Watch me participate in a panel discussion at KansasFest 2010, with Martin Haye and Mike Maginnis, moderated by Ken Gagne. The topic is "Apple's Growing Divide Between Users and Programmers," and we discuss whether Apple has strayed from its roots of making computers that encourage and empower users ...
Ode to the PowerBook 2400c
I'd like to take a moment to tell you about my favorite Mac. The Macintosh PowerBook 2400c, the subnotebook version of the more widely known 3400c, is one amazing Mac. It's almost usable today if you have replaced its PowerPC 603ev CPU with a G3, which of course I did. In fact, I have the cool 320 ...
urgent: Apple II floppy update
How to get a 5.25" floppy onto a modern Mac Warning: this post contains some serious Apple retro geekery. I've actually had to exercise serious restraint with the details. You may want to skip this one unless Apple II's, Color Classics, SCSI ethernet interfaces, PowerBook 2400's, and other Apple ...
Apple II Update
A while back I planned to pull my beloved Apple //e (circa 1993) out of storage with the intent of a) having fun, and b) archiving anything noteworthy I found on my many 5.25" floppy disks. I did, and the experience was both better and worse than I imagined. The experience was wonderfully tactile: ...
Disks as Dolls
Well, for the time being this is going to me my retro computing blog, because that's been what I've been putting a chunk of my spare time into lately. This all started with my desire to preserve my Apple II 5.25" floppy disks. The short answer there: to my surprise and delight, they're fine. Most ...
Floppy Disk Archeology
I’ve got a box, filled with 5.25″ floppy disks. (If you’re too young to know what those are, ask your dad.) I mean, there are probably 300 in there. Most of them are for the Apple II computer, which is what I primarily used from 1978 through 1990, and which, despite being an Apple, is not in any way ...