Signs of old age

The least pleasant aspect of collecting a few vintage machines is their maintenance. One of the bits of advice I often give to new vintage Mac enthusiasts is Don’t leave these Macs unused for extended periods of time; try to use them as often as you can. Usually the part that suffers most in a vintage Mac left unused for a long time is the hard drive. Over the years I’ve witnessed my good share of Macs whose hard drives didn’t come out of the long sleep (I call this phenomenon Dead On Reboot). With vintage PowerBooks another source of problems after long periods of neglect is of course the battery — this is especially the case with the Macintosh Portable and the PowerBook 100.

Another rather common problem with vintage compact Macs (from the 128K to the Classic II) are their capacitors on the logic board. With time (and neglect) these components fail and leak on the logic board itself, causing a few issues. I tried to follow my own advice, but since I own a fair number of vintage Macs and there isn’t much space for them where I live, it’s hard to keep them all in their best shape, despite my very good intentions. Having only a small desk devoted to my vintage hardware, I’ve had to resort to some kind of rotation system where, say, I use my Macintosh SE for three weeks, then I put it away and replace it with the Macintosh Classic for another three weeks, then the Colour Classic, etc. As I said, despite my best efforts, two of the compact Macs in my little collection — first the SE/30, now the Macintosh Classic as well — have started presenting the telltale symptoms of capacitor trouble.

Earlier today, after booting my Macintosh Classic, I noticed something weird: the system clock wouldn’t advance. After a bit of Web research, I found this page, Macintosh Classic Logic Board Repair with a few decent images of where the failing capacitors are located. It also has a good summary of the revealing signs of a Mac whose capacitors are starting to fail:

The Mac Classic range of computers often show a variety of symptoms but which have a common cause of failure, for example:

• Low volume or no sound.
• Real time clock not advancing.
• Power up problems with checkers and stripes etc.
• No serial or LocalTalk functionality.

My Mac Classic suffers from the first two symptoms, while the SE/30 is curiously mute only on boot (and sometimes it presents a chequered/striped screen, but restarting the machine usually makes the problem go away, at least for now). In the next days I’ll open up my compact Macs and take a look at their logic boards. The most frustrating thing for me is my lack of skills (and tools) when it comes to soldering/desoldering components. I’ll do my best to clean the logic boards and to perform some damage control. If you find yourself in a similar situation, probably a good place to ask for help/advice are the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army forums. And if you have some logic board cleaning tips to share, you’re welcome to chime in by leaving a comment. Thanks.

The Essential Mac

I was looking for some SCSI-related information for an article I’m working on, and I stumbled upon a lovely website dedicated to the classic Mac OS: The Essential Mac. It’s like entering a time machine and being brought back to 1997, but definitely in a very good way. (Edited to add: The Essential Mac is actually a website that has been around since 1997, in case you’re wondering.)

I rarely feature other vintage Mac websites — my endorsement is usually made explicit by adding them to my blogroll on the sidebar, but The Essential Mac is worth a mention because it’s very well made. It covers a variety of topic in detail, it is organised like a beginner’s guide to the Mac (the pre-OS X Mac, of course), but most of all, it’s really well written. The writing style reminds me of those excellent printed manuals of the 1980s and 1990s: informative, concise, and a pleasure to read. Take a look at SCSI Voodoo, the section about the SCSI interface, to have an idea.

If you’re a Mac user who has no experience of what it was before Mac OS X, and who has just started exploring the world of vintage Macs maybe after scoring an old PowerBook for a few dollars, you’ll definitely want to check this site. And even if you’re an experienced or long-time Mac user, you’ll want to add The Essential Mac to your bookmarks to have a quick, useful classic Mac OS reference when you need one.

Another vintage Mac story with a happy ending

I’m still doing some research for a couple of long articles I’ll hopefully publish next month, and I’m also in the process of consolidating and moving my small Mac magazines collection from the 1990s to a more accessible place, so that I can continue to offer some bits of Macintosh history through my ‘reprints’ of interesting excerpts.

In the meantime I break the silence with a link to a nice story involving a Macintosh 128K and an ImageWriter.

