PPC Challenge '21

[Amethyst1]

Why should they know? In my example I provided two genuine icons for a text file but they look different.

The TXT file icon I showed was introduced in Windows 95 and left unchanged for six years until XP came out. And it was the only icon used for these files. Since eg readme.txt was a common thing on software media, I assume that most users were familiar with their icon.

And even if they weren't, they should at least have known better than to open random mail attachments from a complete stranger.

 

[Project Alice]

Software today isn't utter trash. Software today is infinitely more complex because the world we live in today is infinitely more complex. Back in the 90s and even into the early 2000s computers were rarely connected to each other in the way they are today. Most viruses spread via floppy disks passed around in schoolyards and the worst damage they were able to inflict was to modify your MBR to keep your computer from booting. Data breaches, security incidents, (digital) identity theft, keystroke logging, or encryption malware holding your valuable and priceless memories or business data ransom was about as distant to 90s computer users as self-driving cars running on nitrogen emitting nothing but pure oxygen are to us today. Remember the worst security incident of that era? It was the ILOVEYOU computer worm developed by a 24-year old college student in early 2000. Seems absolutely laughable compared to today's organized and sometimes state-sponsored computer crime units hijacking global corporations demanding millions of dollars in ransom money, doesn't it?

Viruses were spread on the internet just like now in the early/mid 2000s. Emails especially. They weren’t “spread through floppies” since probably the mid 90s.
Nonetheless, none of that is actually relevant to the computing power.

Put a modern OS onto a G3 and it’ll do all the same stuff. Encryption, ect albeit slower.
The only thing more complex about our world is that people can’t seem to decide what gender they are or what color to dye their hair this week. But much like @z970mp ’s comment about the plandemic that’s a topic for another discussion lol.

Would I trade the convenience of a modern Toyota, Chrysler or Volkswagen for an 80s Ferrari, Ford, or Mercedes Benz? Absolutely not.

I HATE modern vehicles. They are ugly, and huge for no apparent reason. The newest vehicle I own and will probably ever own is a 2003. I have been driving a 1990 daily. Modern vehicles also teach people how to drive like an idiot; traction control, blind spot detection, crap like that is extremely toxic for the society of lazy idiots we live in. Not to mention every little sensor that costs more than the car when it breaks.
Modern cars are like Modern macs. Overpriced and non user serviceable
I’ll take that 80s Ford over a 2020 Camry any day.

The end results from this super sophisticated software and the mighty hardware that's necessary to run it - outside of industrial, research and military applications, is no better than that made on 90s machines.
Music, art, design, literature - all of these things have made no qualitative leap.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.
In fact I’d say that a lot of that stuff has took a quantum leap in reverse. There are definitely some great things that have come out, but they are few and far in between with the garbage that most people my age consider art or music.

 

[Amethyst1]

Modern vehicles also teach people how to drive like an idiot; traction control, blind spot detection, crap like that is extremely toxic for the society of lazy idiots we live in. Not to mention every little sensor that costs more than the car when it breaks.

Not to mention that doing something as simple as replacing the battery isn't that simple anymore because some of the systems will have to be recalibrated and whatnot.

 

[m1maverick]

The TXT file icon I showed was introduced in Windows 95 and left unchanged for six years until XP came out. And it was the only icon used for these files. Since eg readme.txt was a common thing on software media, I assume that most users were familiar with their icon.

And even if they weren't, they should at least have known better than to open random mail attachments from a complete stranger.

How does the end user know it didn't change until six years later? How does the end user know that the "new" icon wasn't due to some application they installed changing the file association (and thus the icon)? Applications do this all the time.

Your argument lies on the premise that:

1. Users know what the appropriate icon is.
2. The know this for every file type.
3. That it remains static.

The typical user knows none of this and, frankly, I doubt many advanced users know them all too. It's easy to say the user should know but I think it's clear users don't know. Maybe you could argue they should know but I wouldn't support such an argument given vast number of genuine icons within a given OS.

 

[sparty411]

Think about cars - do I love old cars? Absolutely. They are gorgeous, great to look at, and more often than not engineering marvels of their time. Would I trade the convenience of a modern Toyota, Chrysler or Volkswagen for an 80s Ferrari, Ford, or Mercedes Benz? Absolutely not.

This is a horrible analogy. My daily drivers are a 77' Continental Mark V, and 89' Town Car Signature, both of which sport more bells and whistles than 99% of cars on the road in 2020. Cars remain useful for much longer than personal computers.

 

[m1maverick]

This is a horrible analogy. My daily drivers are a 77' Continental Mark V, and 89' Town Car Signature, both of which sport more bells and whistles than 99% of cars on the road in 2020. Cars remain useful for much longer than personal computers.

Primarily because the task they've been asked to perform hasn't changed much nor has the means to accomplish it (roads) change much either.

