AmeriNZ Podcast episode 367 is now available

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 367, “Doing things”, is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast episode, along with any other episode.

The five most recent episodes of the podcast are listed on the sidebar on the right side of this blog.

The Super-secret Project: YOMP2

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on what I dubbed my “Super-Secret Project”, one that’s related to several projects, one way or another. Mainly, though, this project is a stand-alone one that’s connected to one other, but is nevertheless a project all on its own: It’s basically YOMP2.

In August of last year, I talked about buying a vintage Macintosh, and I went on to nickname that project “Ye Olde Mac Project” (or, YOMP). I did a couple updates, one on September 2, in which I talked more about the reasons I was doing the project at all, and another later that month about buying a vintage Power Computing Mac keyboard. In that post, I foreshadowed what would become YOMP2. I said:

…in my first YOMP update post, I talked about not being able to access old diskettes. I said that “somehow getting access to a working vintage Macintosh” was an option if I can’t get the Mac Classic working. The jury’s still out on whether that Mac Classic will work or not, but I made progress on the back-up option, something I’ll talk about in a few weeks (those same Covid restrictions are delaying the completion of this mysterious development). But I think it’ll be a good development.

A few days before that post, I’d bought a newer vintage Mac, an LC575 (photo above right), on our online auction site. I was so vague about it because those Covid restrictions at the time meant I couldn’t go to Auckland to pick it up, and I had no idea when I’d would. Then, the restrictions eased a wee bit, but I still couldn’t go there, so my niece was able to pick it up for me. However, even then I still had no idea when I’d be able to get the Mac—and I didn’t even know for sure if it worked (though I knew the screen worked). I didn’t want to talk about it until I knew more.

Then, things got worse: Auckland got locked down until just before Christmas and there was absolutely no way I could go pick it up, or for family to bring it to me. In the meantime, my niece moved to a new place, and that delayed things further.

I finally got it January, and I started it up. The screen showed a question mark in a drawing of a diskette, which means it couldn’t find the operating system. I checked the logic board and it looked fine: The battery hadn’t exploded (less likely than for the Mac Classic) or leaked, and none of the capacitors needed to be replaced. I thought it looked a bit dusty, though, so I bought a can of compressed air, which I mentioned at the time, adding, “It’s for a super-secret project that soon won’t be secret, but dunno whether it’ll turn out super or not (I’m optimistic, though).” And that’s where things stayed.

I don’t have any reasons, or even an explanation, for why I didn’t work on it, apart from having so many (too many, probably…) projects, and then there was that whole fatigue thing to contend with. I do think, though, that I was also afraid that it, too, might be beyond my abilities to get going again.

It wasn’t just a vintage Mac that I bought, it was a vintage bundle: It came with two keyboards, a mouse, and a Colour StyleWriter 2400, a thermal inkjet printer that Apple started making in September 1994, about the same time the LC 575 was made. While ink for the printer is still available, it’s hopelessly out of date: It printed only 3 pages per minute in black and white, and 0.3 in colour. If I was a collector of Apple products—and, by default, I guess I am—it would be a “nice to have”, but not something I needed or sought. Everything else was useful, though.

However, one of the two keyboards was damaged in that move, but that didn’t really matter because if I ever get the Mac Classic (the first vintage Mac I bought) going, I’ll now have a keyboard for it (because I’d already had that Power Computing keyboard). All that’s good, but then it got even better.

The seller later offered to give me some USB Iomega Zip Drives, and some used Zip disks they had. I told them that those drives have value (they can be quite expensive if in working order and good condition), but the seller didn’t want money for them, especially because they knew the Mac was going to someone who really wanted it. That happened after my niece had already collected the Mac for me, so the seller dropped the drives off, which is probably how they got separated from the stuff I’d bought.

I got those drives recently, after my niece found them in a box, and I plugged one into my current Mac and was able to access one of my Zip Disks. I couldn’t get any other disks to read, however, I didn’t know if the drive was faulty or if, like with floppy disks, my current Mac was too new to access the files.

The next step, I decided, was to to see if I could get the LC575 itself running again. My idea was to plug my own SCSI Zip Drive into it. It took a couple goes, but I eventually got the LC575 to boot up; there were a few old-timey things I needed to do (using long forgotten techniques), but the important thing is that it had been so long since it was last used that it took the hard drive some time to start spinning again. Once it did, it was fine.

The first task I took on was checking all those 800K floppy disks I hadn’t been able to read before. Out of the 45 I’d found, I checked 35 (the other 10 had software files on them), and of those, 17 had files I wanted to have (most of the diskettes were either blank or had files I didn’t want, like software updates). I was, right, though, that among those 17 were some of my oldest files—but not all of what I wanted.

I’d discovered that I didn’t have the correct SCSI cable to plug my Zip Drive into the LC575 (I think I still have it somewhere, though), so instead I plugged one of the USB Zip Drives into my old MacBook Pro, and I was right: It was able to access all the files on the disks. By that time, I’d found 11 Zip Disks (I’d found another one since last mentioning them). Two of them were Nigel’s files, and appeared to be Windows updates, but the other nine had files I wanted, including the biggest prize: Our emails to each other from before I came to New Zealand the first time, in September 1995, and from during the time between that visit and when I moved here in November. I still have even larger disks to access, but I can’t do much with them because of the limitations of the LC575.

The problems I face are, first, that the LC575 doesn’t have a network connection. In those days, Macs generally used a networking protocol called AppleTalk (later called LocalTalk), often using phone cables with special connectors. In fact, at my first job in New Zealand I set up and maintained such a network, though that one used coaxial cables. The LC575 had an expansion slot, as most later Macs had, and the LC575 takes a card that plugs into the Processor Direct Slot (PDS) to provide an Ethernet connection, and that’s what my wired home network is.

That matters because I the larger external SCSI storage device I have is called a SyJet, sold by SyQuest Technology, a company that at its height was THE way to transfer large files (or lots of files). The Syjet cartridges held 1.5GB each, and was a competitor to Iomega’s Jaz Drive, the cartridges for which held 1GB. I bought the Syjet Drive not just for the larger capacity cartridges, but also because Jaz Drives were notorious for their failures—the infamous “click of death”. Both companies are long gone, and their products are rare. The advent of CD writers and FTP made the Syquest and Iomega products unnecessary and obsolete.

All of this matters because unless I can connect the LC575 to my ethernet network, it’d be an absolutely HUGE job to transfer files. If one of the Syjet cartridges was full, it would take more than a thousand floppy disks to move all the files, however, because the LC575’s hard drive currently only has around 40MB of available space, I’d have to do lots of small batches over and over and over.

In the interim, I’ll check the Syjet cartridges for any files that I want right now. There may or may not be any files like that—I simply don’t know. But finding what’s on them is at least possible now.

The Super-Secret Project, then, was really just a joking name for a revised version of the original Ye Olde Macintosh Project, and it exists for the exact same reason as the original: To get access to my oldest files. But that’s not where this ends.

I have lots of games from that era, including one of my favourites from that time, like “Marathon” from Bungie software (it was a forerunner of their later “Halo” series). It’ll be fun, in a nostalgic kind of way, to play those games again (although parts one and two of the “Marathon” trilogy were ported to Apple’s iPadOS, I find it too difficult to play without a keyboard). In true Apple fashion, there’s one more thing.

The Macintosh LC575 is the model that Nigel had before I came to New Zealand, and for some time afterward. I brought my own Mac with me, and I have vivid memories of us both sitting in the room we shared as an office, him on his LC575, and me on my Performa 637. We both upgraded many times in the years afterward, going back and forth between Windows machines and Macs, before we both ultimately settled on Macs. Nigel’s LC575, then, was an integral part of making it possible for there to even BE an “us”. I didn’t buy the LC575 because of that—I knew it was a good machine for its era, met all my criteria, and as an all-in-one Mac, and that meant I wouldn’t have to find a vintage monitor or work out how to adapt a newer one to work with a vintage Mac. Even so, the fact it’s an LC575 is definitely a nice bonus.

This project, whether it’s called YOMP or YOMP2, isn’t completely finished and done, but I have accomplished the main driver for this whole project: I now have the old files that were the most important to me, especially those 27-year-old emails. And that feels bloody awesome.

More on the Mac LC575: It was available February 1994 to April 1995 (the one I bought was manufactured in August 1994). It has a Motorola 68LC040 33MHz processor; the “LC” in the processor name means it had no Floating Point Unit, which affects graphics, and the same processor with an FPU would be labelled 68040. The LC versions of processors were used in Performa Macs and in LC models. It could run up to MacOS 8.1, and shipped with System 7.1. They started with an 80MB hard drive (the one I have has a 250MB hard drive), and had 4MB built-in memory, expandable to a 68MB maximum. They had a built-in 14-inch Trinitron colour CRT monitor, a 2x CD-ROM drive (read only), and a SuperDrive for floppy disks. It originally cost US$1,699. In today’s money, adjusted for inflation, that would be about US$3,049. The 2022 US amount would be around NZ$4993 in today’s dollars, which can be compared to current models: The new Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra chipset would cost NZ$3,999, but without a monitor, and the more comparable 24-inch iMac with maximum memory and internal hard drive would be NZ$2499. Modern Macintoshes are definitely a LOT more affordable now, even if it sometimes doesn’t feel like it.

Open, says me

A miracle happened this week —well, two actually. Well, three, all up. And I was relieved by all three.

First, those Torx screwdrivers I ordered that were delayed? They arrived Tuesday, a day earlier than promised, and six days earlier than the revised delivery estimate. One miracle will take a bit of explanation.

The Torx screwdrivers arrived, much to my surprise, and that’s not just because all the talk of delays turned out to be irrelevant, but also because of the way they were shipped: The drivers were in the wall rack they came with, but were otherwise loose in a what appeared to be a retail box, with two tape circles holding the lid closed: The product was just loose in the box. It’s a miracle that the box didn’t open in transit—though that’s not the last big miracle.

The finally opened Mac Classic.

On Tuesday afternoon, I used the Torx screwdriver to finally open the case of the Mac Classic and: The battery did NOT explode and destroy the logic board! That was so common among on Macs of that vintage that it’s what I actually expected to see. It means that whatever’s wrong with it may be repairable. Whether I, personally, even can repair it is another matter entirely. Another big miracle may be required.

To recap for a moment, I needed a special long-handled Torx screwdriver because two of the screws were in the recess for the carry handle (in the shadow at the top of the photo above) and I couldn’t find such screwdrivers here in New Zealand. I ordered them from Amazon, was told they were delayed, they arrived early, and I immediately used the new Torx screwdriver to open the case, and then found that there was no catastrophic damage, like I thought there might be. So, even though it seems like nothing much happened, this was actually a big step forward.

And that’s a bit of a miracle, too.

The screws after removal. The black one on the left is from the bottom of the back of the case, which can be seen, so they're black to match the various ports. The upper screws can't be seen, so they're just ordinary screws (and have looser threads), and un-coloured screws are usually cheaper. But making sure that visible screws match nearby ports is the sort of attention to detail that Apple was once famous for.

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 358 now available

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 357, “Projected Living” is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast.

The five most recent episodes of the podcast are listed on the sidebar on the right side of this blog.

Waiting patiently

There’s been a lot in the news lately about the huge backlog NZ Post has in delivering packages due to a massive jump in online purchasing because of Covid lockdowns, and how that’s meant huge delays in deliveries. There really are big delays, like, for example, that vintage Mac keyboard I bought on Trade Me took nearly a week to get here from Auckland’s North Shore, somewhere I could drive to in a couple hours or so, depending on traffic (and without lockdowns, obviously).

But now it seems the very space/time continuum has been ruptured.

Last week I ordered something from a major retailer (because it wasn’t available at any of their stores within an 8 hour drive). It arrived at the NZ Post depot in Hamilton early Saturday morning, where it’s been ever since. When I got up yesterday, Tuesday, I thought it might be delivered that day (since it was already in Hamilton). That didn’t happen, but we did enter The Twilight Zone.

When I checked the tracking today (image at right), nothing about its status had changed, except it said, “Estimated delivery: Yesterday”. I’m expecting to suddenly remember it arriving yesterday as I look at the package on the table where I put it, yesterday, though it’s not there right now, of course. This led me to a question: What day will my reality be altered to accommodate a delivery of an item in the past? And will it hurt when the space/time continuum burps?

Those sarcastic questions popped into my head today, but the bigger thing is how noticeable it is that things have fallen apart for NZ Post, so much so that they’re not even trying to keep the estimated delivery date remotely accurate (assuming, of course, that they really can’t travel back in the past to deliver a package…). This same thing is happening to a lot of people I know.

There’s actually a part of me that wonders why NZ Post was caught so ill-prepared for the surge in online orders. They’ve talked repeatedly about how package delivery has become the biggest part of their business, and they even re-branded to promote their new reality. This doesn’t seem to bode well for the Christmas shopping season. Still, this is also a global problem, so I don’t want to be too hard on NZ Post (yet…).

Today I also checked on the delivery status of those Torx screwdrivers I ordered from Amazon for Ye Olde Macintosh Project. They were due to arrive “about October 6”, but today their website said, “Unfortunately, your delivery is running behind schedule,” and then added that the delivery company was “working to make sure the delay doesn’t affect your final delivery time. Your package can still arrive by October 11,” which is nice, but that’s actually five days later than they originally said, and while I’m sure their wording was meant to be positive, I couldn’t help noticing they’d moved the goalposts.

I don’t know what the specific problem was, though the details on the order said it was “Carrier Delay – Operational/Capacity Related”. I have no idea what that actually means, but in general terms it’s happening absolutely everywhere.

After all of New Zealand (apart from Auckland) moved to Alert Level 3 Lockdown, construction could resume, and within a week or two that led to warnings that builders would be running out of various materials because the factories in Auckland were closed due to their Level 4 Lockdown. The industry has had trouble getting foreign-made supplies for months, and, in fact, pretty much any person or business ordering stuff from overseas has probably seen delays, sometimes massive ones. As the world begins to accept that Covid has become endemic, shipping will begin to return to normal, but what about next time? There will be another pandemic and we should take the lessons from this one to better prepare us so that next time we don’t start seeing shortages of stuff and/or massive price hikes.

Before all this happened, I was looking at some specialist New Zealand food suppliers, small businesses supplying NZ-made products that aren’t sold in supermarkets. I seriously considered placing orders to try their products, but I’m now glad that I didn’t: Wouldn’t want food products sitting in a depot for several days.

I was just being silly when I talked about my package’s delay—my life will not be diminished by it taking a long time to get here, apart from the fact that I don’t want to leave the house in case the package is dispatched and their system doesn’t alert me like it usually does. Same with those screwdrivers: If I’ve gone this long without being able to tell if that Mac Classic is repairable or not, then an extra five days (or whatever it ends up being) won’t make any difference.

But it would do a world of good for people’s sense of well-being if deliveries could get back to being a little more, well, normal. We’re waiting patiently for that, too.

Update – September 30, 2021: The package was delivered around Noon today.

Update 2 – October 5, 2021: The Torx screwdrivers were delivered early this afternoon—and a day earlier than originally promised. Um, good?

This is based on something I posted on my personal Facebook earlier today, but that was just my starting point for this post.

Slower than I thought

Progress is progress, right? Well, Ye Olde Macintosh Project (YOMP) has moved even slower than I expected. Which doesn’t mean that nothing’s happened, just that not much has happened. Which makes a short post all the more possible, for a change.

in my first post on the project, I talked about some of the things I needed in order to be able to get the Mac Classic working. There are updates on two of those.

I said I needed a long-handled Torx screwdriver, and I thought that Nigel might have some. I haven’t found any, and I’ve since realised that what I pictured in my head were probably hex drives because they were used for the machines that Nigel built, like his CNC router and his (many) 3D printers. Torx are kind of a specialty thing in computers, and I can’t think of a reason he’d have needed one.

So, I started searching for them in New Zealand, but true long-handled Torx screwdrivers weren’t available here. I bought an ordinary one from the home centre, even though I was pretty sure it wouldn’t work for the two screws that need the long-handled screwdriver, and I was right (though it did work for the other two, not that it helped anything with two than couldn’t be reached).

It was back to the search, and I finally relented and went to order a set from a New Zealand site that imports them from the UK, only to find they were out of stock. I surrendered: I ordered a set from Amazon, and they should be here on October 6, give or take. Oh, well, I tried to buy in New Zealand. As I learned from watching Nigel, it’s all too often impossible to source specialised tech stuff in New Zealand, and now it’s even worse because of all the Covid-related disruptions.

Another thing I mentioned was that I needed a keyboard and mouse that could connect to Macs of that era (they use a standard called “ADB”). I also said that the only place I found vintage keyboards was in the USA where prices could be many hundreds of dollars. Then, my luck changed.

Someone put an ADB keyboard on the New Zealand auction site, Trade Me. It was from Power Computing, which I knew had manufactured “Mac Clones” in the mid-1990s (until Steve Jobs returned to Apple and killed off the clones market, acquiring Power Computing’s assets). I knew it was a Mac keyboard from that alone (the listing didn’t say), but it had a photo of the connector, which I could see was ADB (because of the number of pins and their configuration), plus the key combinations to the left and right of the spacebar (I used one every day for years, after all). The asking price was $15 (!).

I was all set to bid on it in the last few minutes of the auction—and then I forgot to go there and the auction closed with no bids. I sent a message to ask the person to relist it. Then I got an email from Trade Me touting various auctions, as it does, and one of them was for the same sort of keyboard from the same person, but not as yellowed (a topic in itself). Another lucky break! I got that one (photo up top) for $15, plus $10 for shipping (it was in Auckland, and I couldn’t go there to pick it up due to Covid restrictions). It took six days to get to me because of local shipping delays (apparently caused by people buying lots of stuff online during the Covid lockdowns).

I was sure that the delay didn’t matter, because without the Torx screwdriver, I can’t open the Mac Classic to see why it won’t boot (I’m betting the logic board is munted). Nevertheless, I hooked up the keyboard (after giving it the first clean it’s getting), and, as I suspected, nothing happened. Back to waiting for the screwdrivers.

A keyboard alone isn’t enough: I’ll need an ADB mouse, too. I keep having visions that I still have an ADB mouse packed away, but I don't know if I do or if it's a displaced memory or something. I looked through some old boxes where I thought it might be, but so far nothing. I did, however, find the AC power adapter for my Zip drive that I brought from the USA (once here, I had to get one that would work in New Zealand), and also the US power cord for my old Mac Performa 637 that I brought from the USA. If I kept those, then the mouse, if I do have it, will be packed away somewhere—and so, too, there may be some SCSI hard drives I had back then, too. After all, I still have the modem I brought with me.

Meanwhile, in my first YOMP update post, I talked about not being able to access old diskettes. I said that “somehow getting access to a working vintage Macintosh” was an option if I can’t get the Mac Classic working. The jury’s still out on whether that Mac Classic will work or not, but I made progress on the back-up option, something I’ll talk about in a few weeks (those same Covid restrictions are delaying the completion of this mysterious development). But I think it’ll be a good development.

So far, though, that’s all that’s happened—or not, depending on your point of view. And there’s much more yet to come—or not. For me, the not knowing is part of the fun of the whole thing.

