Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#101

Post by FreeFull » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 8:21 AM UTC

toadi wrote: post #61

because I didn't have a lot of money I was working on a 486 when pentiums were the normal. I used a pentium when most where on pentium 3. thank god for linux to make my computers workable. Mail: mutt, Editor: vim, actually most like newsgroups, irc, .. all had cli clients. Only netscape was run in a very lightweight window manager like blackbox. good thing about that in my teens is that I learned a shit load about co…

Fun fact: The latest Linux kernel will still run fine on a 486, and give you a somewhat useable experience. You just need to make sure to pick a distro that hasn't built its packages targetting newer instructions than what a 486 offers.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#102

Post by dkdbejwi383 » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 8:24 AM UTC

emersonrsantos wrote: post #55

George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels, he saves his work on floppy disks. Of course, he has a second computer for email and web browsing.

> George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write [citation needed] the Game of Thrones novels

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#103

Post by lloeki » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 8:28 AM UTC

zelos wrote: post #97

> Of course, it goes without saying that my ancient iBook can’t run Slack Out of interest, I wonder what the minimum spec to run an IRC client is?

I was running IRC on a Palm (IIIe IIRC), then a colour Sony Clié SJ-30, tethered via serial to a Sony Ericsson t68i phone that could do GPRS (Later had a W850).

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#104

Post by jarcane » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 8:34 AM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #6

Uh, if all you need is to write documents on an air-gapped machine, it seems like practically anything would do the job. Any Mac of any age whatsoever, a typewriter ...

Teeeechnically yes.

But the barriers to file transfer get larger the farther back you go.

I have two old Macs that I use for writing: a 1985 Mac SE 2/40, and a PowerBook G4 1.67ghz.

The SE is indeed pretty thoroughly cut off from the world, but this also means that if you want to get your data off the drive, you have very limited options to do so. In my case it means using an SD card-based floppy emulator, writing to virtual floppy, loading the SD onto my modern Mac with a dongle because MBP2019, renaming the virtual floppy file so that Disk Utility will still recognize it, and then finally hoping I remembered to save the file as plain text because nothing is gonna read that shit other wise.

I have experimented with a Wifi232 dongle as well, but found that getting a vintage version of Z/XMODEM to talk to a modern one is all but impossible in 2020 and I failed at almost everything I tried.

So: enter the PowerBook. At 1.67ghz it's actually beefy enough that with TenFourFox you could technically get to some websites, but other than a handful of Mac abandonware sites and the old version of Reddit, almost nothing else will work thanks to JavaScript requirements. So distractions remain minimal and the alt-tab addiction is kept at bay.

BUT, it is still internet-capable enough to be able to connect to modern WPA2 wifi (mostly, I had some compatibility issues with my old ISP router that required working around with an old Airport Express), and that means I still have ways to more directly share the fruits of my labors. Email works just as well as any modern machine of course, USB is there (albeit slow 1.0 speeds), and some of the older sites I post my work on even still work in TenFourFox. More recently, thanks to Tigerbrew, I've got working git, so I can even backup my stuff to Github.

The PowerPC line makes a very nice "bridge" generation. Just modern enough to still by able to connect to the outside world, but old enough to be relatively free of distraction, or at least to keep the Twitter habit out of the way while I work.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#105

Post by spiritplumber » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 8:36 AM UTC

MrZammler wrote: post #99

zelos wrote: post #97

> Of course, it goes without saying that my ancient iBook can’t run Slack Out of interest, I wonder what the minimum spec to run an IRC client is?

Depends on the platform, but I used to run AmIRC on an Amiga with a modest 68030 @ 50 Mhz :-) I think it did run ok also on a stock A1200 with a 14(!)Mhz 68020 processor and a couple of MB's of RAM.

Can confirm that you could do IRC just fine on a stock A1200.

You can browse wikipedia on one of those, too.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#106

Post by jarcane » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 8:37 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #69

cellularmitosis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tigerbrew is also worth mentioning https://github.com/mistydemeo/tigerbrew

And MacPorts should still support a bunch of things too.

I would actually recommend trying MacPorts first, because it can uninstall cleanly, whereas TigerBrew is a fork from before Homebrew got around to thinking that might be a thing people would want. Which means you won't be able to try MacPorts if TB doesn't have what you want, which is likely IME, as a lot of the builds are broken these days and it's barely supported anymore.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#107

Post by squeezingswirls » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 8:44 AM UTC

> Does this mean we’ll see another PowerPC desktop computer or laptop in the future? Not likely.

This project https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/ is pretty advanced in that regard.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#108

Post by aaccount » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 9:01 AM UTC

because you are broke

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#109

Post by toyg » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 9:02 AM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #90

war1025 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to a job interview a year and a half ago where part of the interview was to give a walkthrough of my solution to short "homework" problem. Got there and tried to connect my laptop to their wifi network. No dice. My laptop (2014-15 era) doesn't do 5ghz and they had no 2.4ghz access points. Ended up having to use a cellular wifi hotspot they had lying around to get anything to work.

Couldn't you just use your phone as a mobile hotspot? I do that all the t I'll me instead of relying on whichever local it department coming up with solutions for me.

a lot of phones have this sort of tethering disabled by carriers, who then sell "internet access dongles" as an add-on.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#110

Post by mhd » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 9:04 AM UTC

nordsieck wrote: post #74

emersonrsantos wrote: post #55

George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels, he saves his work on floppy disks. Of course, he has a second computer for email and web browsing.

> George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2. * It was designed for elementary school children so it's decently rugged. * It runs a long time (months) on 2 AA batteries. * To get the text off the device, it impersonates a USB keyboard, making it compatible with basically every computer.

Maybe "much better" when it comes to distraction-less writing, although I don't think a DOS computer offers more than that, and the portability only enables going to places where there's more going on…

But a predilection towards WordStar isn't just about not having fancy icons and weird ribbons, as author Robert Sawyer[1] pointed out. The "long page" metaphor and a short-cut friendly environment should be somewhat understandable for us programmer people.

[1]: https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm