Eureka-UEA! A Fat Mac Saga

[Snial]

Hi folks,

Now at last I understand, it's only taken me 38 years.

I started studying Computer Science at the University of East Anglia in September 1986. In basically the first introductory lecture I went to, the professor there covered the facilities the Computer Science department made available to SYS 1: First Year Information Systems students. Firstly, there was the VAX 11/780.



That was the most powerful computer we could use, a 32-bit beast, but mostly we wouldn't get access to it, except when we were trying to do project work in the Computing Building, which was also available to basically anyone in the Uni with an account. Then there was the MicroVax I - an anemic sibling with 30% of the 1MIP, 11/780's performance in the SYS building. But they'd expanded it to 16MB of RAM, even though that apparently wasn't possible, so we could do even more slow computing. Hurrah.


And then - to the accompaniment of angelic choirs in my mind - they told us about the MacLab: 10 to 15 Macintosh computers in a single Lab. And these weren't just any Macs, they had been upgraded from a perfectly adequate 128kB to a stonking 512kB over summer. Our year was the first to use them.

I couldn't wait. I had never seen any of these fabled creatures in real-life, still less a FAT Mac! We were advised to buy a 3.5" Sony disk for just £10 (equivalent to £29.78 today) so we could approach the Temple of Macintosh and begin the discipleship. So I did.

Pretty sure we ran System 2 on it. 512kB was incredible, you just couldn't fill it with any kind of MacWrite, MacPaint or MacPascal document you could conceive of. But of course, these apps were massive in themselves, some over 65K! How could anyone seriously write an app that big? It would have taken months of solid slog! Even though they only had one drive, and often involved lots of disk swapping and frequent system crashes, they were mind-blowing

But skipping ahead 35 years I found myself confused. This is why: Fat Macs had 400kB disks, but I'm sure our Fat Macs had 800kB disks. But my mind could have been playing tricks with me. So, today, when I was visiting my dad in Nottingham, I popped into a wardrobe we never use and strangely found myself in a remarkable wintery landscape... no, no. I found a whole bunch of non-HD, 3.5" disks some of which went back to 1986, marked with titles such as: "ESE182" (Electronic Systems Engineering, 1st Year, course code 82).

And, it turns out all of these Mac disks are 800kB. And I never remember, later not being able to take any one of the disks from our even newer Mac Plusses in the Digi-lab and put them in the Fat Macs, since that would be a pretty bad show stopper! But how did they have working 800kB disks? The Fat Macs didn't! And they couldn't have been Mac 512Ke's, because they were Mac Plusses with just 512kB of RAM and I knew for sure they didn't have SCSI round the back.

Or did they? This evening I finally looked up the Mac 512Ke spec on EveryMac. And yes, it was really a Mac 512kB with 128kB ROMs, an 800kB drive and no SCSI. They'd never been Fat Macs, they'd been Mac 512Ke(ED) upgraded Macs all the time.

So, the mystery is solved and I have a stack of 33 DSDD disks, including a stack of 14 MacWrite II (British) installation disks I'm not sure what to do with.

 

[cheesestraws]

14 MacWrite II (British) installation disks I'm not sure what to do with.

Archive them! British versions of software are under-archived

 

[aladds]

This has awoken a memory for me. Back when I was at Uni (not UEA) I was dating someone who was at UEA. I remember walking around the campus with her (probably 2009/2010) and noticing a LocalTalk box (with two cables running out the back high up into conduit on the wall) on an otherwise unused table in a small computer room.

Could it be that they still had LocalTalk running that recently? Some part of me hopes so. I sadly did not have a computer to test it with me.

Archive them! British versions of software are under-archived

I have British ClarisWorks 2.1 somewhere. A quick check shows me that it indeed is not archived!

 

[joshc]

Slightly sidetracking the original post but I’d be more than happy to host any archives of Mac software that’s in British English, and any other language or localisation for that matter.

 

[Snial]

Archive them! British versions of software are under-archived

OK, they're transferred to a ZIP disk now! All I have to do is pop them in a ZIP 250 and the internet (and @joshc ) awaits! There's actually 3 disks: the main app, help and translators. Since I had quite a few copies, after copying, I tried to copy System 5 to a disk using System 7. It blessed the disk, but the Mac Plus wouldn't boot. I tried the same thing on another disk with my full copy of what I think is System 3.2, but again the Mac Plus wouldn't boot (disks format fine though). I wonder what I could have missed.

<snip> dating someone who was at UEA. <snip> LocalTalk box <snip> in a small computer room.

Very likely. The Original Mac Lab was full of LocalTalk boxes and a number of researchers also had Macs in that era, so LocalTalk was well distributed. The same was true of the Mac II Lab to the left of the Mac Lab (about the same size) and the Digi-Lab which was downstairs at the far-right. From memory, to get to the Mac Lab. Going along the walkway from the Sainsbury centre, SYS, I think is the last school before the Ziggurat walkway merges with the main walkway. Go into SYS. Pretty much straight in front of you is a corridor that leads to the SYS building behind the original SYS building. The Mac Lab was just on the left. It was about 2.5m to 3m x 6m, ish. The Mac 512s were connected via LocalTalk, because we only had 2 or 3 ImageWriter printers in the lab, so they had to be shared over LocalTalk.

Could it be that they still had LocalTalk running that recently? Some part of me hopes so. I sadly did not have a computer to test it with me.

Sadly, I imagine it would have been obsoleted around the time Macs had ethernet built-in. So, I would guess maybe the mid-1990s?

To give you an idea of what facilities reearchers had even in the 1990s, I knew one guy, "Owl" Kwok Cheung (he was a birder, big fan of owls!) who bought the first Mac LC I'd seen, and he bought it with a colour monitor. So I remember going into his office at one point in 1990-1991 where I think maybe he had an X-Windows app talking to a workstation. It all looked impressive, even at 512x384, a major step up from the Mac Plusses or SE's other Uni academic staff had.

I have British ClarisWorks 2.1 somewhere. A quick check shows me that it indeed is not archived!

Interesting. I have a proper CD of CW 2.x (though I think it's 2.0).

Slightly sidetracking the original post but I’d be more than happy to host any archives of Mac software that’s in British English, and any other language or localisation for that matter.

OK, I'll pass it on to you too (though I'm likely to post on Macintosh Garden).

 

[adespoton]

I remember our Mac Lab at uni was similar -- I thought it contained Mac Pluses, but the machines didn't have SCSI -- so they were actually Mac 512ke(ED)s.... and eventually we got newer labs with newer Macs (and 386es). But the fun bit that was in the CS department, we eventually got not just an SGI IRIS to play with, but an entire NeXT workstation lab! And the NeXT workstations were connected to the Internet along with the SGI, so we didn't need to use terminals, but could do local development on the workstations before connecting to the IRIS to test/run on UNIX. AND... I could use my 1200 baud modem to connect to the university mainframe and from there log into the IRIS as well, and eventually figured out how to compile and install slirp so that I could use MacTCP on my Mac, and have it, the IRIX mainframe, and the lab NeXT workstations all talking together on a single "network".

Eventually, when the modem pool got popular and it would take hours for me to not get a busy signal, I realized that the 512ke's were also able to run a terminal emulator and connect into the IRIS... and by that point, very few people were using the "old Mac Lab" because of the newer macs and PCs that were available. It was a lovely, quiet haven when classes had the NeXT lab booked.