate the curvaceous aesthetic and instant-on usefulness of Apple's translucent green digital man-purse. Since the battery started giving him grief about a year ago, he had stopped using the eMate and figured that I could probably give it a good home. Too true. And as for that stubborn unchargable battery, I think I know how to tackle that particular issue.

No, not that Osbourne.

2003-03-25T20:48:00.000-08:00

I just discovered that computer pioneer Adam Osborne died last Tuesday. And although I don't currently own an Osbourne luggable device, I have always appreciated the engineering that went into these early portable computers. There is something about those twin 5.25 inch floppy drives with the pair of matching disk storage bins framing the 5 inch green phosphor monitor that makes me grin. Have a nice afterlife, Adam. I'll make sure at least one more of your machines ends up in a good home down the road.

Will scan for food.

2003-03-17T15:07:00.000-08:00

The HP ScanJet 3c that I rescued from Danyon prior to his move to Hogtown about a year and a half ago has found a new home. After trading a pair of Seagate hard drives for the previously documented box of deep fried confections, Sean mentioned that he was in the market for a scanner to replace his crappy one-touch job. Well, did I ever have a deal for him. Since there are two other fully-functional scanners in my peripheral quiver, I lugged the beefy ScanJet out of storage and up to the office for Sean. Providing he can still find decently modern drivers for that beast, it should suit him quite well. And you know what happens when one piece of hardware goes out the door... it makes room for at least two new bits of junk for the basement.

Reeling in a Tarpon.

2003-03-11T20:59:00.000-08:00

Unofficially, I have been trying to collect one of every model Newton or Newton-compatible device very manufactured. To be completely honest, I've been unofficially collecting all sorts of crap for years - trying to or not. I can now place a well-deserved checkmark beside one more item on my wanted list. I have come into the possession of a Digital Ocean Tarpon. The Tarpon is a ruggedized, wireless-capable Newton OS-based hand held that was originally designed for use in outdoor, industrial and other harsh environments that would otherwise kick the living snot out of a regular PDA. I haven't had a chance to fire it up yet, and the manuals are still on their way, but from the looks of this beast, it's going to be fun to muck about with.

We got the backup back up.

2003-03-06T19:50:00.000-08:00

I hope you'll excuse the short spell of downtime earlier this evening. It was absolutely necessary, I assure you. I had put off replacing the toasted backup drive in this server for far too long and I figured that the seething masses could survive without a half hour or so of splorp and company. The verdict? I simply plopped in one of the 4.5GB Seagate drives that I traded Sean a box of Timbits® for, and everything is right in the world of nightly incremental backups. For my next trick, I plan to add a wonderfully convoluted set of IP filters to my router so I can back this silly thing up to the fancy-schmancy network attached storage drive hanging in the rack directly above the server.

Thinking machines.

2003-02-11T14:29:00.000-08:00

On a little weekend trip to Vancouver Island, my wife and I spent time wandering through literally dozens of antique shops and used book stores. I controlled my packrattish urges extremely well and came home with but a single item. A book published in 1961, written by Irving Adler and entitled Thinking Machines. It talks about "hardware brains" and "electronic clerks" and waxes less than poetically about math and algebra and boolean logic principals. Pretty dry stuff. Aside from a wonderfully quaint illustration on the cover consisting of a pair of vacuum tubes surrounded by numbers and a requisite lightning bolt, there's isn't much in the book that's enlightening or even mildly amusing. Then again, it wasn't the content of the book that attracted me to it, it was the title. I'm currently reading the prequel series to Frank Hebert's Dune, where thinking machines play a fairly significant role in the initial development of the full story. The thinking machines in Irving's book aren't nearly as ominous or destructive as the ones in Dune, but the coincidence of finding the book in that store was entertaining nonetheless.

Of course it'll fit in there.

2003-01-13T21:31:00.000-08:00

The ladies of the house use my seven year old Power Macintosh 8500. It's not a bad machine, just an older, crankier one. In fact, it's been a veritable workhorse since it arrived along with my cable modem back in December of 1995. It's been upgraded with not quite a quarter megabyte of RAM, a 233mhz daughterboard salvaged from a 9600 has been stuffed inside, and it's been outfitted with a dandy multi-port USB card. However, the poor thing also been limping along on its single 2GB hard drive since the sounds of hardware failure tour this past summer. I've yet to wedge larger replacement drive into the ample beige chassis, but I took it upon myself to at least update the operating system to something released within the last three years and get the applications into some semblance of order. The easiest part of the task was doing the backup prior to wiping and reformatting the drive. Ever since I got the beastly Iomega network attached storage drive up and at 'em, I've been automating the backups across all of the boxes in the household. At least in theory I've been automating the backups. Sometimes the reality of practical computer interaction rears its ugly, deformed head and certain things get missed. Or forgotten. Or deleted. Or... well, you get the idea. However, having a nasty half terabyte of online storage at your beck and call makes worrying about where to put everything a bit less of an issue. Needless to say, the 8500 is happier now. The files are much more backed up than they used to be. And I get a kick out of telling people I have a half terabyte of online storage humming in a rack down in the basement. What a geek.

Let it all hang out.

2002-12-28T15:44:00.000-08:00

The rackmount monitor that arrived prior to Christmas has been installed in my vintage Digital Equipment Corporation server rack, even though I had to remove the back panel and free-swinging door in order for it to fit. The damn thing is three inches deeper than the rack cabinet. I guess that just shows you that even though the mounting holes still use standard spacing, cabinets are indeed deeper now than they were back in the early seventies. Crap, the ties were a heck of a lot wider back then. What happened to the server racks?

Driving a hard bargain.

2002-12-11T13:54:00.000-08:00

When you stumble across the opportunity to purchase a genuine replacement hard drive for that dusty Macintosh Portable languishing in the corner, and the price is a quarter of what you'd pay if you sent the old, flaky hard drive in as an exchange, what would you do? You buy the darn thing and not ask any questions, that's what you'd do. Jump in while you can and take advantage of the situation. These suckers aren't getting any more plentiful you know. And ding dang it, I'm going to get that old MacAnchor up and running again if it kills me. Now, if I could just find a surplus Widget drive for my Lisa, I'd be beside myself.

Out of the blue.

2002-11-30T22:28:00.000-08:00

So I get this email from a fellow who lives in Three Hills (about an hour and a half drive from where I reside) who just bought a Newton. He's coming to Calgary and is going to buy a new ethernet PC card. He really wants to get his Newton networked back at the home office. So he's asking some very nice questions that should be fairly easy for me to answer, but crap almighty, it's way too late and I'm going to bed. So next day, I'm thinking about firing up the email so I can answer this fine gentleman's questions, when the phone rings. It's the same guy. He looked me up and figured it was just as easy to call me as it was to chat via email. Cool. So I tell him to come on over and I'll help him get his Newton all set up. He's already found the appropriate drivers. He's already downloaded the Newton Internet Enabler (NIE). He's pretty much all set, except his Titanium G4 laptop doesn't do serial. Neither does my G4 tower. So we mount his Titanium as a FireWire drive on my G4, copy the software to my file server, and then it's over to the trusty 8500 to install Newton Connection Utilities (NCU). We got his Newton connected and talking using a serial cable and a borrowed dongle. The driver gets installed. We take the ethernet cable from the 8500 and smack it into the Newton's networking card. We fire up NCU on the G4 as a test and now he can connect to and browse not only my hard drive, but his FireWire mounted drive on the remote machine. He's blown away by the technology and the hospitality. I send him off with a hard drive full of collected Newton goodies and a smile on his face. What a great way to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon.