|
|
|
|
| Welcome, Guest | Home | Search | Login | Register | |
| Author | S7T's System7 Summer Challenge (Read 121729 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Bolkonskij
Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023 
|
on: July 31, 2023, 20:36
For this year's summer, Knezzen and me thought of an interesting challenge. Summed up in a sentence: Only use System 7 Mac gear for a whole week. That's right. No iMac, no Windows laptop. No "bridge" machines. Why? + You'll get to know your Mac on a first name basis (again) + You'll find clever new workarounds to problems. + You'll explore overlooked possibilities of these systems by forcing you to use them  + You'll dive deep into using them like 'back in the day' + You'll have plenty of fun and share it with other like-minded folks! Share your experience Keep and share a daily summary of your activities on the S7T forum. System 7.1 and a browser like iCab or IE 4+ are sufficient to do this. You can use this thread after the official start. The Rules - Only use a System 7 Mac as a daily driver at home. (work is a different thing, but at home only use your System 7 Mac) - If you're emulating, do NOT use your host system for e.g. browsing, downloading, file-transfer etc. - Everybody can join in! - Have an "insanely great" time! When will it start? - Saturday, August 5th When will it end? - Saturday, August 12th Known participants: Knezzen (PowerMac 8600 and PowerBook 540c) Bolkonskij (Macintosh IIci) 3lectr1c (machines unknown) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Last Edit: August 05, 2023, 17:10 by Bolkonskij
|
Knezzen
|
Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot
Reply #1 on: August 06, 2023, 17:40
|
I'm hard at it! Updated the Jabber server using SSHeven to SSH into the server, writing with some friends on Telegram using our Jabber server and I'm chatting away with the friendly folks on our Hotine server (join us at hotline.system7today.com). Working on some music with the 540c as my MIDI sequencer and browsing around the web using MacLynx in combination with Crypto Ancienne as well as TurboGopher over the "Texopher" WWW to Gopher proxy. Check out our Gopher server for some awesome linkes and a lot of nice stuff! gopher://gopher.system7today.com Writing this post in Netscape 3 Gold on my PowerBook 540c running System 7.5.5 
Last Edit: August 06, 2023, 17:47 by Knezzen
|
3lectr1c
|
32 MB  Posts: 36 PowerBook Enthusiast
Reply #2 on: August 06, 2023, 20:29
|
My goal for this challenge is to use System 7 for as much as I can, to try and rely on modern systems for only what I can't possibly make work on these Macs. Here's what I've done so far. Day 1 (Yesterday): Didn't do much yesterday as I had done a lot of setting up for this challenge in the days before. Mostly just had my 3400c/240 next to me doing music playback duties, and used it to post here. Also tried to set up BBEdit to try some html editing for my website, but it screws with formatting when I try to transfer back to Windows. Day 2 (Today): I've done a lot more today. - Music on my 3400c/240 - Tried out bigmessowires updated version of Tetris Max on my 3400. It's pretty good! - Updated the System 7 partition on my 1400c/166 from 7.5.3 to 7.6.1 - Set up floodgap.com's custom Etherlink III driver for NuBus PowerBooks in order to get my 1400c/166 online. - Got iCab and other software moved over to the 1400 Later I think I'll do some HTML coding on the 1400. I can't work on my actual website (macdat.net) on it unfortunately as transferring the files to and forth Classic Mac OS and Windows causes a lot of formatting issues from the looks. I'll keep looking to see if I can get that to work. Instead I think I'll just have some fun working on a smaller little project, maybe a small site dedicated to the 1400c or something. Whatever I make, I'll try to get it up on macdat after the challenge as a sub-section. Having a lot of fun so far! And plenty of system lockups, as is par for the course with this stuff... ------------ Sent from my PowerBook 1400c/166 via iCab 2.99 on Mac OS 7.6.1
Last Edit: August 06, 2023, 20:32 by 3lectr1c
|
wove
|
1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #3 on: August 07, 2023, 23:38
|
I am unavle to connect to the gopher.system7.com using either CyberDog or TurboGopher.
|
Knezzen
|
Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot
Reply #4 on: August 08, 2023, 13:49
|
Sorry about that. We had some thunderstorms on and off the last few days and there was a power outage. I guess that the Gopher service didn't start up again when the server rebooted. Should be back up now though
|
wove
|
1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #5 on: August 08, 2023, 14:32
|
Thank you. I did not realize that the service was hosted on hardware you own/control. Like most things I find on the web, I give very little thought to the mechanics of how that is actually happening. I run a NextCloud instance on a Raspberry Pi as a home server. Indeed this time of the year thunderstorms have a big impact on its reliability. Thanks for doing this, it is much appreciated.
|
Bolkonskij
|
Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #6 on: August 08, 2023, 15:09
|
Started out a bit late on the Summer Challenge, as my mom had been hospitalized (all fine now) and generally there were tons of to-do. Taking kids to the dentist, driving a child to a birthday party etc. When I booted my trusty IIci I didn't feel like doing much, so I just relaxed with Shanghai II and a bottle of beer. I also did read the latest issue of the Macintosh Fanzine 01/2023. It's amazing to have a new Fanzine for the (68k) Mac being published as a Hypercard stack in 2023. Unfortunately, it's German language only, but given the presentation including mod tunes I'd say it is worth a look even if you don't understand anything. Kind of odd nobody tries to create an English version of it given the Mac's popularity in North America and the much larger target audience. I did some chatting with @Knezzen by using the IRC client Wallops which utilizes a server running Bitlbee... so I'm essentially chatting with my Telegram contacts from a 1989 Mac IIci. Not too bad, is it? So I don't feel "disconnected" from the world, really :-) Now I'm about to explore the forum posts here. The forum works on a 68030 IIci with iCab 2.9 but it's slow. That's something I started to miss, the quickly jumping from thread to thread. On the other hand, I found it gives me time to think about what I'll write while it is loading. And I kind of like that too. So there's pluses and minuses. But it just reinforces my wish to further improve the "retro compatibility" of our forum for a smoother experience. I noticed the Captain's Quarters II BBS has a news section where you can read some news, including Apple's latest shenanigans. Along with 68k.news I feel I can follow pretty well what is going on in the world from my IIci. My plan for either today or tomorrow is getting e-mail to work on the IIci, obviously through a SSL bridge. I need a solid 68k POP3 e-mail client. There's a few candidates, I'll test them and report back. And I noticed that the Retro Computing Roundtable has a gopher presence (rcrpodcast.com) where they offer "lo-fi" versions of their podcasts to be run on actual retro hardware. I'm going to download their latest episode and will listen to it while exporing Gopherspace. Knezzen, next time you play with music, can you create a mod file of the Miami Vice intro theme for me please? ;-) @3lectr1c - updated version of Tetris Max? Oh, did I miss something? Care to tell me more, they updated the game?
|
ovalking
|
128 MB Posts: 199
Reply #7 on: August 09, 2023, 00:34
|
I finally completed the restore to the replacement HD in my P475. There was so much tape swapping and whirring... odd issues with the external drive I was booting from... flat battery... monitors failing... It took ages! I'm not convinced the replacement HD is working 100%, due to the clunky noises and real slow writing performance, but it does seem to work. And DFA gives it a clean bill of health. Tomorrow I'll start doing some proper stuff with it. All I had time for today was to post this message!e
Last Edit: August 09, 2023, 10:18 by ovalking
|
Bolkonskij
|
Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #8 on: August 09, 2023, 18:00
|
@ovalking - Way to go! Join us in our summer challenge, better late than never :-) About yesterday / today: So I had planned to get e-mail going. I was thinking about what I need and ended up with wanting just a bare-bones simple plain-text e-mail client with a small footprint supporting POP3. Mind you, I'm on a 68030 Mac IIci running 7.1 and 32 MB of RAM. There's no CPU cycles to waste :-) Unfortunately, the choices in that category aren't as many as one would think. Yes, there are the old classics like Claris E-Mailer. But I need a client that allows to specify both an individual port and user id / domain. PopMail II is wonderful. Simple and small, just what I'm looking for. But it has hardcoded port configs for whatever reason. (memo to myself, check with ResEdit if these are stored in the resources and can be altered ...) I then tried the 68k version of Musashi. I liked it on my 8600 and after some chat with @Knezzen got it to work with the e-mail bridge. Yay, e-mail on System 7.1!! Anyone here who wants to receive an e-mail sent from a 1989 Macintosh IIci? ;-) I've also been further exploring Gopher using the TurboGopher client. My 68030 @40 Mhz is just fast enough for me to playback .mod tracks in the background while I browse Gopherspace. So I browse Gopherholes while listening to 80's syntheziser music and drinking beer. Man, life is good! Can't ask for more! :-D On my exploration in Gopherspace I dug up a few interesting adresses. Even a gopher outlet of a German mainstream newspaper (my native language). No idea if this is a legacy thing they keep up or if they deliberately chose to create this. Anyway, cool reading news on there. Gopherpedia is so amazing for accessing Wikipedia content via Gopher in an unobtrusive, text-only way. Found lots of gopher blogs of "techies" (programmers, engineers) on Gopher too. They all seem to enjoy the protocol and it's focus on dense information over bling-bling presentation. How did Knezzen write to me on IRC an hour ago? Something along the lines of "I wonder why I have all this modern stuff when I can do what I need with my old Macs". Indeed, amazing how much you can get out of a simple 68k Mac IF you know how and/or are ready to learn and experiment! Although !!! Today I had a moment where I thought I'd have to cheat by using my wife's MacBook Pro. Reason was that I needed to know the opening hours of a local enterprise. iCab and the modern web aren't compatible, so how to access that info? Luckily I remembered frogfind.com which is a Google search for retro computers. So I just searched for the business name and frogfind returned the result but stripped away all the JavaScript and CSS bloat. It delivered me the info that I needed, although the resulting page wasn't pretty. But phew. Cheating averted :-) Now been browsing through the Macintosh Garden. It really IS amazing how much software is out there for the Macintosh at my disposal. Like if I'd be really into games, I think I'd find enough games to keep me entertained for the rest of my life :-D ...and I'm just talking about 68k compatible games! Then there's the producivity software. So much to explore. I wonder if I should get a classic DTP software for the Mac like Ready,Set,Go and just layout a magazine cover page. Just for the fun of the experience (never done that). Somehow it would be cool to create a fantasy magazine cover page and then print it. Anyone having any better idea? Oh and before i forget - I browsed Cornica and downloaded some movies for testing. Fast Player (available on the Garden) is just SO much better for Quicktime movie playback then the Apple original.
