In Praise of Older Computers

On the occasion of the Macintosh's 20th birthday, I found myself in a discussion about those primal Macs. Despite the innovation of their point-and-click interface, the hardware was a product of the early 1980's. The earliest models didn't even have a hard drive, and ambled along at 8MHz. When a model with half a megabyte of RAM - think about that number for a moment - was introduced, it was popularly nicknamed (over the protests of a certain fast food chain) the "big Mac". We snicker at that level of hardware now, but 20 years ago it was state of the art, and a lot of people shelled out two and a half grand for one.

A first-gen Mac is really good for only two things nowadays: a museum piece or converting into a Macquarium. They'd been discontinued well before the internet (and the software that uses it) came into widespread use, and most of the software developers of the day are gone as well. There's just very little common ground between them and modern systems, kind of like Neanderthal and Cro Magnon, who simply couldn't reproduce together. The same is true of the typical IBM-PC-class systems of the 1980's, whose 8088 and 80286 processors are incompatible with the 386-or-better instruction set modern software uses.

But the story begins to change a bit when you get into the 1990's. 386's were commonplace and the 486 was taking over. Microsoft had finally hammered Windows into something usable by then. Over in the Mac realm, the Motorola 68040 provided similar 32-bit operation and floating-point arithmetic. Although 64-bit processors are now emerging, we're still using fundamentally the same kind of 32-bit technology today. Which makes a 10-year-old computer still fairly useful.

In fact, that discussion prompted me to pull out of storage an old Mac Quadra 630 I'd bought years ago. It has a 68040 processor, 20MB RAM, a 250MB hard drive, and an ethernet card. In other words: it's an internet-era machine. It took a little work to get some of the software installed (machines of this era didn't come out of the box ready for the web, and most of the software had to be downloaded: a catch-22) but I now have it setup with a current web browser (iCab), and even web server software (MacHTTP). It's not as snappy as my roughly-gigaHertz-class machines with nearly-gigabyte banks of RAM, but it does pretty well, thanks. In fact, I'm using it right now to write this article.

I also have another machine of similar vintage that I've been using as a mission-critical component of my network for a few years now. It's a compact desktop Dell 433 Netplex, with a 33MHz 486DX cpu, a floppy drive, and a couple ethernet cards. It runs Coyote Linux and serves as a firewall and router, allowing all the other computers on my local network to access the internet through it, and blocking a whole variety of attempts to crack the security on my systems.

There's something I find appealing about these systems. Sure, they're sluggish if you try to run modern software on them, and the software they run well doesn't have all the photographic icons, animated helpers, and whatnot. But they have a certain elegant economy to them. And they're simple enough to be knowable. I haven't poked in all of the corners of it, but I know that Coyote Linux system pretty darn well. That Mac Quadra's operating system, with its Extensions folder, its Control Panels folder, etc. is pretty easy to get a handle on.

Going back a little further, I also have an old Macintosh SE, which is pretty much the same as the original Mac, but with an internal hard drive and a whopping 4MB RAM. The 9-inch black-and-white screen is a bit cramped, but other than that it's a decent little word processor. I just plugged it in and powered it on, and that hard drive holds a mere 121 files, including the entire operating system, extensions to operate the 100MB Zip drive I used to use with it, a word processing/spreadsheet/database program, and a bunch of documents. () Looking at that you can start to believe (again) that a complete operating system could fit on a diskette.

Or on a ROM chip. If I go back all the way to "the beginning", there's my old Commodore 64 and Atari 400, which were limited to floppies and cassette tapes, respectively, and had only 64KB and 16KB of RAM. But I knew the track-and-sector format used for storing data on those floppies, and I learned just what every byte of that address space was for. The whole machine was within my grasp.

Contrast that with today, with my OS X, Mandrake Linux 9.2, and (already out of date) Windows 98 powerhouses. I like to think I have a pretty good handle on how these systems work, but the truth is that there's so much there that I'll never learn more than a fraction of it. Which also means that if something goes wrong, there's less I can do to fix it myself. Perhaps someday I'll look back with fondness for the simplicity of OS X. But for now, I'm enjoying just tinkering with my vintage systems.