Years later, I had that story on my mind when I was browsing a local online classifieds site and stumbled across a gem: a Macintosh IIsi. Even better, the old computer was for sale along with the elusive but much-desired Portrait Display, a must-have for the desktop publishing industry of its time. I bought it the very next day.
It took me several days just to get the machine to boot at all, but I kept thinking back to that article. Could I do any better? With much less? Am I that arrogant? Am I a masochist?
Cupertino retro-curiosity ultimately won out: I decided to enroll the Macintosh IIsi as my main computing system for a while. A 1990 bit of gear would now go through the 2018 paces. Just how far can 20MHz of raw processing power take you in the 21st century?
The Macintosh IIsi is such an elegant machine, a fitting home for the equally elegant System 7.x.
Sadly, though, i don’t have the portrait screen, but rather the 13″ color monitor.
It’s a nice machine.
I made a localtalk network between it and an old powerbook 145. Works well.
In fact, it was so easy and seamless that it makes you think.
I really enjoy writing on it, because it’s an experience that is utterly free of distractions.
My unit only has the base 5mb of ram, so if you open op word, that’s it, no room for anything else
That’s about all i use it for, though.
I’d really love to get an ethernet card for it and use it as a terminal.
The end of that article has a strong stink of less is more; it basically states the digital equivalent of being happier with a tiny desk because one always leaves a huge mess on the bigger one.
I’d venture to guess that the author rarely does the cleaning at home, since clearing the desk is something which would be routine to anyone who gets assigned that task.
Edited 2018-07-03 13:02 UTC
Always good to go back to appreciate what we have here today.
I’m always caught between the powerful pull of nostalgia with the “What the heck am I doing here” when knee deep in it.
A friend of mine has a collection of older machines. A notable one is a Mac Cube. That machine was in “sleep” mode much of the time.
When you tap on the keyboard to wake it up, it’s similar to waking up the cat on my lap. That is, it’s one of the slowest events possible. It is simply glacial to watch that thing revive itself. And this is from sleep, not a cold boot.
I recently logged in to a PDP-11 that an enthusiast leaves connected to the internet. I dabbled with some “Hello World” C programs, some BASIC-PLUS, a crash course in Teco. “One does not simply use Teco”.
I was on that machine for 1hr. And during that time I consume 15m of CPU time. Watching that poor machine compile my 5 lines of code (plus stdio.h) was just the most sorrowful event. Visualizing this machine, the size of a small refrigerator, struggling to keep up with my modest demands.
I have no memory of the PDP-11 that I used in college being as slow as that machine was, but I don’t know the details. I had similar experience with Z80 simulators running at a simulated 4Mhz. It’s just amazing we go anything accomplished whatsoever back in the day.
I can’t speak for all, but seems many vintage enthusiasts like to play games on their machines, and don’t actually deal with them as tools of the day. But, somehow, I don’t think they wait 45m to load Telengard from cassette like we did at the time.
We take it all for granted now. Modern machines are “too fast” for the vast majority of the tasks we do. Yet the machines are always “too slow” through a combination of everything from the network, to crummy web pages, to your $5000, 18 cores at 3+GHz Macintosh locking up and beach balling as an external drive decides to spin up.
I would still like to see a native port of the NeXTStep 3.x to Raspberry Pi. The OS was remarkable in the day running in 20MB of RAM at 25MHz on a 68040. The idea that Linux barely fits on a 1.2GHz machine with 1GB of RAM makes me itch. Let’s see the original NeXTStep running on such a machine.
Was impressed by my Atari ST running at 8MHz with 1MB of RAM, with a software accelerator to switch the internal graphic routines to better ones really made a difference. When I bought a Falcon030, was confused it was slower than the ST despite running at a whooping 16MHz with 14MB of RAM and featuring a 32MHz DSP. Yet the internal architecture choice made the enhanced resolution video memory shared on a 16 bits bus, which explained a lot. However it was usable because everything was sized accordingly, pictures were lightweight gif or pcx, there was neither divx not mp3 to require computing power.
In the past I semi-regularly switched, out of necessity, to using exclusively some older PC for a month or two – I realised it made me appreciate the speed of modern one when I got back to it.
And you should like GNUStep on Raspberry Pi…
Linux has been around long enough that it used to work on 25Mhz machines in the past. Even DSL linux today is only 64MB in size. If you like the Next interface why not install Windowmaker on a Linux box?