Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

blog.decryption.net.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 79 posts

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#11

Post by WalterBright »

PaulHoule wrote: post #3
zdw wrote: post #2

The best thing about old computers is they're so damn simple, and there are a ton of projects out there to enhance them - for $50 you can get a BlueSCSI which gives you hard drive/optical/network emulation on many machines. Also, new tools are way more capable and cheap - all you need to fix an old computer with a sub-50mhz bus clock is a multimeter/scope, soldering iron, and other bits, which can easily be purchased…

Old cars are even like that in performance. My son and I just bought a 1979 Ford Thunderbird which has a 5ℓ V8 engine but doesn't accelerate as well as a modern compact with a 1.5ℓ Inline 4. It is simple though, it doesn't have a lot of complex parts to repair.

I enjoy my 72 Dodge, because I know what every part in it does.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#12

Post by pbohun »

It's interesting how more "amateur approachable" both old cars and old computers are. Old cars can be worked on by anyone with some basic tools and know-how, and old computers could be understood and programmed the same way. MacPaint was made by one employee.

I think this is partially why people want these types of objects. You can actually own them. You can understand them. You can mod them.

Modern cars, games, computers, etc. aren't owned anymore. They always have updates, and could be bricked at any moment if the manufacturer wishes, gets bought or goes out of business.

There's nothing preventing this from being the golden age of computers. The capabilities of the hardware are near magical. We just need to bring back the concept of ownership.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#13

Post by WalterBright »

jdkee wrote: post #6

There is certainly a nostalgia that I feel about tech from when I was 8 until 15 years old. This corresponded with Radio Shack 100-in-1 electronics kits, the Mattel Big Trak programmable vehicle, Mattel handheld electronic games, the Vectrex gaming system, the ZX-81 and the Commodore Amiga 500 computer. And I will throw in old Edmund Scientific catalogs for good measure. I was pre-Nintendo and Sega and certainly pre-…

This is the electronics kit I had as a boy:

https://generalatomic.com/teil1/index.html

If you work through the base kit and the sequels, it offers a complete undergraduate course in electronics, minus the math.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#14

Post by userbinator »

PaulHoule wrote: post #3
zdw wrote: post #2

The best thing about old computers is they're so damn simple, and there are a ton of projects out there to enhance them - for $50 you can get a BlueSCSI which gives you hard drive/optical/network emulation on many machines. Also, new tools are way more capable and cheap - all you need to fix an old computer with a sub-50mhz bus clock is a multimeter/scope, soldering iron, and other bits, which can easily be purchased…

Old cars are even like that in performance. My son and I just bought a 1979 Ford Thunderbird which has a 5ℓ V8 engine but doesn't accelerate as well as a modern compact with a 1.5ℓ Inline 4. It is simple though, it doesn't have a lot of complex parts to repair.

That sounds like it needs a tune-up. Lots of performance parts available too for cars from that era.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#15

Post by jojobas »

An old car can still drive on current roads. There's may be no aircon, only AM radio and no airbags, but there's still horsepower and size to do what cars do.

Then, cars rust and naturally become rare and expensive to restore to a running state, and almost all of the appeal is that you can show off in them, displaying how much money you can afford to spend on a hobby.

Old computers are pretty cheap and are limited to old software, and there's nearly no showing off other than on HN.

Whatever rocks your boat I guess.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#16

Post by doodlebugging »

I returned the MacSE30 that I bought at the Apple Store back in 1989 or 1990 when I went into grad school. Compared to the Epson that I bought at the same time it was a fantastic machine that would do almost everything that I needed to do out of the box whereas for the Epson I needed to buy other software. It helped that I already had Mac software though.

I returned it because I couldn't afford it. The cost with peripherals was almost 3X the price of the Epson so I took advantage of Apple's return policy and let it go.

I still have my original computer though, a 128k Mac that I upgraded to 512k within a couple months of getting it back in January 1985. I have the printer, an external floppy drive, and maybe something else. I used it to introduce my kids to computers, teaching them to type and use a mouse and to play the one or two games that I have for it. I have several software applications that are not Apple software including one with capabilities that I made good use of back in the day. It was mathematical software that I could feed the software points defining a line and it would compute the equation defining that line out to the nth order polynomial. It understood linear, logarithmic, and exponential scales so all you needed as input were the points in x,y space and the scale for each variable. It was very powerful and there was nothing like it in DOS land or in early Winland. I used it find the equations of lines in published nomographs and then used those equations to write and debug QuickBASIC software to calculate reservoir properties on an old Compaq 286 (later a 386 and 486, etc).

I don't remember the name of the software but it was very a good mathematical application. I still don't think there is similar software for Windows unless Wolfram Alpha can do the same thing. I haven't needed to try in a long time.

Thanks for this reminder.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#17

Post by dlcarrier »

pbohun wrote: post #12

It's interesting how more "amateur approachable" both old cars and old computers are. Old cars can be worked on by anyone with some basic tools and know-how, and old computers could be understood and programmed the same way. MacPaint was made by one employee. I think this is partially why people want these types of objects. You can actually own them. You can understand them. You can mod them. Modern cars, games, comp…

What really disheartens me with modern cars is that electric cars are much simpler than than cars powered by combustion engines, which could be a huge boon to the fix-it-yourself crowd, but car manufacturers now lock customers out of their cars, so electric cars don't have the opportunity to become hobbyist friendly.

There are small electric-car companies that let customers do what they want, like Edison Motors, but they make industrial-sized work vehicles. It would be nice if a similar small company started selling consumer cars, but the automotive industry is heavily plagued by bikeshedding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality) to the point that large trucks and busses are allowed to do their thing, while subcompact vehicles have been effectively regulated out of existence.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#18

Post by geerlingguy »

jojobas wrote: post #15

An old car can still drive on current roads. There's may be no aircon, only AM radio and no airbags, but there's still horsepower and size to do what cars do. Then, cars rust and naturally become rare and expensive to restore to a running state, and almost all of the appeal is that you can show off in them, displaying how much money you can afford to spend on a hobby. Old computers are pretty cheap and are limited to…

Surprisingly, a lot of the Internet is still accessible to these old dinosaurs, through the efforts of retro enthusiasts. A search engine like FrogFind reformats results for the earliest browsers like Netscape Navigator, and kind of "text modes" the pages. There's even virtual plugfests like GlobalTalk that links together retro enthusiasts' printers over the Internet.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#19

Post by Animats »

pbohun wrote: post #12

It's interesting how more "amateur approachable" both old cars and old computers are. Old cars can be worked on by anyone with some basic tools and know-how, and old computers could be understood and programmed the same way. MacPaint was made by one employee. I think this is partially why people want these types of objects. You can actually own them. You can understand them. You can mod them. Modern cars, games, comp…

> It's interesting how more "amateur approachable" both old cars and old computers are.

Right.[1]

I think of those guys at the Computer Museum who took years to repair an IBM 1401. They even had the assistance of some of the designers and retired IBM field engineers.

[1] https://freefallmirror.com/ff300/fv00214.gif

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#20

Post by jdougan »

doodlebugging wrote: post #16

I returned the MacSE30 that I bought at the Apple Store back in 1989 or 1990 when I went into grad school. Compared to the Epson that I bought at the same time it was a fantastic machine that would do almost everything that I needed to do out of the box whereas for the Epson I needed to buy other software. It helped that I already had Mac software though. I returned it because I couldn't afford it. The cost with peri…

MathCAD? TK!Solver?
Post reply on HN