Made it home to find a large box from Amazon with the tiny DB-15-to-VGA connector (also, neither here nor there, but a second package containing a promotional LEGO clownfish.)

So I dove into my long-abandoned desk area to grab the most readily available CRT. And it was a big one. Let me tell you, dear reader: if anyone ever tells you that a 21" Trinitron is not really, really, really heavy then they are an enormous liar. With some pulling and shoving and oh-look-millions-of-stinkbugsing I dragged the monitor to meet what was most likely its final duty.

Gotta move that finding-an-LCD step up, I think!

And so I lovingly attached the power cables, put on the new dongle, hooked the parts together and so forth. Power on the monitor--green, no source, yellow standby. And then I stepped back and considered something for the first time:

I had absolutely no idea how you turn a 1997 Macintosh on.

I had done it once, when I bought it, to listen to the boot up... but not since. Was it the weird nub under the CD drive? No, further feeling around revealed a second one of those on the other side, they were for releasing the front of the case. On the back? Nope, a flashlight and a magnifier revealed no buttons.

So I whipped out my trusty iPhone, Google'd up Apple's support site which happily had a PDF manual for the 7300 right there. I zoomed it into iBooks and found that the on button was... right in front of my face, a tiny recessed button on the bottom left of the front. D'oh.

I turned it on and waited with baited breath. Pause. Startup chime! Pause again... the monitor switches to green, there is a video source! And then I was greeted with this beautiful sight:



Thank Sivar! Now I know it has Mac OS 9.1, which may be problematic. I have a memory that SWC may not work with such a new operating system... in which case I'll have to figure out how you go back to 7 or 8. But I'm sure it can be done!

We'll find out more on Tuesday when the actual input devices arrive. Can't wait!

LOAF Fixes a Macintosh

I know I have enough Wing Commander projects to last ten lifetimes, but the recent news about Steve Jobs inspired me to finally get to work on something I've been meaning to do for myself for many years: build the ideal old Macintosh for playing Wing Commander. My aim is to go from some old surplus to a kickass machine for Super Wing Commander, Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV, tracking down all the cool extras they support in the process. I thought I'd start a thread so folks who are interested can follow my progress... and we can use it as a reference for anyone else wanting to do this.

First I should say that I have absolutely NO idea how old Macs work. As I mentioned in the other thread, I grew up with an Apple ][... but irony of ironies my father turned the skills he learned on that early Apple into a job for IBM and we never owned a Mac. I have a Macbook as my regular notebook and I use a Mini as my HTPC today... but beyond the occasional encounter in a middle school library, I've never touched anything before OSX. So this will be an adventure! Sort of.

(... and it goes without saying that I could use some helps from folks here who *didn't* skip the Macintosh...)

So, here's where we start. I picked this up five or six years back at a surplus sale for a few bucks. I suspect it belonged to a university:



It's a Power Mac 7300/180, which would have been top of the line a short time after Wing Commander IV came out. I'm not necessarily married to her, but that seems like a reasonable place to start. I also have no idea what the actual condition of the thing is. All I've ever done is listen to see if it boots up, which it does (I hear a startup chime, anyway.) I never picked up a monitor or keyboard/mouse or anything else...

Until yesterday! Amazon has Primed me one of these, which is sitting on my doorstep at home right now: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002J1JAE

That should let me plug a regular monitor in. Like all houses, mine is full of old CRTs so I can use one of those for now. It sounds like you can also get an LCD to work with an old Mac which I will want to do eventually (I don't have much space left, for you see my house is full of old CRTs...)

So, there's our cliffhanger--what will the monitor reveal? Stay tuned to find out.

(I also bought an ADB keyboard/mouse off of eBay, which should show up in a few days.)

If anyone wants to keep track of how much this project costs--and say yell at me when it outgrosses buying an old 3DO--we're at: $20 for the computer, $10 for the DB-15-to-VGA plug and $15 for keyboard/mouse.

Edit: THRILLING UPDATE -- the keyboard and mouse will be here on Tuesday.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

Hopefully no one out there has Space Quest II on their RSS readers; I'm going to archive all of the "building a PC" articles here so they form something approaching a narrative. We'll start with the Steve Jobs memorial post that kicked everything off. Like anything I've ever written, I'm not altogether happy with it on reflection... but I also think it's best not to go back and edit such things.

I tried to string together a few words to send to the Apple memorial address, so I'll repost that:

Days before I was born, my father--who was an ER nurse at the time--went out and bought an Apple II+. He used it to teach himself about computers, to make a better life for his family. In a few years he was a top database developer. That was Steve's genius: discovering how technology could be used to improve life. In a few days the wags are going to start pointing out that he didn't really invent the PC or the phone or the animated movie... but he figured out how to elevate these things, to give them a meaning and a value that no one else could.

You wanted to imagine a different end to this story. We all knew this was coming but... needed to believe that something magical would happen, that there would be some deserved recompense pointing to a fair universe. I don't think that Apple needs Steve to keep innovating, but you wanted so much to imagine an end to his story where he would have been able to look back at the world he changed ten or twenty years on.

And of course Steve knew what was happening better than any of us, which is why the narrative that now emerges is so compelling. We come to realize that faced with his own death he lived his philosophy in a way that most people can't. He fought to spend his final years working on things that would change how we communicate instead of stepping back at all. That's astonishing to me.