bit, if only because I'm absolutly disgusted with the MS DOS installation deal.
I've never frozen up a Mac so often in my life- I may have set a new record for
Cuptertino.
It wasn't always this way, and now that I'm reminded of the sheer joys of Black
and White- and that I really need to clean this keyboard- it's going to get
easier.
More time spent doing non-computer things; this time, labeling a photograph of
the moon I had taken through a telescope a year and a half ago. Still not done,
and though the detail is exquisite, the amount of dirt on the prints destroys
any other usefulness.
First order of business (on a whim, of course) was to get RealAudio to work on
the Performa. This is not a task for any other than the undead, and since
Cheney was out of town, it fell to me. In short, never ever do this. I
downloaded 5 different 'compatable legacy installers' only to find out they were
all 'expired' and that I had to 'install the latest version' [for Mac OS X, of
course]- only to find a copy of RealPlayer already on the hard drive. Hope be
damned again, since this didn't work either- listing compatabilities with all of
three browsers, all of which I downloaded, all of which crashed.
Seriously!
I had been doing this since I got up [for the second time] at noon.
So, 1900 rolls around and I begin doing something decidedly *un*retro.
Those who know they're in the know know about something referred to as the iBook
dual-usb motherboard replacement service program; essentially, around 2002 and
2003, Apple screwed up a batch of iBook dual usb model computers. I bought one
of these strait out high school [before the flaw was made public] and my
motherboard was replaced twice, both times exhibiting the same symptoms-
intermittant, freezing, and fractured video followed by the video going away-
permanently. The last time this happened, in September 2006, I saw it coming
and hooked it to a tv and got everything I could to an external hdd before it
failed again. No video, no sound, no sleep light. It seemed all was lost,
except what was saved. I bought Pismo, and iBook 900 has been in a coma in a
desk drawer ever since.
Long winded? Yes. You see where this is going? Whaddya mean, 'no'?
Procuring a vga monitor [just in case] and all the needed cables and cords, I
pull the iBook out of the drawer. Is this a violation of the Spirit of
RETROCHALLENGE? I don't think so, especially knowing what is going to happen.
Holding this 12-inch block of ivory electronica in my hands again, I'm daunted
by how light- nay, anorexic- it feels. It weighs under six pounds; my Pismo
almost eight. I had bought it for that quality, that weight should not impede
it's usefulness and integrity; what was given up were expansion and
robustatude. Tape tells the tales of wear and tear: scotch tape on the
keyboard letters keeping the Q on; masking tape on the corner to mask where the
edge of the plastic chipped and fell off. The ethernet port has gunk in it from
a bad cable and dirt and grime from my hands have caked the surface, except for
the trackpad where the texture has completely worn off.
For a long time I had kept it in the hope I could get a proper external case for
the hard drive. But what if it could still turn on?
The Monitor gets plugged in to the external video port and then the power brick
is plugged in as well; and though the luminous blackness of the monitor tells
one story, the Num Lock key clearly screams "I'm Alive."
The machine is alive, simply blind. There is no video output of any kind.
That first sentance is a good sign. Very good.
This particular machine, you see, shipped with two operating systems: Mac OS
9.2.2 and OS X 10.2.8. Both of these are capable of Appletalking to Mac OS 7.
Eyebrows raising yet?
I plug the long-orphaned appliance into a switch with the rest of my Macs.
Immediatly the lights flash acknowledgement that something is poking it's way
about the network- and Performa gets booted up. No file servers appear under
the Chooser though, which disappoints. I open a program to ping my entire LAN
of Macs- MacPing- and the following appears on the list:
Darwin 65440/150
Power Macintosh 65280/1
and several agonizing minutes later, at 1945, the Chooser heralds the existance
of a new filesharer.
In short, my System 7 network can now acess via AFP and ethernet a 40 gig file
sharing headless server that may also be a gateway to other usb volumes- which
is very nifty as Mac OS X 10.4.8 cannot do this directly.
On the dos front [and this is where it gets long...]
I have been entirely too tramatized to post this tonight.
I might get to it tomarrow.
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