The other day I was browsing David Tucker’s website and wished I could have paid more attention before because I had missed this article from last year. David writes:

Sitting in the book arts lab I almost fell over as fellow docents carried in a beautiful Apple Macintosh 128k and sat it down in front of me.

Knowing I used to work for Apple the computer was brought in and placed before me partially in jest, it had been assumed that the machine probably didn’t work as it had been packed away in a box for who knows how long up back in some rafters.

Follow the link and read the story of how David managed to get the Mac and the printer (especially the printer) back to their feet. I really like this bit at the end:

The museum has always focused on “antique” printing methods, at 27 years old this machine is not nearly as old as our Gutenberg presses or Heidelberg windmills but indeed made and equally important milestone in printing history. Bringing this whole system back to life now ensures that this piece of the story is not lost and we can continue to teach its place in history.

Good job, David. Another system saved from the landfill.

DVD Player, Mac OS X, and the PowerBook G3 Lombard

While today has been “OS X Lion day” for basically everyone, I was updating my recently acquired PowerBook G3/400 ‘Lombard’ to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. The installation was a long process, surely longer than I remembered, and after installing the Mac OS X 10.3.9 Combo Update (which luckily I had on a CD I burnt a while back, along with the Mac OS X 10.1.5 and 10.2.8 Combo Updates), I still had to wait for more updates, as Software Update promptly informed me:

When finally everything was updated and after rebooting for the nth time, I noticed a missing piece: DVD Player. This Lombard came with a stock installation of Mac OS 8.6, and a 2x DVD-ROM drive in the right expansion bay. I played a couple of DVDs and was surprised to see how well the PowerBook handled them. That’s because this model has a built-in hardware decoder. So it was strange that Panther didn’t install its very own DVD Player software. Well, I assumed that OS X could detect that the PowerBook was able to play DVDs and act accordingly. I did a brief search on the Web and I found a discussion forum where a user was lamenting the same problem with the very same hardware. Someone suggested to use Pacifist to extract DVD Player from the Mac OS X Panther Install CD 1, but it had no effect: DVD Player would refuse to run, warning that the hardware was not compatible. I dug more, and on another discussion I found this quote:

The version of the DVD Player provided with Mac OS X is not compatible with the Lombard G3, as it does the decoding in software and your computer’s processor isn’t fast enough to effectively handle it. Mac OS 9’s DVD Player works by accessing the computer’s hardware decoder, for which there are no Mac OS X drivers.

Corroborated by this Apple technical note, from which I quote this relevant bit:

DVD Player 3.0 requires an Apple computer originally equipped with a built-in DVD-ROM drive and AGP graphics. It is installed and will open on computers that meet this requirement.

The following computers may meet the DVD Player requirements:

• iBook – see Notes 1 and 4
• iMac – see Notes 1 and 4
• PowerBook (FireWire)
• PowerBook G4
• Power Mac G4 Cube – see Notes 2 and 4
• Power Mac G4 – see Notes 3 and 4

So, in a nutshell, if you have a PowerBook G3 (Bronze Keyboard) a.k.a. ‘Lombard’, and you install Mac OS X on it, your only option to watch DVDs decently is to reboot in Mac OS 9. And no, you can’t run Mac OS 9’s ‘Apple DVD Player’ from the Classic Environment, you’ll really have to reboot. Some suggested to download third party software like VLC, but since it can’t rely on the hardware decoder either, I suspect performance would be too poor to watch anything.

Perhaps this information is obvious to many, but since it’s the first time I’ve found myself in this situation, I thought it’d be useful to share anyway.

Putting my Data Retrieval service to the test

Almost a year ago, I started (tentatively) offering a new Data Retrieval service. It went basically ignored for many months — which surprised me a bit, since the two main reasons that led me to offer this kind of service were (1) keeping my vintage hardware rolling, putting it to good use, and (2) because I kept hearing people complain about having stuff on old devices and media and being unable to retrieve it. (As a somewhat bitter aside, I was not surprised to notice a lack of interest for a project of mine: it seems to be a recurrent pattern in my online presence.)

But lately things have started moving, and so far I’ve successfully helped three people, either by extracting their data from obsolete media, or by converting data written by obsolete applications into something readable by more modern software.

