#MARCHintosh: Partial Success

10 Mar 2024

#MARCHinstosh I’ve not had much time to tinker since the start of the month, but in the time I have had I’ve had some partial success: the Mac SE is now talking to the Internet!

Screenshot of a successful MacTCP Ping

This turned out to be pretty straightforward, mainly following along with the instructions from BlueSCSI. The one wrinkle I hit was that I couldn’t mount the image with the drivers with the software I had. I worked around this by duping it to an actual, honest-to-goodness 3.5” floppy disk. Running from that, everything went smoothly, and pretty soon MacTCP was talking to my router, and from there the world.

So, why am I only calling this a partial success? While, strictly speaking, I’ve already achieved my stated aim, it doesn’t match the picture I had in my mind. When I said “on the Internet”, I was really meaning “browsing the web” — I want to be able to access this very blog from the SE. The networking layer is solved, but when I came to installing Netscape Navigator 2 (which seems like a reasonable baseline), I found that, rather than MacTCP, it requires OpenTransport (an alternative TCP/IP stack — yes, you needed to bring your own back in the day). BlueSCSI/DynaPORT also supports that, so I’m optimistic I’ll be able to sort it out.

Side note: while taking screenshots in System 7 is trivial (just Command-Shift-3), I’ve yet to figure out a smooth way of getting them off the SE in a form readable by modern software. My current workaround is to mount one of the SE’s hard drive images in InfiniteMac, open it there, and then take a screenshot of that. Hence, the above image isn’t of the highest fidelity. I still have the original PICT, and will replace it with a better version once I’ve fixed the workflow.

Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf wearing T-shirts reading I didn't invent the internet and I didn't invent the web

#MARCHintosh

29 Feb 2024

#MARCHinstosh

I came across #MARCHintosh a few days ago — it’s a loose collection of retro Mac content for the month of March — and I’m going to give it a go. My goal will be to get the recently-revived Mac SE on the internet via the BlueSCSI’s Pico-W WiFi support; a modest project compared to others out there, but should be fun to do it as part of a larger event.

Keyboards

23 Feb 2024

This blog has had a variety of structures since it started, but for many years it’s been whittled down to the very basics: a reverse-chronological list of posts, with an archive. However, as I pick up the amount I’m posting here (both frequency and volume), I’ve come to the conclusion that it would be useful to start adding long-lived summary pages to bring together pages on particular themes.

To that end, I’ve added a page summarising my various keyboard projects. This gives an overview of each project, and links to the relevant posts and external resources.

Behind the curtain, I’m trying out Jeykyll’s data files as an easier way to produce structured pages. The page itself is a Liquid template that iterates over a separate YAML file which looks like this:

yaml - title: Full Keyboards keyboards: - key: corne name: Corne thumbnail: images/keyboard_thumbnails/corne.jpg hero_image: /2021/12/corne_full.jpg firmware: https://github.com/robhague/qmk_firmware/tree/master/keyboards/crkbd/keymaps/robhague description: | This is the first proper keyboard I made, and is still in daily ...

This turns out to be a good fit for how I think about these things, so I can see myself using the technique more in the future.

I anticipate adding these kind of topic pages as other themes emerge, but sparingly. The reverse-chronological list of posts is the heart of blogging, and this blog is no exception.

Cheap and Cheerful

11 Feb 2024

In my post recent about the dawn of the Mac, I alluded to the fact that I didn’t have a Mac at all until much later, but instead grew up on other platforms. I’d like to expand on this a little.

For much of the late eighties and early nineties, the computer market was bifurcated, at least on this side of the Atlantic. Powerful, and correspondingly expensive, PCs and Macs were increasingly prevalent in the workplace. In homes, however, there was a completely separate ecosystem. Amigas (and Ataris) weren’t generally as powerful as their business rivals, peripherals like displays were rougher around the edges (more often than not, it was just a regular TV), and advances like hard drives were slower to arrive.

Nevertheless, the fundamentals of what was then the leading edge of computing — graphical user interfaces, applications such as word processing and desktop publishing, and so on — were all present and correct. These platforms allowed people a gateway into this world at a price that was literally an order of magnitude cheaper. You could get a complete system for a for a few hundred pounds, rather than a few thousand.

Back in the present day, I’m typing this on a wall-size display in my Meta Quest 2. Yes, the resolution could be better, the hand tracking keeps kicking in as I type, and the passthrough looks like 16mm film that’s been left in an Argentinian basement for fifty years, but it’s easily good enough to give a taste of the possibilities, and might even be useful. The games are pretty good, too.

Pixel-art image of Tutankhamun's blue and gold death mask wearing a Meta Quest 2


Image based on Avril Harrison’s iconic King Tut, which adorned the box of Deluxe Paint III.

First Contacts

30 Jan 2024

Today I hit a switch that I’ve been putting off for a while; I ended my decade-long refusal to give access to my address book to WhatsApp. When the service first came to prominence, I decided I wasn’t happy giving other people’s information to FaceBook, despite the limitations it placed on my use of the service. However, I’ve been re-evaluting this for a while, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, statistics. The service is very widely used here in the UK, and has been for many years, and almost everyone will follow the default path and allow it to scan their address book. The chances of my providing any information that the company don’t have already are basically nil. As such, my demurring is at this point purely symbolic.

Secondly, and more importantly, the landscape has changed. Since the rise of WhatsApp, tech in general and the handling of personal data specifically has a lot more regulatory and legislative attention. In particular, the GDPR1 provides targeted and toothy oversight in this case. While I don’t really trust FaceBookMeta any more than I did in 2014, I trust that they’re under close scrutiny, backed by serious regulation. Their public description of how they handle contact data seems fine, and I now have a reasonable amount of confidence that they’ll stick to it.

With those two points, I was on the fence. The thing that finally pushed me into action was this story, which quotes Apple as being willing to “withdraw critical security features from the UK market” if amendments to the Investigatory Powers Act current under consideration make it into law.

I am far from a privacy absolutist, and recognise that there are circumstances that justify law enforcement, with due process and safeguards, gaining access to private communications. I also bristle whenever gigantic transnational corporations seek to place themselves above elected governments. However, the legislation in question, as is the case more often than not, does not engage with the nuances of the technology it seeks to regulate, and in my opinion fails to balance individual and societal rights.

My hope is that the government listen to the arguments put forth, and refine or drop the changes. However, this is by no means certain (or, I fear, likely). Moreover, Apple has, on multiple recent occasions, shown its willingness to comply in the more minimal and spiteful way possible with legal constraints it doesn’t agree with, and so I have little doubt it would be good to its word. If that comes to pass, iMessage would be the most likely casualty for UK users.

With that in mind, making sure I have WhatsApp as a fallback seems prudent. It is, of course, possibly that WhatsApp will find themselves in a similar position as Apple, but given the degree to which it’s used for off-the-books Westminster discussions this seems like one thing that might actually get the politicians to sit up and take notice. It’ll be interesting to see when the penny drops.

  1. Despite Brexit, the UK still has equivalent protections in the form of the Data Protection Act 2018, at least for the moment. [back]

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