Personal Notebook
Want a private micro-blogging environment? I’m experimenting in the lab with this Turnkey Linux appliance of StatusNet. The screenshot above shows the public timeline with some test “notices” (as I would guess “tweet” is probably a trademark by now) and “repeated notices”. There is even a desktop client and support for all kinds of features.
After some serious tinkering, I was finally able to get my original Mac Plus (cira 1986) to surf the web natively. No cheating, no terminal emulation. Just a real web browser running in System 6 accessing the live internet.
Here’s what the System 6 Heaven webpage looks like on the Plus:
That’s not just a text file! It’s actually MacWWW, an early web browser (circa 1992) that can run on System 6. For comparison, here is the same webpage in Safari 5: <Photo Missing>
How did I do it?
Well, it was a little tricky since the Mac Plus and System 6 were built before the web, web browsers, home Ethernet LANs and always-on broadband Internet connections were common place (or in some cases even invented). Macs of that time communicated using AppleTalk over LocalTalk networks, both of which are obsolete and no longer even supported by contemporary Mac OS X.
First, I acquired a Quadra 700 for the lab (circa 1992), sort of the Mac Pro of it’s day, since it has ports that support both LocalTalk and Ethernet (using a proprietary Apple AAUI adapter, yes another trip to eBay) and can run System 7. After getting it working on both the modern Ethernet LAN and the vintage LocalTalk network with the Plus on it, the next step was to bridge the two networks using Apple’s (now freely available) LocalTalk Bridge software (the trick being to remember it will always use your printer port for LocalTalk!).
With that in place and working, I could now use AppleTalk file sharing across both networks to easily move all the vintage software around that I needed on the respective systems. It also occurred to me that I should back all this up, given the age of the hard drives and floppy disks, so after exploring open source alternatives like FreeNAS (and learning the vagaries of which versions of AppleTalk are supported by which OSes), I resorted to bringing up a virtual Windows NT 4 Server (cira 1994) with Services for Macintosh. It gave me quite the chuckle that I had to use a Microsoft product to pull this off.
Lastly, I made a clean System 6 install on the Mac Plus and added MacTCP but still needed to get TCP/IP routed over LocalTalk and the bridge on the Quadra. For that, I found IPNetRouter and these instructions which quite frankly required some serious trial and error (the trick there being while you set the bridging machine address as the gateway on the LocalTalk devices, you have to use a real DNS server address).
After some patient tinkering, and many disappointing pings on the Mac Plus, I got it working and fired up MacWWW to find a webpage with no graphics, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, embedded media, or just about any modern element we take for granted. You see the results in the pictures above.
Why did I do it?
Just to see if I could I suppose.
Both my Mac Plus and the early web played an important part in my life and the beginning of my career. I can still recall when NCSA Mosaic was first installed in the university computer lab–after just being told during orientation that most of us would work in jobs that hadn’t been invented yet (which has held true for me). And aside from a brief (and shameful) period during the late 90’s, I’ve always had a Mac.
I had wanted to do this for some time, but it wasn’t until my recent focus on some other vintage technology projects that I got serious. My next task is to get a solid SSH client working on the vintage machines (perhaps for retro Twitter), as well as virtualizing each of them in emulators on my modern systems (so they can live in perpetuity).
Anyone up for a game of Bolo?
Wondering what Twitter might have looked like a few decades ago? Maybe seeking a nostalgic way to get your news headlines? It’s easy to go retro with today’s tools–in this case the Terminal app in Mac OS X and TTYtter, a command line Twitter client written in Perl.
First install and authorize TTYtter as per the instructions on the website (it’s really much simpler than it appears when reading the directions, took maybe 5 minutes including authorization with the Twitter mothership). If you are looking for just news headlines, you might want to setup another Twitter profile to follow just breaking news sources, as TTYtter doesn’t yet support lists.
Then find and install a nice retro font, like the free Teletype 1945-1985 by E.V. Norat II. Next, In Mac OS Terminal, go to Preferences to create a new skin, specifying the new font and a pleasant vintage paper-like color for the background. Play with these settings until you get it to look just how you like.