Success story #1
Giuliano, an “avid reader of my blogs” as he wrote in his letter, is an Italian graphic designer who recently relocated in France, and after settling in his new home, he found a box of old stuff from his early days in his profession. Most of that stuff was on Iomega Zip disks, and he was able to retrieve it by borrowing a USB Zip drive from a friend. But then he found a couple of SyQuest 44 MB cartridges, and that proved to be a bit trickier, so he sent them to me to see what I could do.

The disks needed minor repairs, nothing that the old Norton Utilities 3.2 and FWB Hard Disk Toolkit couldn’t handle. For the data retrieval I used my SyQuest 5200c unit (that reads 44, 88 and 200 MB cartridges) connected to the Power Macintosh 9500/132; the files, mostly old Photoshop projects, were transferred directly to my MacBook Pro via Ethernet and made available for Giuliano in my Dropbox public folder. It was thrilling to see file creation dates such as October 1995 and January 1996 (it’s safe to assume that they were Photoshop 3 files), but even more thrilling was the moment in which I could open them and realise they were still fine and readable (I asked Giuliano permission to verify the data before making the files available for him).

Success story #2
This was, admittedly, a rather trivial affair. Stewart, another reader of this blog, wrote me asking for assistance in converting a bunch of old DocMaker files into something he could read again. “These were e-zines I created with another guy back in the Nineties. We uploaded them in my FTP server and then time went by and we kind of forgot about them. One day I was doing some spring cleaning in the archives and bam! I was back to memory lane. But since neither I nor my friend have old Macs now and our Intel Macs don’t run OS 9 or Classic, at the moment I have no way of reading that stuff. I realized it has sentimental value — it’s fine if you can’t give it back to me in a pretty state, I’m mostly interested in being able to read it.”

Stewart gave me access to his FTP server, and four years of e-zines were waiting for me — almost 50 files. Since Stewart was just interested in reading the contents, I figured the quickest way was to convert them in PDF format. There is no DocMaker-to-PDF utility that I know of, but I used PrintToPDF on my G4 Cube under Classic and got the job done. (As the name suggests, PrintToPDF is a printer driver that creates PDF files. It works in the Classic Mac OS only, or in the Classic Environment under Mac OS X, and you select it as the default printer in the Chooser; then you can ‘print’ PDFs from any application.) Sometimes a page break cut graphic elements in two, but the result was readable and that was the main goal. I uploaded the PDFs back on Stewart’s server and he was happy, and that’s the most important thing.

Success story #3
Nicola sent me a file, presumably generated by an old version of ClarisWorks a few years back, and containing a series of photo references. It didn’t contain any images, just (as I discovered in my investigation) a long array of records with descriptions of where the photo was taken and what was on the photo. It looked like a temp file, and when I opened it with a hex editor it just looked full of garbage. My first idea was to use AppleWorks to open or import it, but I didn’t have much luck; then I thought about FileMaker. So I fired up my old copy of FileMaker Pro 6 which, to my great satisfaction, found the file readable and offered to update it in a more recent format. It ended up perfectly usable in the end.

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These little experiences made me realise once again the importance of so-called obsolete technology. When new media and new formats arrive, we have to keep up with them and constantly transfer our digital archives on up-to-date devices and media, but sometimes we haven’t got the time, the opportunity, or simply the level of organisation needed for the task — especially as our archives keep getting bigger. So, every now and then, something doesn’t get updated, gets lost in a move, or simply the machine where it was created stops working (or the operating system or the application gets updated and doesn’t offer enough backward compatibility) and data or media become ‘orphans’. That’s where vintage hardware comes into play.

There may be some plan to expand this kind of service in the future, so that it can definitely come out of the current ‘beta’ state, so stay tuned!