Ye Olde Macintosh Project – an update

Among my many (many, many…) projects are ones on which progress is extremely slow. It’s now clear that the slowest of all may be the project to get a 1990 Macintosh Classic running again, something I talked about in quite some detail this past Sunday. In the interest of brevity, I’m going to do some shorter posts updating progress rather than long ones with lots of details. Besides, this blog is often sort of a repository for things I otherwise would forget, and I find it helpful to have complete information about my projects.

The first thing I’ve done is give this project a nickname—of course I have: I give nearly everything that’s not serious a nickname. So, this project is now Ye Olde Macintosh Project, or YOMP for short. Because, why not?

This week I made further attempts to access my oldest floppy disks—after finding six more of the more “modern” ones. I said on Sunday that I ordered a new USB floppy drive that could read 720K floppies. That arrived yesterday, and no, it couldn’t read my old DS/DD floppies, either. I now realise why: Both the USB floppy drives were designed for PCs, not Macs.

The problem here goes back to the dawn of the double-sided floppy disk era, the mid 1980s. The original DS/DD disks were designed to hold 720K, however, the clever engineers at Apple worked out that they could get the capacity up to 800K (which was quite a lot in those days!) if they varied the speed the floppy spun at depending on the location of the read/write head of the drive. That never became a standard for PCs, and so, floppy drives intended for PCs can’t read 800K disks because the disk rotates at a constant speed.

Apple dropped floppy drives from their machines in 1998, with the release of the G3 iMac. Then, in 2019, they dropped support for floppies in the MacOS, too. All of which means that there are NO new USB floppy drives that can read 800K disks (something I should have researched before I bought the new drive, but, never mind).

All of which means that my options for those old floppies are quite limited. First, I could get the Mac Classic running. Second, I might be able to find a vintage external Apple floppy drive that’s affordable (not easy). Or, third, maybe I could find a munted vintage Macintosh that I could salvage the SuperDrive from. That last option’s the most problematic one by far because it would mean adapting it to work connected to a modern machine, and that’s way beyond my capabilities—if it’s even possible.

So, accessing those old 800K diskettes—which is a side project related to, but not actually part of YOMP—is now on hold until I find out if the Mac Classic is salvageable. If it isn’t, I’ll explore other options.

Meanwhile, the Zip Disk project (also a side project related to, but not actually part of YOMP) has had only negative progress: I’ve now confirmed that none of my PC computers have a serial port. The only thing left to try is to hook it up by USB to a PC, but I have my doubts that will work due to formatting differences. I looked for used USB Zip Drives and, well! If I thought the old ADB keyboards and the old Apple external floppy drives were expensive, I didn’t know what I was talking about: I saw prices as high as $3000 (!), with most in the high hundreds, and all with maybe another US$125+ on top of that for shipping. I think I need a lie down with a cool cloth for my forehead…

All up, getting the Mac Classic to work, or at least somehow getting access to a working vintage Macintosh, would be my best option for accessing all of those now vintage disks. Can’t speculate about the latter, of course, but the former will need more time.

My next step is to go back into my garage project and set up my workbenches so I have somewhere to work on the Mac. In addition to clearing space for the workbenches, I also need to find the bolts for the legs. I found them right after I moved in here—maybe even the very day I moved in—and I put them somewhere “safe”. The rest is predictable.

Still, even though none of this has actually moved forward, it at least keeps me busy, with no time to get bored. That’s especially good while we’re living in Covid Alert Level 3 and I can’t really go anywhere, anyway.

Now, back to work!

It’s my new project, Mac

If I’ve learned anything about managing my various projects over the years, it’s that it’s always good to have several non-important ones on the list. That way, when progress on important projects gets stalled, I can still have other projects to turn to. Idle hands, and all that. However, my latest non-urgent project takes that to a whole new level—breaking me into new and completely foreign territory populated with many new challenges and the chance to learn totally new skills. Or, it could all end badly. It should be clear which way it’s headed within a few weeks, when the project itself may end. Or, it may go on for ages. The not-knowing is part of the excitement.

