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Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

blog.decryption.net.au

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Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#61

Post by rograndom »

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.

Ha! I had one of those in the late 90's. My father had it first and I inherited it when he passed. A couple of months after he bought it, I bought a 1985 LTD, which was basically a 4 door Mustang GT. He asked me if I wanted to race, I said it wouldn't be close. He said "Both cars have the same engine." Yeah, not quite. The Thunderbird had like 120hp, no fuel injection and bogged down to meet emissions, while the LTD had close to 200hp and was several hundred pounds lighter. Another person up the street had the same vintage Thunderbird with the 350ci and had done some work to it. That one went pretty good.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#62

Post by WalterBright »

linguae wrote: post #36
dgfitz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wholeheartedly agree. I’ll leave this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44422763 “ I do a lot of work on my own vehicles. I think a lot of the responses are from people who do not. Paying for vehicle repair labor is basically a tax. They're making it harder and harder to fix your own car. I spent the afternoon yesterday trying to find headlight assemblies that didn't need to be coded to work correctly. Headl…

I’d love to have a project car that I could work on, particularly something simple like a classic Volkswagen Beetle or maybe something more complex but still manageable like a 1980s BMW, but one significant challenge I have (and many other would-be car hobbyists) is being able to afford housing where I’m not subject to lease/HOA restrictions or even local ordinances prohibiting at-home repairs. These restrictions are…

I understand where you're coming from. I've lived in apartments with no garage, and just went ahead and did repairs in the parking lot anyway. But you cannot do major repairs that way. One huge problem is your tools will get stolen if you go back into your apartment to get something. It's all rather unpleasant.

But there are places in Seattle where you can rent a garage and the tools you need, for people in your situation. But I doubt it is cheap.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#63

Post by PaulHoule »

Reubachi wrote: post #57
flomo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing. A 68 Mustang had no almost emissions controls. A 78 Thunderbird was almost the exact same stuff, except it was choked to shit. A modern computer-controlled Camry is not only way better performing, it also orders of magnitude cleaner. IMO the ICE has achieved its final form, so now the future has to be something else (electric).

RE: "ice final form" It's an intersting time to live, we are indeed seeing the peak of ICE, though I think there are lots of room for improvement in EGR, compression, more efficient catalytic process. "smaller market" ICE manufacturers IE isuzu, mazda, hino etc. are sort of working towards this, as opposed to jumping on EV train. Theoretically, it's completely reasonable for a high compression inlne 3 cylinder with a…

I think the major carmakers aren't interested in super-economy ICE cars.

They're attracted to XXXXL EVs because they can make the XXXXL cars they want to make and still claim they're "green"

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#64

Post by homarp »

doodlebugging wrote: post #54
homarp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maple?

No it wasn't Maple. I'm familiar with Maple. I found it by following ads in MacWorld magazine back in the day. It should be identifiable by checking issues between December 1984 and May 1987.

https://archive.org/details/macworld-magazine has the scans

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#65

Post by jdkee »

WalterBright wrote: post #13
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.

I should have included my top Amiga games, Defender of the Crown, Dungeon Master and Empire.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#66

Post by doodlebugging »

homarp wrote: post #64
doodlebugging wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it wasn't Maple. I'm familiar with Maple. I found it by following ads in MacWorld magazine back in the day. It should be identifiable by checking issues between December 1984 and May 1987.

https://archive.org/details/macworld-magazine has the scans

Thanks. I'll dig through and see what I can find or dig through my disk archive.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#67

Post by formerphotoj »

jnaina wrote: post #38

Have 2 Apple ][e, Lisa, Apple NeXT Cube, Fat Mac 512K, Mac IIci, Mac LC and an Apple Xserve, as part of my Apple collection. Along with Sinclair ZX81 and an Atari 800. Many decades of collecting and maintaining them. Unfortunately kids are not interested in inheriting them after I'm gone, even as I have shared with the some of the great origin stories behind some of these machines. They don't see the value. Their log…

