Rediscovering my old obsession

[sircabulon]

About 9 months ago, my wife and I adopted our son. This has been the biggest life change I have experience so far, and I found myself doing an interesting type of nesting. I found myself worried about my son getting online and ruining his brain, so my line of thinking was I'd be better off having his first computing experiences not even have that option. Then I thought about all of the memories I had with my late father on our old Mac Plus's and how the games encouraged me to learn to read. I have a few years yet, but getting ready immediately seemed right at the time. I had forgotten how much I love tinkering with these old things and one repair of a bad ram chip in a Mac SE has turned into much more. I told my friends to keep an eye out for anything beige with an apple on it, and my brother actually re-acquainted me with some of my old computers I thought were lost. I got almost all of my non-beige macs up and running on a shelf. The collecting has been fun, and I have no intentions of stopping, but I did have to reorganize my basement to make room. Most of my non-beige Macs are in my basement now and running, while the compacts and some of the beige ones are at my office on display.

The full collection is as follows:

Mac SE FD/HD - Brainstorm 16 Mhz 68000
Mac IIcx - used to have a Mobius Speedster but that was lost years ago - non functioning now
Mac IIci - Bolle Carrera 68040 sound just went out this weekend
Mac Classic
Mac Color Classic - Max1zzz 32 Mhz 68030 w/ FPU
Mac Quadra 650 - bought for donor parts
PowerBook 160 - parts donor
PowerBook 180
PowerBook 520c
PowerBook G3 Pismo
iMac
eMac
PowerMac G4 Sawtooth
PowerMac G3 Beige Desktop - non functioning
Mac Mini G4 - OS 9 lives
Mac Mini G4

 

[LaPorta]

Yes, and that's why my kids use all my old Macs and don't have phones or iPads. I actually gave my daughter a refurbished PowerBook 1400 for Christmas to learn typing and play games.

 

[Joopmac]

Same here

 

[sircabulon]

I scored two G4 12 inch Powerbooks today, one 1.5Ghz, one 1.33Ghz that will be used for parts.

 

[Retro Rider]

I've been kinda getting back into classic macs too! I've been meaning to post a conquest post about it like this one, but I've been lazy haha.

But I just wanted to say I see u bro.

 

[iantm]

Yes, and that's why my kids use all my old Macs and don't have phones or iPads. I actually gave my daughter a refurbished PowerBook 1400 for Christmas to learn typing and play games.

What a fabulous notion! I wish I’d done something like that. They’re teens now and fighting the screen is real. Old computers are glorious in their focused constraint and lack of distraction.

I consider doing actual work on my Se/30 to be almost meditative in comparison. I want to code a markdown app to really use for writing (I use Ulysses, and always wanted to write a MacToolbox app)

meanwhile I use it for drafting. It’s a very different experience.

 

[adespoton]

My kids used an iPad 2 and a 2008 MacBook Pro in the late 2010s and early 2020s -- new enough that they could get on the Internet, old enough that they couldn't do much. Both had Mini vMac loaded to run old Mac software.

It seems to have worked; they still don't use social media to this day, despite spending hours in direct communication with friends and writing software.

A markdown app for 68k would be awesome! We've already got LaTeX apps, so it should definitely be possible.

For that matter, a markdown filter for the Alpha text editor should do the trick.

 

[iantm]

For that matter, a markdown filter for the Alpha text editor should do the trick.

Say more about that? I thought about BBEdit and custom syntax (BBEdit 4.5 is already 99% of what envision) but I didn't see a way to do it. I've not heard Alpha as a text editor. I see the wikipedia article and it even should have source code available somewhere (though that seems to be broken)

I wouldn't be opposed to something as simple as that, though I've long wanted to try and write an app. Intimidating, to say they least, when things like BBEdit exist, and I've been more of a high-level, front-end programmer at best.

But then, I don't care if anyone else uses it, I just want to learn how to do it, and while it didn't seem fathomable 25 years ago, it does more so now. Also I don't have the burden of worrying about marketability. It's just for the fun of it.