 

[sparty411]

Primarily because the task they've been asked to perform hasn't changed much nor has the means to accomplish it (roads) change much either.

Agreed

 

[Amethyst1]

How does the end user know that the "new" icon wasn't due to some application they installed changing the file association (and thus the icon)? Applications do this all the time.

And I hate that.

I concur and say that your points are valid. My point about not opening attachments from strangers still stands.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

WordStar FTW!

Yep. I did on-site computer repair in the '00s. I had one client who was a professional author (of nonfiction works,) who still wrote in Word 5.0 on a Macintosh Quadra with a black-and-white display. She had a panic one time that had me come out because she was ready to turn in her latest manuscript, but AOL would no longer let her dial-in using the 68k-compatible version of AOL, and both her floppy drive and printer had stopped working.

Ironically, she had high-speed internet and a modern computer, so I just got her an AAUI adapter to plug her Quadra in to her modern Ethernet network, so she could do email on it, rather than paying for a separate AOL dial-up account. Fixed her floppy drive (the "shutter" of a disk had fallen off inside, some needle-nose pliers got it out, drive itself thankfully undamaged,) and the printer just had a really nasty paper jam. (The three things hadn't all broken at the same time, it was just that because at least one option was working, she hadn't *needed* it fixed until all three had stopped.)

 

[m1maverick]

And I hate that.

I concur and say that your points are valid. My point about not opening attachments from strangers still stands.

Ah, but wasn't one of the tricks of ILOVEYOU that it used an end users address book as a list of targets to send e-mail to?

I concede your points are good points but they're a lot more difficult in reality than in theory.

 

[Imixmuan]

The end result of this super sophisticated software is a world that has been plunged into a worldwide pandemic the likes of which it hasn't experieced since 1918 and still managed to send a huge percentage of its workforce home without prior notice to continue working from home

Music, art, design, and literature may not be the best benchmark to measure technological development. Neither is the average life expectency of a Mongolian prairie chicken by the way, because that would be just as pointless.

Funny you should use that as an example, kind of proves my point how uniquely screwed up we have become.



Cultural and artistic endeavors are the very pinnacle of what we can aspire to as a civilisation.

Could not agree with Dronecatcher more. In 2005 at Macworld I met someone else who, if he were still here, would likely also agree:

"Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating."

“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.”

-Steve Jobs

 

[bobesch]

The PPC-Challenge (both with os9 and OSX) does only make sense to me, if I'm able to connect PPC to contemporary devices and use those devices side-by-side (like other equippment).
Within that scenario a modern smartphone/tablet (or another computer) serves both as a hub for file-exchange/network&cloud-access and as a substitute for tasks , wherever the old system comes short (video-conference, video-streaming, bloated web, cloud-access). No one could have foreseen or prepare software for the current rapid changes of internet and communication-standards, PPC have to face now.
During the last challenges I had much fun to find out in how many ways it is possible to connect PPC to modern devices and networking an make them this way part of my computing-environment. Especially learning about the capabilities of os9 has been a great pleasure.
I wish the PPC-challenge this time would focus more on the aspect of connecting PPC (os9/OSX) to supplementary modern devices instead of proving PPC to be still the universal computer, that is able to cope with everything ...

Cheers & stay healthy!

 

[2984839]

If your day-to-day tasks involve "modern web" apps, sure. Too many modern websites are simply unusable on too many older systems (without jumping through hoops that require a "modern" system to act as a bridge, which kind of defeats the purpose.)

But there are *PLENTY* of day-to-day tasks that don't require anything modern. If you spend most of your day writing documents in Microsoft Word - you can use Microsoft Word 5.0 from 1991 on a Macintosh Plus! Modern versions of Word can still read documents saved from Word 5.0 just fine. (Although Word 5.0 can't read modern documents.) Heck, I write Markdown documents regularly, and that doesn't need graphical editing, so I can use TextEdit/SimpleText/TeachText/Windows Notepad/DOS EDIT/emacs/vi to write my documents no problem.

If your job, like mine, involves a lot of "text mode command line" work remotely to servers, that can be accomplished by anything that can act as a serial terminal with a bridge Linux/UNIX box (that can itself be ancient, since newer ssh versions have been ported to basically every architecture, including A/UX.) The biggest annoyance of using an old system is that I'm used to 100+ columns, 50+ lines in my terminal window now, and I go through log messages where a single log message could overwhelm a 40x25 display.

For my day-to-day work, the biggest barrier is that I am on a lot of Zoom/Google Meet/WebEx calls every day (yes, a mix of all three,) including video. There is no way to join a WebEx video call, with video, on an older system. And I demo my company's web-based product on these calls - can't do screen sharing on older systems, even if I could get our website to load on older browsers. (On a lark, I did hack a demo copy of our product to remove SSL, and the login screen loaded on Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 - I filed a bug with our UI designer complaining that it didn't render properly. He laughed.)

