Living with a Mac Classic II – Day Three
“We’re dealing with medievalism here,” said McCoy. And just as a doctor from the twenty third century would find modern medical practices “medieval,” so do I find aspects of working on a computer from 1992.
First off, I assumed that moving files around between machines would be easy. The Mac reads and writes FAT12 disks with ease, and the USB 1.44 MB disk drive I have plays nice with the family PC. And that’s where the easy parts end, and I am thrust back into the hell that was the Mac/PC formatting debacle.
To start, the Mac Classic II I am using, even though it is running the newer Mac OS 7.5.5, still predates Windows 95 and long file names. So when copying files to the FAT12 diskette, Mac OS truncates everything down to the old 8.3 naming scheme. But that’s when things go nicely. That’s assuming I added the three character extension myself. Even though Mac OS 7 has a feature called the PC Exchange, it only seems to work one way: PC to Mac. So any files I haven’t manually entered the file extension on becomes an almost indecipherable mess, meaning I need to use some brains to determine which file on the disk is the file I want, and which one is the resource fork that Windows will likely never understand.
See if you can guess which files are which
A task easier said than done, since the file and its fork are named in very similar fashions, but with almost random and unpredictable extensions. This is a stark contrast to how Mac OS X handles resource forks, which is the creation of those infamous .* and ._* files (an example is .DS_Store). So exactly determining which file is which involves opening the file, which can actually take a little longer than everyone is used to, since 1.44 MB diskettes are slower than DSL.
I also assumed that older files would be easily readable on newer machines. And to an extent, this is true. Microsoft Office 2003 does indeed read Microsoft Word 5.1 files. However, due to security policies set by default in Word 2003, reading of file types this old is disabled. This is likely due to several vulnerabilities in Word Macros in older versions of Office. This means that the easiest way to get information out are the tried and true, old as dirt TXT (AKA Plaintext) file, and the RTF (AKA Rich Text File, or RTF Interchange, as Word 5 calls it) format. This, of course, limits some of the editing capabilities, but maintains all the important features I need.
The other issue is writing e-mails. It is quite convenient to be able to have a distraction-free writing environment with a full spell checker, but being unable to copy/paste information is a bit more annoying than I had initially expected. It almost makes me want to buy a SCSI Ethernet adapter (which tend to be quite rare) just so I can run a simple mail client for sending (rather than reading) e-mail.
The last problem is that when I am composing things, I frequently refer to other sources, such as an e-mail sent to me (if I’m replying), the Wikipedia, a news report, and so on. Most of these sources are from the Internet, and for now I’m using my Nexus S as my bridge to the Internet, but its configuration for conservation of power makes it inconvenient. Then there’s the fact that I cannot copy and paste between the two, which is rather irritating. And if I want to move something from the phone to the Mac (or vise versa) I need to use another computer as an intermediary, which I would suppose is the most annoying, because if there were an easy way to throw files betwen the two (if, say, the Mac were networked, so the two could could pass files to each other) I could probably temper the other issues in this particular category.
On the whole, however, this isn’t as bad as it could be. The Classic II is pokey, but quick enough to get me to work before the cat decides I’m not doing anything important and decides it’s time for a long and involved scratching-me-behind-the-ears ritual. I am rather interested to see what it could do if I were to outfit it with a network card, some additional RAM, and some additional software.
But this reveals the issue with using these old devices: the hardware is quite sound, but the software is where everything trips up. I had, prior to getting an iPod Touch, considered snagging a used Newton MessagePad, which seemed like quite a good idea. And while I could deal with the fact that the Newton requires a serial port for linking to a computer with a USB-to-Serial adapter, actually getting the software to do the communicating was another story altogether. Sure, the Newton could talk to the Mac through Bluetooth or WiFi, but the software didn’t know how to use those particular protocols. And such are some of the issues with the Mac Classic II, however, it is saved by the fact that it has a strong community of dedicated users, and it was around when the simplest common protocols and formats were becoming popular.
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