Last Edit: August 10, 2023, 12:33 by Bolkonskij
|
ovalking
|
128 MB Posts: 199
Reply #9 on: August 09, 2023, 23:01
|
Your enthusiasm always inspires me Bolkonskij :-) Gave the P475 a good workout today. It seems to be working as well as it can! I downloaded some pdf files with GetDown, opened them in Acrobat Reader 3, added some of the data to my Excel spreadsheets. Then checked my mail with Netscape. Someone sent me an image which I viewed with GraphicConverter and transferred the info to more spreadsheets and my Filemaker Pro database. I had to cheat slightly a couple of times... one of the pdfs kept crashing Acrobat 3. I had to use Acrobat 4 on a PPC machine (still Sys 7) to view that one. The other thing was this image I got was enormous - not enough memory or power for the P475 to cope. Had to scale down to 25% on the PPC machine which allowed me to continue.
|
snes1423
|
256 MB Posts: 458 A Man born of Mechina
Reply #10 on: August 10, 2023, 03:17
|
i attempted but failed after i realized 16mb of ram isnt enough for photoshop 4.0 to open a 720p photo taken on a minolta
|
3lectr1c
|
32 MB Posts: 36 PowerBook Enthusiast
Reply #11 on: August 10, 2023, 19:03
|
I've sort of failed too... got sidetracked on other projects. I think I'm going to get back into it in a day or two though. I'd like to try out some new games I've yet to get into. I'd also really like to get cornica working.
|
Knezzen
|
Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot
Reply #12 on: August 11, 2023, 18:28
|
Less than 24 hours left! I have been coding a bit, made some music, wrote some stuff and just chatted with friends. The usual computing things, but using my PowerBook 540c instead of the usual MacBook Air M1. I love it. I don't really understand what I need the MacBook for anymore.
|
Bolkonskij
|
Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #13 on: August 13, 2023, 16:46
|
It's over! I was really looking forward to the summer challenge and spend some dedicated time with my IIci. I didn't get as much time as I had hoped for. Mainly because so many other things coincidentally went on in our lives. But for the (few) free time that I had, I really enjoyed it. I see that I haven't properly appreciated wiby.org for the awesome service it provides. Big thumbs up. I'm able to browse the web and discover many new pages from my IIci thanks to it and iCab - which is amazing in 2023. (note: just make sure to go to settings and pick http only connections) I had wanted to get back into programming in C on the IIci but only got as far as setting up Think C and compiling a simple Hello World style program. Which is something I really wish I've had more time for. All in all it was a fun challenge and I don't know what you guys think, but we should probably make this a S7T tradition  @3lectr1c - what doesn't work with Cornica? Playback directly on page?
|
3lectr1c
|
32 MB Posts: 36 PowerBook Enthusiast
Reply #14 on: August 13, 2023, 17:40
|
I just didn't have QuickTime properly set up (I think). It's supposed to stream playback, right? Alongside the download options? Not entirely sure as I haven't used it before except for on my G3 a while back when I did download a video. I actually brought my 3400c into the Apple store yesterday. I had to go for a different reason and I figured I'd bring it along, since I do have working batteries for it. A lot of the workers there got a kick out of it! One of them did mention though that they saw a couple of them around a year ago... ...because someone brought them to be recycled 
|
|
Pages: [1] 2
|
| |||||||||||||||
|
© 2021 System7Today.com. |