I basically have the same usage where I'm ssh'd in to servers all day. I often do that from a 266 MHz Alphastation with a VT220. Big log files can sometimes suck on the terminal, but the smooth amber scrolling is fun to watch, so it's worth it.

 

[Amethyst1]

I wish the PPC-challenge this time would focus more on the aspect of connecting PPC (os9/OSX) to supplementary modern devices instead of proving PPC to be still the universal computer, that is able to cope with everything ...

Yes, but then you could also just remote into a newer system all the time and do everything on that one, with the old one just providing display/keyboard/mouse.

 

[Amethyst1]

I had one client who was a professional author (of nonfiction works,) who still wrote in Word 5.0 on a Macintosh Quadra with a black-and-white display.

I love this. That's what I call distraction-free writing. Black-and-white CRT had very sharp images compared to colour ones, so they were perfect for text work.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

I basically have the same usage where I'm ssh'd in to servers all day. I often do that from a 266 MHz Alphastation with a VT220. Big log files can sometimes suck on the terminal, but the smooth amber scrolling is fun to watch, so it's worth it.

*sigh* I need an Alpha machine. It's the only major "non-x86 UNIX architecture from the '90s" I'm missing. For a while, I used an Apple IIc with matching green phosphor display as a serial terminal for that; but my eyesight just can't handle that tiny screen any more.

 

[bobesch]

Yes, but then you could also just remote into a newer system all the time and do everything on that one, with the old one just providing display/keyboard/mouse.

No, I didn't mean to just make PPC a thin client for screen-sharing/RPD.
That would be one option among many others (basically not being able to establish a VPN-connection/RDP-session to my office-server was the main reason, I abandoned PPC as my daily driver and switched to an EarlyIntel-MBP)
My personal PPC-challenge still remains to focus on how to use modern (mobile) devices for special situations, where PPC comes short, e.g. file-exchange and access to those cloud-services, that are not available for PPC (Dropbox/iCloud/OneCloud etc. or stream music or video). Also some certain web-based services (banking/cloud/etc.) require a more modern browser compared to the ones available on PPC.
On the go you'll need a mobile device as a mobile-hotspot anyway ...
And connecting PPC (os9 and OSX) to local network resources might become also somehow tricky - definitely often a good puzzle.

 

[RogerWilco6502]

Just got a PowerBook 1400cs/133. This will be fun to set up as part of the challenge

 

[Drich290195]

Prepping my machines this week today I found the back light on my PowerBook G4 has gone. This was to be my mobile for the challenge with my G5 desktop. Fortunately I have a spare PowerBook the case in poor condition. Tomorrow I shall transplant the parts. The PowerBook G4 12 inches are a nightmare to strip though. Hopefully will end up with a mint example.

 

[RogerWilco6502]

Prepping my machines, almost all done but I can finish tomorrow. I just need to get some stuff installed and also I need to get the Macintosh Garden IRC bridge set up, but then I'll be in business

Also ordered the parts to get my PowerBook 1400 set up.

 

[Project Alice]

PPC Challenge 21' is live! If you aren't on the MacYak discord or youtube channel you should check it out.

 

[2984839]

So far, all is well on the TiBook. I haven't missed Javascript, that's for sure

 

[Amethyst1]

So far, all is well on the TiBook.

First time I'm featured on a screenshot

 

[RogerWilco6502]

Been having fun with my two PPC laptops so far

 

[uller6]

Well, it's not a PPC Mac, but it's their next closest neighbor: the slowest Intel Mac ever made. That's right, it's a first-generation AppleTV! I have mine on 10.5.8, so it has similar software limitations to a PPC Mac. However, the 256 MB RAM (soldered to the motherboard) really hobbles the machine and makes it almost unusable. Almost.

I redid the thermal paste on both the CPU and GPU, which are connected directly to the external casing as a huge metal heatsink. I installed OS X on the machine years ago, and porting the install over to a 32 GB SSD I found was simple using carbon copy cloner. The SSD is much cooler & quieter, so I also removed the fan.

With SSD and no fan the machine uses about 15W from the wall no matter CPU load, which is less than I expected considering how hot the machine still gets to the touch. With the original HDD and fan installed power consumption was closer to 22W from the wall.

Edit: I'm fully online, in both terminal and GUI mode, using the awesome Links2 browser. It's very fast, and surprisingly functional considering I only have about 15-50 MB RAM to work with on top of OS X and Finder.

I can do reasonably advanced word processing using Bean. It can read and write doc and docx files, so that actually lets me get most of my work done.

I haven't figured out a good e-mail client that A. has a RAM footprint < 50 MB, and B. will work with gmail. Any suggestions?