I recently bought an old Macintosh Classic (manufactured in 1990) on NZ’s online auction site. I paid $63 for it (today, that’s about US$44) as is—no keyboard or mouse or power cord, and no promises it would work. If that seems like a weird thing to buy, I have my reasons.

It all started when I found an old “get started” disk for the “America Online” Internet service (I forgot to share that Instagram post here; oops). The box it was in also had “dozens (…and dozens) of floppy disks”, as I put it on my personal Facebook at the time. I knew I had a USB external floppy disk dive, so it should’ve been easy to check them, right? That’s not how technology usually works.

So far, I’ve found a total of 154 floppy disks, all but three of which I’ve checked. And that right there is where it first got complicated.

I plugged the floppy drive into my current Mac Mini, but it couldn’t read any disks. A little Googling told me that in October 2019, Apple eliminated support for the floppy disk file indexing system called HFS (Hierarchical File System) when they released their 2019 MacOS, Catalina. My new Mac Mini couldn’t read the floppies—but I thought my old MacBook Pro probably could.

That old MacBook still has an older (pre-2019) operating system, so it could read most of the floppies—but there were 45 it couldn’t read. Those disks were “double-sided, double-density” (also known as DS/DD or just DD), and they were the oldest of my floppies and, based on the labels on them, hold some of my oldest files. Those disks hold stuff that doesn’t exist anywhere else, including stuff from my activist days. I had those disks because in those days I was sometimes renting time using the Macintoshes of the day, and they often could only use the DS/DD diskettes. NOW I wish I’d copied the files to HD diskettes, but it never occurred to me back then.

I suspect, but don’t know, that the USB floppy drive Nigel had can only read the more “modern” HD floppy disk format. I couldn’t find any model number on the drive, and my attempts to find out through searching online didn’t solve the matter—but it seems the most likely explanation.

Next, I decided to try to access a bunch of disks that look like floppy disks on steroids: Zip Disks, something like mini-removable hard drives used in the peripheral Zip Drive. I have ten 100MB Zip disks, and I think the emails that Nigel and I sent to each other before I moved to New Zealand may be on those disks, along with other lost files.

The drive I have is a SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) device (SCSI is similar to a serial interface on a PC). I bought a cable that connects it to a USB port, however, it’s a straight pass-through cable, not an adapter, and it won’t necessarily make a modern computer able to access a SCSI device. None of my Macs can access it.

All of which means that I could access some of my files, those on HD floppy disks, but nothing else. I needed new options.

The wisdom of the Internet told me that a Linux machine might be able to read the Zip disks. Nigel turned our oldest MacBook (the white plastic kind) into a Linux machine, but it couldn’t access the Zip disks (or the DS/DD disks, which again suggests the drive can’t read them). Other advice suggested hooking it up to a PC running WindowsXP, but there are potential file formatting issues, and, anyway, I only run that on my old Hackintosh through emulation, and it doesn’t have a serial port. A dead end.

That’s where the Macintosh Classic came into the picture: It has an Apple Superdrive, the floppy drive they introduced in the late 1980s to read and write both DS/DD and HD diskettes. It also has SCSI—all of which would be useful.

The day the Mac arrived by courier, I grabbed a power cord and plugged it in to see if it turned on (photo above—the fire extinguisher in the background was because I figured it was best to play it safe). It seemed like absolutely nothing happened when I turned it on—the screen remained off, there was no sound of a hard drive spinning up, but then I heard the soft whirring of what I think is the cooling fan. This isn’t necessarily bad news.

There could be lots of different things going on, but I won't know anything for sure until I can open it up. I need a very long-handled T-15 screwdriver, a particular size of a Torx screwdriver with a very long handle. I have heads for that, but nothing with a long-enough handle. I'm pretty sure Nigel would've had one, but, I'm not entirely sure where it'd be (though I have ideas…). If I do need to buy one, I can't get it at Covid Alert Level 4, so there's nothing more I can do right now.

