Hand me downs

[mcdermd]

Got a few hand-me-downs from a friend clearing out some space:

• Macintosh SE - 800k/20MB MiniScribe HD. Starts up but the MiniScribe has an error. Maybe just stiction
   
  Macintosh SE/30 - Capacitor issues
   
  Macintosh LC - still need to fire it up and see what's happening and what's not
   
  A few drives - two 40mb Quantum drives, an 800k floppy, two 2mb super drives, HP DAT drive?, two external SCSI drives
   
  An LC III logic board
   
  A StyleWriter printer
   
  A few Keyboard and Keyboard II keyboards and ADB mouses
   
  A bag of 30 and 72 pin RAM modules
   
  A dozen or so various MacUser and MacWorld magazines from '95-'97 (Clones! Copland!).
   
  Five-Volume set of Inside Macintosh
  

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Inside Macintosh is always a good read. It reminds me of the venerable old Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide.

I have a copy of CodeWriter with all the A-line traps in it too.

 

[trag]

Inside Macintosh is always a good read. It reminds me of the venerable old Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide.
I have a copy of CodeWriter with all the A-line traps in it too.

I find it difficult to follow in detail without a good background in Pascal. While I have been proficient in C in the past, I never learned Pascal.

So the progression starts to look something like:

1) Want to build an expansion card for an old Mac.

2) Gots to learn the stuff in Inside Macintosh in order to write the firmware and even to know how to configure the hardware so that it addresses the correct bits, provides meaningful services, responds to the system properly, etc.

3) Must first learn Pascal in order to understand Inside Macintosh....

Daunting.

 

[techfury90]

Inside Macintosh is always a good read. It reminds me of the venerable old Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide.
I have a copy of CodeWriter with all the A-line traps in it too.

I find it difficult to follow in detail without a good background in Pascal. While I have been proficient in C in the past, I never learned Pascal.

So the progression starts to look something like:

1) Want to build an expansion card for an old Mac.

2) Gots to learn the stuff in Inside Macintosh in order to write the firmware and even to know how to configure the hardware so that it addresses the correct bits, provides meaningful services, responds to the system properly, etc.

3) Must first learn Pascal in order to understand Inside Macintosh....

Daunting.

Pascal isn't that bad for C people...

 

[Gorgonops]

Pascal may not be that bad (although I've never touched it its reasonably readable), but my very brief exposure to trying to figure out some code written for 1985-ish vintage MacOS sent any urge I might of had to try to write anything low-level for it running screaming into the hills. I have quite a lot of respect for anyone that's able to handle an API with that many sharp edges and make it work.

It does amuse me how early Macintosh advertising material was pretty forceful in pushing the "32 bit"-edness of the 68000 CPU as being superior to IBM's 16 bits, but just casually poking through "Inside Macintosh" finds *copious* examples of vital data structures and pointers which suffer scalability issues due to the use of 16 bit integers . ;^)

 

[techfury90]

"Pascal" may not be that bad (although I've never touched it), but my very brief exposure to trying to figure out some code written for 1985-ish vintage MacOS sent any urge I might of had to try to write anything low-level for it running screaming into the hills. I have quite a lot of respect for anyone that's able to handle an API with that many sharp edges and make it work.
It does amuse me how early Macintosh advertising material was pretty forceful in pushing the "32 bit"-edness of the 68000 CPU as being superior to IBM's 16 bits, but just casually poking through "Inside Macintosh" finds *copious* examples of vital data structures and pointers which suffer scalability issues due to the use of 16 bit integers . ;^)

Hahahaha. Yeah, the Mac OS API is terrible, terrible stuff. I briefly messed with it back in 2008...

 

[krye]

Nice hand-me-downs. Wish I had friends like you!

 

[mcdermd]

Scored a last-generation Dual Core 2.3GHz Power Mac G5 as a hand-me-down. I've had scads of dual-processor G5s but this is the first dual-core I've had.