Finally, open a new shell using the skin you created and run TTYtter for a retro Twitter newswire! Let me know if you can figure out how to add authentic sound effects. Enjoy!
Found this nifty action hidden in Mac OS Automator to watermark PDF documents. Start your workflow with Ask for Finder Items, then choose Watermark PDF Documents. You then select the image file to use as the watermark and control the layer, offset, scale, angle and opacity settings. The rest is up to you, noting you can add actions to encrypt the PDF or edit the metadata among other things. Great way to avoid the full version of Acrobat or other 3rd party solutions.
Experimenting with the open source Sweetcron in the lab as a lifestream or aggregation platform. Fairly simple LAMPS installation (assuming you remember to turn on mod_rewrite), with a good potential for customization.
Interesting that the project’s founder has switched to Posterous for his own site. Personally, I’m always amazed at how Tumblr (my gracious host) continues to evolve beyond that original concept.
I’m very excited to have Alfresco running in the lab alongside SharePoint. These technologies are a key element of an enterprise content management (ECM) strategy and culture. More than simply reducing risk or cost to the company, a strong ECM environment can leverage a company’s information assets and be a critical differentiator in this information-based economy.
You’ll always remember your first. For me, it was a Mac Plus. Purchased by my parents as a family Christmas gift in the mid-eighties, it later ended up in my room and quickly became the center of my universe.
The killer app for me was always HyperCard. Of course at the time I had no idea how prescient that experience would be, since the hypertext driven world wide web did not exist yet nor did my resulting career.
While’s I’ve kept that original Mac in working order (including the original 20MB external hard drive), at some point parts are bound to fail and my trips down memory lane will be over (especially attacking conveys in the Pacific).
Enter Mini vMac, a Mac Plus emulator for modern computers. Now assuming I can successfully migrate the contents of that SCSI hard drive (connected to a computer with LocalTalk but no TCP/IP networking) to the disk image running in the emulator, my Mac Plus can live on indefinitely (that is until 10 years from now when I’m emulating Mac OS X to run the Mac Plus emulator).
It’s only took a couple of hours to get cooking. Notice the top (black and white window) is actually the Mac Plus (running a HyperCard stack I created in the early 90’s), with the purple window being VNC giving me access to the desktop of a headless G4 running OS 9 (for the SetFType utility that does not run on Intel Macs), then some OS X finder windows with access to the G4 shared drive to move the disk images back and forth, and of course Safari with the emulator site.
Note how much more real estate I get to use these days compared to the original 9 inch screen. It really is amazing when you step back and think about it.
Following a fresh install of System 6.0.8 from Apple, I had success! Welcome back Larry, John, Steve and Bruce. Mounting disks is easy, just drag them onto the emulated screen and they mount. Don’t have to worry about only having one floppy drive!
And for those a little more curious, back in my early teens I developed several HyperCard projects, including this piece of shareware that generated random yet pronounceable words (perfect for passwords) based on a consonant/vowel/number structure you could customize.
I’ve toyed with the idea of getting the physical Mac Plus onto the internet via a LocalTalk to Ethernet bridge, or perhaps just getting the SCSI hard drive accessible via some kind of adapter to Firewire. I’d be curious if anyone else has undergone a similar effort–let me know. In the meantime, I’m off to sink a convoy!
Let the fun begin!
Hopes are high for the next version of Windows, and early indications are that Windows 7 will be a refreshing improvement over Vista. I’m typing this, mind you, on my Mac Pro. If you’d like to preview it, you can download the release candidate, and for those with VMware you can follow this guide.
Never has the default SharePoint UI looked so good! As previously discussed, next on the list for implementation in the lab was Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, otherwise known as MOSS, which is now complete.
In addition, SharePoint Designer (now a free download) was added alongside to complete the Microsoft experience:
With this addition, the lab now has a robust range of web platforms suitable for experimentation.