Riccardo Mori posts at the wonderful System Folder:
The main reason I’m surrounded by vintage tech in my studio is that these machines still serve a purpose. The fact that ‘progress’ has obsoleted them does not mean they have stopped being useful.
Amen, of course. Mori’s posts is a good part two to my On My Mac Hobby.
We all do this stuff for varying reasons. Isn’t it funny how sometimes we feel the need to defend our interests?
Mike Grimm, darn near a neighbor to me over in Fowlerville, Mich., shared a collection of his own Apple portables – including an Newton eMate 300, several varieties of iBooks, and a PowerBook 190 (“Ready for PowerPac Upgrade“).
“Eventually there may be some of the vintage desktops, and maybe a couple of PDA shots,” Mike said over e-mail.
I don’t see the neon eMate styluses very often, but Mike shares a bright orange one in his eMate shots.
How fun: a site dedicated (more or less) to classic Mac graphics.
The Vintage Mac Museum is in Japanese, but for us English speakers it’s still navigable. The author, Motohiko Narita, posts photos of projects, too, which are a hoot (check out that vertically-aligned monitor for the Mac IIci!).
Lots of fun to poke around, and a great resource for classic Mac graphics.
[Via vintage Daring Fireball.]
Riccardo Mori over at System Folder:
When your main system is capable of keeping multiple applications open, it’s easy to be distracted by incoming emails and updated RSS feeds. Not to mention the temptation to search the Web by following the spur of the moment — when that happens, the best case scenario is that I find myself two hours later digesting a lot of information I found following link after link, yet without doing anything really productive.
His solution? Write on a Mac Color Classic, or a Newton eMate 300 when away from home, to cut down on distractions.
“No browsers, no emails, no distractions: just me, my ideas, and the word processor,” Mori says.
It’s a brilliant (and, in a recession, cost-effective) solution to a problem a lot of us face every day. Why be productive when there’s another blog post to read? I’m working on my own, similar setup with my eMate 300.
Nice to see that Mori is getting something done on perfectly capable hardware.
If you checked out today’s earlier post, you can tell I’m a big fan of April Fool’s Day. Always have been.
So last night I crept back into work after hours and installed a “new” computer for one of my coworkers. A Mac SE.
I came up with the idea months ago, but I originally meant to replace all of my coworkers’ workstations with vintage Macs – all four of them. The logistics, however, made me think twice. Lugging two Mac SEs, a Quadra, and an LC 550 up the office stairs didn’t seem worth it. So I pulled some other fun pranks instead.
I even made a “Punch In” alias on the SE’s desktop that mimics our timecard software. It was a MacWrite document, and said, simply, “Happy April Fool’s.”
They got me back, too:
Someone caught me in a woman’s hat at a recent event. One of my coworkers printed off 10 copies and posted them all over the office. It was like 1984, with Big Brother’s face plastered everywhere you went. The above spot was my favorite, however.
My boss, who was not spared in the tomfoolery, liked the Mac SE prank the best, which makes me feel good. For a minute, I thought I was going to walk into work in deep trouble. Thank goodness for good senses of humor.
Happy April Fool’s! And happy birthday, Apple!
Before Apple got so paranoid about licensing its operating system software, it tried letting other companies borrow the Newton OS for other devices. Like Sharp’s ExpertPad.
Sharp’s model featured a different case than Apple’s MessagePad, without the rubberized feel, and a side-hinged screen cover like the later 2×00 MessagePad series (check here for good pictures). Software-wise, however, it was just like Apple’s model.
Sharp gave the ExpertPad 4 MB in ROM, 640k in RAM, a 336 x 240 pixel LCD, and the model version went up to PI-7100. The ExpertPad ran Newton OS up to 1.3, but never stuck around long enough to take advantage of the 2.0 OS (though some on the Newtontalk list have wondered).
Luckie’s Newton Gallery says Sharp bowed out of the Newton family because of lack of demand:
Sharp Electronics discontinued manufactering its ExpertPads as well as the Apple models in late 1994. It had expected to make millions in the first year and quietly exited the Newton world due to the poor sales of Newtons in general and ExpertPads specfically.
Other Newton clones included the Motorola Marco, the Digital Ocean Tarpon, and a German Newton-phone hybrid called the Siemens NotePhone.