Adventures in Vintage (part 2)

The first part of the task to restructure my home network — where I put a PowerMac 9500 in place of a Quadra 950 to create a bridge between modern Macs and vintage machines — told the vicissitudes resulted from an unfortunate setback (two internal SCSI hard drives both dead on the same day). Reinstalling Mac OS 9.1 on the surviving internal hard drive of the PowerMac, as my exhausting story showed, has been far less trivial than expected, and when I finally succeeded, the first part of the story (and post) closed with a last catch:

I disconnect everything and restart the PowerMac 9500. The system loads correctly, but the Mac is suspiciously slow. Twelve minutes from the happy Mac icon to the fully loaded desktop are indeed too much. […] Starting with extensions off everything works fine and the PowerMac is quite reactive, I’d say even more than before. The problem is obviously one or more extensions, or even a conflict amongst them. Perhaps by not installing Mac OS 9.1 directly on the PowerMac and instead using a Titanium PowerBook, some components might have been added that trigger a rejection in the PowerMac. Now starts the Hunt For The Evil Extension, in pure pre-Mac OS X style, and if the topic has entertained you so far and was fun to read, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Now, I don’t know whether the topic was entertaining and fun to read or not, but since I always like to get to the bottom of things, here’s the sequel of my adventure in vintage.

Before practicing the infamous “take away extension 1 / restart your Mac / put extension 1 back, take away extension 2 / restart your Mac / etc.” dance (long-time Mac users surely remember it as one of the most tedious and quite un-Mac-like experiences ever), I wanted to try to better understand that strange slowness of the PowerMac 9500 at startup. After a more careful analysis, the phenomenon was as follows: the whole boot process was taking place as if it were in slow-motion, with the extensions loading one at a time with a considerable pause between one and another. When the desktop was finally loaded, the entire graphical interface reacted to mouse clicks and keyboard input with great delay, in such a way as to make the Mac look frozen. (A similar scenario in Mac OS X would occur if, for whatever reason, a process could manage to suck 100% of CPU resources and to choke the CPU to the point of severely affecting the speed of the mouse pointer). In short, the Mac seemed so busy to handle something behind the scenes, that was not responding to external stimuli. I couldn’t hear any crunching or grinding activity from the hard drive (and this 500 MB unit is otherwise obscenely noisy), so I thought it could be some memory-related issue. After a few minutes in this state, however, the Mac ‘regained consciousness’ to be its old snappy self as it had always been, and everything was working smoothly. No errors, no unexpected nasty messages.

Perplexed, there wasn’t much to do but start the aforementioned ‘extension dance’, opening the Extension Manager control panel and starting to turn off unnecessary components (like FireWire Support, the numerous ATI extensions, the OpenGL related components, and so on). After every restart the situation did not change: Mac in slow-motion until the desktop was fully loaded, then a handful of minutes spent in a state of semi-dizziness, and then again back to being ‘snappy Mac’. When even selecting the “Mac OS 9.1 base” extensions preset (which is proposed as a default set to use in case of conflicts with third-party extensions) the PowerMac continued to behave in this strange way after a restart, my patience was gone. (Consider a quarter of an hour for each reboot, multiply it by at least a dozen reboots and you start getting the picture of how much time you can lose with this kind of troubleshooting). It was crucial to install Mac OS 9.1 directly on the PowerMac, without workarounds and shortcuts.

So I connected the glorious SyQuest 5200C SCSI unit to the PowerMac and inserted a 200 MB cartridge with a clean installation of Mac OS 7.6; I restarted the Mac from this drive and deleted the Mac OS 9.1 System Folder on the internal volume. The idea was to try to put the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM back in the PowerMac’s optical drive and retry the installation. However — blame it on my fatigue — I forgot that the CD-ROM wouldn’t be recognised by the older drivers of Mac OS 8 and earlier versions. So I found myself back to square one once again, with a PowerMac only bootable from the SyQuest cartridge with Mac OS 7.6. I absolutely did not want to pull everything out, start disassembling the PowerMac 9500, removing the hard drive, etc., yet another time, therefore I thought about using again the PowerBook 5300 as a conduit between the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM (inserted in the Titanium PowerBook G4’s optical drive and shared from there) and some other external device where to install at least a minimum Mac OS 9.1 System Folder, in order to start the PowerMac from there later. Having the SyQuest at hand, I looked for a cartridge with enough free space, but in vain.