Once I open up the case, I may find that the battery exploded (a common thing, apparently) and damaged the logic board. If that happened, it may be irreparable, or, if it can be fixed, it’d be way beyond my capabilities. Another common problem, probably unrelated to the failure to start up, is that capacitors may have leaked, and they sometimes can be replaced—something I also don’t know how to do (assuming I could even get the right capacitors). Once I know what I’m facing, then I’ll see what things I’d need to learn to do, if possible.

As Steve Jobs might put it, “there’s one more thing”: Macs of that era used something called ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) to connect the keyboard and mouse. Those devices disappeared when USB was introduced, so now the only place to get them is from an online auction site (usually in the USA), and they often go for crazy prices (I’ve seen some keyboards going for more than US$200, which today is about NZ$285). I found a place that makes a true adapter (not just a cable) to connect a corded USB keyboard and mouse to the ADB port on the Mac, and it’s cheaper than many vintage keyboards. Still, no point doing anything about that until I know if the Mac can be saved/repaired.

If all else fails and I can’t get it working, it'll be a nostalgic object for me because it's basically the Mac Plus in new clothes, and the Mac Plus was the very first Mac I ever used—AND I used to do page layouts on the thing, but from here in the 21st Century, I have absolutely no idea how I ever did that. On the other, I saw a video by a guy who took out all the guts of a dead Mac Classic, mounted a modern LED screen where the old CRT monitor was, and put an older Mac Mini inside the case. It's—an option, I guess.

Meanwhile, I have other things to try. For example, I could try to find a used USB Zip Drive, which my old MacBook should be able to access. I also ordered a new USB floppy disk drive that can read both formats of floppy disk. That’ll arrive in a few days. In other words, I’m hedging my bets.

All of this is something I did because progress on my important projects has been stalled by the Level 4 Lockdown. I won’t have any room to move in my garage until I can get those 80 now-flattened boxes out of the way (something I’d planned to deal with the day we moved to Level 4). The horrible weather we’ve had lately (cold and lots of rain) has also meant I couldn’t do any of the preparatory work in the gardens. So, it was really good to have this multi-faceted technical project to work on, especially because so far it’s all cost me less that $100, which is pretty inexpensive as hobbies go.

There’s nothing in all this so far that’s new to me: I’ve been using Macintosh systems since the 1980s, so I’m very familiar with how they worked then as well as now. Even so, there’s plenty of stuff for me to learn, and maybe even a new skill or two to pick up. Most importantly, I enjoy it—even the incomplete successes.

To quote Steve Jobs yet again, there’s one more thing: All of these projects I talk about now have one thing in common: They’re all about me—what I want to do, what interests me, and how I want to arrange my life. Very few of my projects now are actually about Nigel, though the security alarm project was one he never got to. But even that was about what I wanted, and it’s part of the changes I’m making to things that were Nigel’s projects as I move to things that work better for me. I carry all the stuff I learned from Nigel, even from just watching him, but now it’s me taking charge of everything, willingly and on purpose.

It turns out, I’m my own biggest project of all, and so far that’s progressing well.

More on the Mac Classic: It was available October 1990 to September 1992 (the fact that the one I bought was manufactured in September 1990 means it’s among the original machines made). It has a Motorola 68000 8MHz processor, and the OS it could run was System 6.06 up to System 7.5.5. They usually had a 40MB hard drive, and had 1MB built-in memory, with a 4 MB maximum (!). They also had a 9-inch (23cm) monochrome CRT monitor, and that SuperDrive I mentioned. It originally cost US$999 to US$1500, and was the first Mac to cost less than US$1000. In today’s money, adjusted for inflation, that would be about US$2,087 to US$3,133 respectively (which would be NZ$2976 to NZ$4469 in today’s dollars; NZ inflation rates may not match the USA’s, and I don’t know the original list price here in NZ, so those amounts are indicative only). Modern Macintoshes are definitely a LOT more affordable now.