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Infinite Mac

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Re: Infinite Mac

#231

Post by rsanek »

dkarl wrote: post #119
dkonofalski wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.

Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly see in large widescreen monitors. Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pr…

I think the secret is to go with much larger monitors and blow up the text size. Right now I'm typing this on a M1 MBP plugged into a curved 48" 4K TV that I use as a monitor. I can have the text scaled about 3-4x as large (physically) as on my Macbook and it looks great. Slight bonus, avoiding reading small text is healthier for your long-term vision.

Re: Infinite Mac

#232

Post by prawn »

robbyking wrote: post #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. The…

That banner-password trick was how I made my first money online, decades ago. I’d password protect a zip of Pamela Anderson photos.

Made $2k in a week for a few minutes of effort, used it to buy my first computer, taught myself web development and went on from there.

Re: Infinite Mac

#233

Post by PortiaBerries »

perardi wrote: post #227
PortiaBerries wrote: post #208

Sigh, this makes me realize how much I loved computers when I was a kid (1990s) and how much I hate them now.

I can’t tell if it’s just simple nostalgia, but I feel it too. I got my first Mac when I was in 4th grade in 1994. (A Performa 630CD, which is so slow that I assume my AirPods have an order of magnitude more computational power.) By god I loved that thing. And I think in part it’s because I could poke at it. You could fiddle around inside the System Folder. You could modify application resources with ResEdit. You cou…

The first app I opened up was ResEdit; the jack-in-the-box gave me a big wave of nostalgia... But yeah, it's hard to separate fond memories of youth from the changes in computing. Plus when I was a kid learning HyperTalk and then C on System 7 it was all for fun; no one was asking anything of me. Now my coding supports my family; I haven't done any coding for fun since a few years ago when I took a sabbatical from my SDE job and worked half-time as a farm hand.

Re: Infinite Mac

#234

Post by gfody »

commandlinefan wrote: post #214
PortiaBerries wrote: post #208

Sigh, this makes me realize how much I loved computers when I was a kid (1990s) and how much I hate them now.

Huh, that's funny. I never really thought about it, but I kind of feel the same way now that you point it out. Or rather, I used to love computers just for the sake of being computers and was always a little annoyed by people who saw them rather as a means to a different end. However, today, I definitely see my macbook pro, ipad and iphone as nothing more than a means to an end, the way people saw old PCs.

same. it's hard to describe how 10-year-old me felt about 8bit dithered graphics sparkling through phosphorus but 30 years later the magic is gone. I can't point to any one thing (maybe the advent of webapps) but it has something to do with software just generally becoming more and more sucky.

Re: Infinite Mac

#235

Post by gattilorenz »

smm11 wrote: post #196
mihaip wrote: post #99

Creator of the site here. There's a blog post with the technical details if you're curious about how it works and whose work it builds on: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html There are also a couple of variants that boot either System 7.5.3 or KanjiTalk 7.5.3 (the Japanese version of MacOS): https://system7.app/ and https://kanjitalk7.app/

Can I update the System 7.5.3 machine to A/UX?

A/UX is very picky about hardware. You can run it in the Shoebill emulator

Re: Infinite Mac

#236

Post by aasasd »

sirmarksalot wrote: post #162
bredren wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In middle school, we had a math teacher with an old mac setup that ran a physics simulator program. It came with a variety of starter templates, one of them was this crash test dummy in a car. It was all polygons, but you could hit run and the car would accelerate and hit a wall then the circle head and arms would sort of fly around. Anyone know what this software was? I remember running and re-running little simulat…

I remember two programs like that, one that my middle school had called "Fun Physics," and one my high school had called "Conceptual Physics." The interfaces were exactly the same, and it wouldn't surprise me if Conceptual Physics was a rebundled version sold along with Paul Hewitt's course. Unfortunately, those names are so generic that I can't find them on Google.

Old software can frequently be found on archive.org—with much more focused selection than ‘the whole web’.

Re: Infinite Mac

#237

Post by samstave »

mihaip wrote: post #148
samstave wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HOLY SHIT! You have a working ver of Bryce KPT! from 1994! Jeasus - that brings back so many shitty 3D city scapes I made back then/ Can you get Aldus Pagemaker (5.0 preferably, /r/beggingchoosers, and all that) running on this please.

I haven't tried this myself, but you should be able to download and install it from https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aldus-pagemaker-50 (drag the .sit on the emulator, and it'll be copied to the "Downloads" folder). You can then use StuffIt Expander to unstuff the .sit and Disk Copy to mount the install images (both are in the "Utilities" folder)

Welp, I can sorta get it there -- but I cant figure out how to install it after mounting:

https://i.imgur.com/WRNDdjB.png

https://i.imgur.com/Pedlilm.png

---

Whats really interesting to me about this, was that just ~last week or so, I was wondering what ever happened to Kai (Kai's Power Tools - Kai was the inventor of it and it was a revolutionary glimpse into the future of what 3D worlds were going to be put into the hands of the masses via PCs.)

Re: Infinite Mac

#238

Post by robbyking »

commandlinefan wrote: post #214
PortiaBerries wrote: post #208

Sigh, this makes me realize how much I loved computers when I was a kid (1990s) and how much I hate them now.

Huh, that's funny. I never really thought about it, but I kind of feel the same way now that you point it out. Or rather, I used to love computers just for the sake of being computers and was always a little annoyed by people who saw them rather as a means to a different end. However, today, I definitely see my macbook pro, ipad and iphone as nothing more than a means to an end, the way people saw old PCs.

When I was in my late teens I lived with an older friend who worked as a web developer at the beginning of the dot com boom. He would come home stressed from work and I'd think how can be stressed? He gets to work on a computer all day!

Re: Infinite Mac

#239

Post by toephu2 »

bad_good_guy wrote: post #93
moth-fuzz wrote: post #69

What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to g…

> What does one have to do to get as ... pretty of a UI Are you being intentionally disingenuous? It is objectively not a pretty UI, it's a functional but quite ugly one.

I think it's quite subjective actually. I like the UI.

"beauty is in the eye of the beholder"

Re: Infinite Mac

#240

Post by kevingadd »

moth-fuzz wrote: post #69

What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to g…

I don't get it. Windows 10 is all crisp 1-2 pixel lines and rectangles for me with sparse use of gradients, and the windows theming engine (used in XP, 7, etc) was all based on bitmaps.
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