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Infinite Mac

macos8.app

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Re: Infinite Mac

#51

Fantastic! It even has Adobe Photoshop 3. So much fun.

Photoshop is one of those things that easily illustrates how far computers have come.

Anyone who used graphic design software, even well into the PowerPC days, remembers having a tiny preview window to show filters/effects, and then waiting seconds or even minutes for the filter to be applied to the entire image. Yes people, even a blur took a long time in the old days.

The real-time manipulation we have on our phones these days is insane by comparison.

Re: Infinite Mac

#52
I'm not sure how many people will remember this, but macOS 8 came with a program called Hotline, who's main activity was "publishing and distribution of a multi-purpose client/server communication software."

Most people I knew used it to pirate software and MP3s.

The way most of us used it was we'd find a server that had something we wanted (software, a crack, or music), and the login would be password protected. There would be a public readme file with instructions on how to find the password, which was typically behind a banner ad you had to click to generate revenue for the file host.

I was working as a web developer at the time, and the start-up where I worked literally had a dedicated server just for downloading music on Hotline, but Napster came along and we mostly forgot about Hotline.

Re: Infinite Mac

#53

I'm not sure how many people will remember this, but macOS 8 came with a program called Hotline, who's main activity was "publishing and distribution of a multi-purpose client/server communication software." Most people I knew used it to pirate software and MP3s. The way most of us used it was we'd find a server that had something we wanted (software, a crack, or music), and the login would be password protected. The…

Hotline didn't come bundled with the OS but was definitely good times.

Edit: oh and Carracho!

Re: Infinite Mac

#54
post #36

I was hoping I could use Netscape Navigator to go to Hacker News and post a comment from it, but it has no network connection. And I guess it probably wouldn't be able to HTTPS.

I’m sorry this is so vague, I’m in transit right now; so I’m a little lazy to try to Google this from my phone - but there is some sort of proxy-type thing for these old Macs that allows you to use the ‘modern web’, to an…extent? I think it kinda works the way Opera Mini does or something, if that makes sense? It does totally solve the HTTPS issue. You could easily access HN using this method through even Netscape. T…

I believe some people have written WASM networking using a WebRTC data channel as the transport.

Re: Infinite Mac

#55

I'm not sure how many people will remember this, but macOS 8 came with a program called Hotline, who's main activity was "publishing and distribution of a multi-purpose client/server communication software." Most people I knew used it to pirate software and MP3s. The way most of us used it was we'd find a server that had something we wanted (software, a crack, or music), and the login would be password protected. The…

I definitely remember Hotline! Got me into trouble in college...a friend and I opened up Hotline servers on our machines and threw a piece of software on there (probably a cracked version of Macromedia Flash or something like that...) and a README that said "please leave something if you take something". A few weeks later, we both got calls from the sys admin at our school asking us to come in for a little chat...we hadn't really been paying too much attention, and apparently people had put all kinds of software/games etc. on there and that we had been serving up from our machines (I believe the admin said "millions of dollars"...but he may have been trying to scare us straight...). We didn't end up getting into too much trouble for it (I believe we were banned from using the internet for a few weeks) and ultimately I got hired to work in the IT department, so it worked out for me at least...

Re: Infinite Mac

#56

I'm not sure how many people will remember this, but macOS 8 came with a program called Hotline, who's main activity was "publishing and distribution of a multi-purpose client/server communication software." Most people I knew used it to pirate software and MP3s. The way most of us used it was we'd find a server that had something we wanted (software, a crack, or music), and the login would be password protected. The…

It was BBS for the rest of us

Re: Infinite Mac

#58

This looks great! But is there any way to turn off the blinking LED light on the faux monitor? It's so spastic it keeps drawing my eye away from the actual software. I never had a monitor that did that in real life!

What browser/OS are you on? The LED doesn't blink for me on macOS with Chrome. Edit: it seems like it's the HDD activity light? It blinks during boot.

I'm using Orion (Webkit-based) on macOS. It was blinking non-stop while just reading the Stickies. I couldn't get past that to do anything else because it was so distracting. It definitely wasn't HDD-related for me. It was constant.

Re: Infinite Mac

#59
post #25

This took me on a trip down memory lane back to my days in elementary school. I recall our class going to the computer lab once a week and having an hour to spend on an iMac G3, of which some were on OS8 and others OS9. Going back even further to kindergarten, our logins on those Macs were forced to use a simplified UI that displayed only icons/tiles of applications -- no browsing files or anything sophisticated from…

I believe you're remembering "At Ease" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease

This is exactly what I'm remembering. Thank you for sharing.

We had one staff member in charge of both the library and computer lab at my school, and I always admired her know-how when we'd watch her demonstrate something or troubleshoot a problem. Looking back now at the selection of software she curated for us, the uniformity of the look-and-feel across all Macs on campus, having a networked file share accessible from the 2-3 iMacs/Macintosh LCs we had in each classroom and in the lab, I appreciate how she really went above and beyond for that period of time and fostered so much intrigue in me. I really have to attribute a lot of my interest in tech to her during those formative years.

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