Powerbook 170 visits the Genius bar

[Anonymous Freak]

The shocking part of this, is that her publisher can read HFS floppy diskettes. I suppose, at least she doesn't need to worry about the files in WordPerfect format, but I would think that they would have one terrible time of trying to determine why the media is 'unformatted', unless she sends them in DOS format.

I seemed to recall that it was going to be DOS format. And Word 5.1 writes perfectly-compliant .doc files, that even Word 2013 reads just fine. (This incident was many years ago now, before .docx was invented.) Although you do need to turn down Word's built-in security settings to allow it to open, since Word 5 doesn't have any macro-virus protection, so it assumes all old Word files are suspect.

 

[mikecwest]

I hauled in a Mac Portable when I went in for a MacBook bulging battery. The MacBook was sitting under the Portable in the black shoulder bag.

Are you talking about the one that was basically a portable with the innards of the SE/30?

 

[Cineplex]

Now I feel old.

I doubt Apple would ever disclose it, but I wonder how many machines are still at Apple's headquarters, if any, that are running OS 9 or earlier. I know Steve donated most of stuff of historical importance from the 80's and early 90's to Stanford, but what happened after that? When Steve declared Classic dead and held it's funeral, were all the machines still running it wiped or discarded? I wouldn't be surprised if Apple has a rule that employees can't have products on company grounds more than around five years old as to not distract from forward thinking. If Steve spotted someone with a Newton he would probably have had them fired immediately.

I can tell you this. I worked for Apple Service as well as retail from around late 2000 until 2003. Our AppleCare service and support system, based on products by a company called "Vantive", ran ONLY on Mac OS 9 for a long time. They had just switched from some AIX based system in 96/97, so that was planned long before OS X was even clearly thought out (Copland was still a thing). The entire retail store POS system also ran on Mac OS 9 as well (despite the fact it had an aqua interface), because it was planned prior to OS X. Anything having to do with retail and service operations ran 100% on Mac OS 9 up until around 2002. Vantive had a client for OS X that newer retail and service locations received, but the install base was largely OS 9. It wasn't until 2004 that they got all the systems off of it completely when they switched to the lame PeopleSoft based service system. I am pretty sure they kept classic support up until 10.4 specifically because they used it internally and certain things required it. They probably don't need to keep anything around to reference any of that stuff as the data lived on non-Mac based systems and their were modern OS X clients for everything by the end. In 2001 Apple was making a huge push to get all internal stuff web based, so likely everything that had a client was Unix or Mac OS X Server based and didn't need vintage equipment to access the archives. Apple loved using Unix for back ends. I would be surprised to see anything kicking around still from those days. The Apple internal attitude was "never look back."

 

[havokalien]

Are you talking about the one that was basically a portable with the innards of the SE/30?

It was not an SE30 it was closer to a classic. more speed than the plus but still a 68000 chip. It was a portable battery mac, not a laptop. At 16 pounds it was a "luggable"

 

[mikecwest]

It was not an SE30 it was closer to a classic. more speed than the plus but still a 68000 chip. It was a portable battery mac, not a laptop. At 16 pounds it was a "luggable"

Yeah, that is the one I was thinking of. My friend David and I picked up a brochure in the shape of that lug top at Apple Fest, it had a little flap that folded up to show the innards, including a little flap that opened to show the keyboard. We both vowed to "use" the lug top brochures at high school graduation. (we didn't end up doing it though)

http://24.52.155.15/dissport/brochure.html

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/98375573082993828/