I was working at Apple at that time, and doing UNIXy things, so I might be a little prolix on that topic, sorry.
2 Likes
Oh, not at all! I learned a fair amount, so thanks for the detailed answer!
You definitely could; I had friends who did BeOS development on Macs when the BeBox was discontinued. I believe BeOS was exclusively ported to Mac for developers, actually.
2 Likes
… haters gonna hate… macs run windows and linux fine … apple releases a lot of the source to their os and contributes to open source projects … the Apple II+ came with schematics and BIOS listings…
OK, NOW I feel old.
I had a Z80 CPU board for my Apple IIe so that I could run the older CP/M operating system, and I customized the case a bit to look retro.
1 Like
God forbid, one ask a question… God forbid anyone even suggest that apple is less than perfect…
3 Likes
I figured it’d have run, though I only saw it on beige G3s. I had a friend/coworker whose brother worked at Be, who ran BeOS for interest/fun on boxes around the office. For the things it was able to do, it was really cool, and mind-boggling in how blazingly fast it was. First seeing that browser render web pages was almost surreal in how fast everything popped in compared to Netscape on an OS 8 box.
Back in the day (i.e., when the //c was still the shit), I picked up a used Apple //e that’d been used by a professor. It was pimped out with 640k RAM, a physics card, a 2400bps modem, and a mouse. For a brief time I had the Apple //e equivalent of a Ferrari.
6 Likes
I think it really was just a sincere question.
They do now, but in '98 when the iMac was released you were running Windows in an emulator with a big perf. penalty. You could run Linux with a bit of a struggle, though.
Once OS X was released they opened up Darwin in late 2000, but the iMac had been around for a few years then.
In '98 the first iMac shipped with MacOS 8.1, which was not open at all, though, and it took time for Apple to get on board with their Open Source strategy (though thankfully they did).
4 Likes
Nope, I dared to question the character of a corporation, I must be hater! I’m just too dense to understand the benefits of Apple, clearly…
1 Like
Please tell me you still have this. That is a lot of ram on a //e.
I remember my school had a bunch of //e’s (one in each classroom along with a dedicated computer room in 1990, and later I saw a GS in storage in the library. Kinda wish I nicked the thing in retrospect.) Loved that ugly thing and the greenscreen… and to top it off ours had something that let it speak (handy given blind school.) Really weird hearing it say minute ‘please wait a mine-ute.’
1 Like
Sadly, my baby ate the big one many years ago, when my dad thought it’d be a swell idea to plug in a SCSI printer while it was on; all of the expansion cards fried. I tried to save up for a GS, but it was too pricey for a middle-school student.
2 Likes
Wow a SCSI printer? That was a thing? I thought SCSI was all disks and such. I guess I had a SCSI scanner at one point, but that is vaguely kind of a storage input device?
2 Likes
It was, but only on some of their printers. I think I was mistaken however – Wikipedia tells me that the ImageWriter II was a serial-port printer.
1 Like
Yep, there was the LaserWriter II SC. All the fun of being a printer with the added fun of SCSI, so when it failed you had to make sure you had a SCSI terminator as well as praying to the print gods.
There also was the ScuzzyGraph - a SCSI box with a SCSI port and a VGA port with a driver that sent a VGA signal over SCSI so you could drive a monitor over SCSI.
I vaguely remember other SCSI madness, but thankfully it’s mostly forgotten.
7 Likes
There were quite a few parallel printers back then too using the same Centronics connector that was being used for SCSI.
3 Likes
Pardon me while I say a quick prayer of thanks to the inventor(s) of USB.
6 Likes
…ouch…
Man just… ouch.
Or, y’know, you can buy a $5 sticker on Etsy to get 90% of the effect at a tiny fraction of the price. I have one, from a different seller. It’s nice. A little splash of color, a little retro flair.
4 Likes
Thank you. Ordered!