I wish I had kept, and could still use, my brown plastic PowerBook...I forgot what model that was but...a brown laptop?!? It was soooo cool! :)

Wish you could swap innards like you can swap engines with (some) cars.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#68

Post by dlcarrier »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #33
dlcarrier wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Contrary to popular belief, EVs really aren't that much easier to repair, that's just a logical expectation from people without service experience based on the idea of less moving parts, but that omits that fact that electronics die too and EVs have more of them and under more strenuous loads. Most of the faults on EVs come from dead electronics like a fried MOSFET or PCB trace, and coolant leaks inside the motor due…

That's what I was complaining about; non-commercial production EVs could be much easier to repair than any other vehicle type, but they aren't. Car manufacturers, for both combustion and electric vehicles, can and do lock out components to prevent end users from servicing and repairing their own vehicles. If modern batteries and IGBTs existed decades ago, we would have had a period of mass-produced electric vehicles that were as easy to work on as a Model T. Really, electric vehicles have existed since the Model T, but none of them ever sold well, because they were to slow and had too little range.

People DIY their own EVs all the time, and on the electronics side all you need is a battery, a battery management unit, a charge controller, a motor controller, and the motor. Some of those parts can even be integrated into a single module If your combustion-powered car is fuel injected, it probably needs just as complicated of computer systems as an EV. (with the exception being rare cases of mechanical fuel injection)

The rest of an EV drivetrain is the same as any combustion car, except the transmission can be much simpler or may not be needed at all.

If an electronic components dies within one of those modules, swapping it out is no more work than swapping out something like an alternator or a starter. If the motor itself needs replacement, that's much, much easier than swapping out a combustion engine. Most electric cars have motors small enough that a single person could lift and carry one. If your motor controller died, you might be able to fix it with board level repair, just as you could rebuild an alternator yourself, but almost everyone working on a vehicle, whether DIY or commercially, is going to replace it, with either something new or something repaired/rebuilt by a specialist.

It's possible to get EVs with cheap components that won't last long, but it's also possible to get components with good design and build quality that will last a lifetime. Combustion engines, on the other hand, are regulated into designs that have extremely high efficiency when brand new, with no care for their long-term performance, so pretty much any modern consumer combustion vehicle has extremely fragile piston rings that begin leaking almost immediately, making for much shorter lifespans than decades-old combustion vehicles.

Driver assist is completely unrelated to the fuel type and open-source solutions do exist, that work on both combustion and electric drivetrains.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#69

Post by dlcarrier »

typewithrhythm wrote: post #35
dlcarrier wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In theory they can be mechanically, in practice high ADAS standards and functionality like regenerative breaking make it feel like a pretty high risk proposal to allow an end user in.

Electrically, regenerative breaking just runs the motor driver in reverse (or really, out of phase) and it doesn't take any extra components, only requiring a few instructions in the motor drivers firmware. It's not anything a DIYer has to even know exists, let alone mess with.

Driver assist has nothing to do with what type of fuel and powerplant a vehicle has, and those features can be broken by DIYers on any vehicle type. Sometimes being able to disable them is a built-in necessity for safety, for example when driving on gravel roads where they tend to do more harm than good.

Re: Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

#70

Post by dlcarrier »

gloxkiqcza wrote: post #41
typewithrhythm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory they can be mechanically, in practice high ADAS standards and functionality like regenerative breaking make it feel like a pretty high risk proposal to allow an end user in.

Also 800V lithium battery packs capable of delivering hundreds of amps of current.

It doesn't take much to make a battery pack safe to work with. Every EV I've seen has contactors on both battery terminals, as well as physical shunt that is removed before servicing, in case a contactor fails closed. There's usually also contactors within the battery, making it possible to work on the battery pack itself, without any unsafe voltage present.

It's no more difficult to make safe than household wiring, and DIYers work on it all the time.

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