The situation was getting grotesque at best, but the idea of using another vintage device proved successful. In fact, I managed to install a minimum Mac OS 9.1 installation on a magneto-optical disk, resurrecting an old MaxOptix SCSI drive and a 652 MB double-sided disk (300+ MB per side). With Mac OS 9.1 installed on the magneto-optical disk, I connected the MaxOptix unit (it weighs as a Macintosh SE, by the way) to the PowerMac, restarted from there, inserted the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM in the PowerMac’s optical drive and finally performed a full installation of OS 9.1 on the internal hard drive. I then copied Vine Server for Mac OS 9 and placed it in the Startup Items folder, and at long last I managed to see the PowerMac 9500 from the 12-inch PowerBook G4 via Screen Sharing:

Since the screen resolution is set at 640×480 (it’s what the 14-inch CRT Macintosh Color Display can offer, apparently), the window is really small. I thought about some way to gain more screen estate, and I recalled an application I had tried years ago: SwitchRes. To my surprise, after a quick Web search I’ve discovered that the application is still supported, and there is a version for Mac OS X (SwitchResX) and for Mac OS 9 and earlier (SwitchRes 2). I downloaded SwitchRes 2.5.3, passed it over to the PowerMac and tried it. You have to be careful with this program, because you can easily try the wrong screen resolutions and find yourself with a black screen and the only thing you can do is a hard reboot. Fortunately, since I was controlling the PowerMac with the PowerBook G4 via VNC, I was still able to see the PowerMac’s desktop on the PowerBook even at higher resolutions (800×600 in the image below).

I registered SwitchRes 2 (I remembered well, it is a great program) and having now finished with the PowerMac 9500’s configuration, I went to see if the 4 GB external hard drive with Rhapsody Developer Release 2 was still as I left it almost a year ago. I connected it to the PowerMac but of course it wasn’t possible to restart directly in Rhapsody, since with the death of the first hard drive I had lost the Multibooter. This application/control panel can recognise Rhapsody-formatted volumes (Rhapsody doesn’t use the Mac HFS or HFS+ filesystems, but UFS, a UNIX filesystem) and you can select them as startup disks (provided, of course, there is a valid Rhapsody system installation on them). Therefore, I inserted the Rhapsody DR2 CD-ROM and copied Multibooter to the hard drive. I launched Multibooter, and the external drive with Rhapsody was immediately recognised:

The figure shows the volumes being recognised: 9500 (Mac OS) is the PowerMac internal hard drive; Rhapsody DR2 (Mac OS) and Rhapsody DR2 (Rhapsody) are the two partitions on the Rhapsody CD-ROM, so that it can be mounted by both Mac OS and Rhapsody; and finally Titan1T7 (Rhapsody) is the external 4 GB hard drive, only visible from Multibooter (it’s not mounted on the desktop — and can’t be, for the reasons above). Note how this application/control panel would become the Startup Disk preference pane in Mac OS X, with the same horizontal display of selectable boot volumes.

After selecting the external drive and restarting, I was back into Rhapsody, with the windows opened in the Workspace Manager right where I left them in late 2007. I’ll talk more about Rhapsody another time: I want to reacquaint myself with this operating system first. I guess the next adventure will be about bringing the PowerMac 9500 with Rhapsody to surf the Web by trying to reinstall OmniWeb (yes, OmniWeb has been around for a while now). If that won’t work, well, there’s always Lynx!

Adventures in Vintage (part 1)

These days I’ve been renovating my Mac home network. I wanted to make some improvements, but some incidents happened on the way, creating a ‘snowball effect’, and taking me back to the classic Mac OS troubleshooting era. I love old Macs and love to maintain them, putting them to good use whenever possible — I wouldn’t have opened this very blog otherwise. But one thing should be said: in a pre-OS X environment, the process of solving problems when everything goes wrong may soon become a bit of a nightmare, and the time needed to isolate the cause and find a solution or a workaround may be unacceptably long. This to refresh the memory of those few who are still pining for those good old Mac OS 9 times.

It all started in a simple, even trivial way. In my home network the link between the more recent Macs and the vintage Macs has always been a Quadra 950. Sometimes a PowerBook 5300, but only temporarily. I wanted a machine that is versatile and expandable, and the Quadra 950 seemed the ideal choice, since you can insert up to a maximum of five hard drives in it. With the addition of an Ethernet card, the Quadra is the ideal bridge between the modern PowerBooks and the serial-based LocalTalk network populated by the Colour Classic, the PowerBook Duo 280c and occasionally a Macintosh SE.

The Quadra 950 has done its job quite well so far, but having a PowerMac 9500 with more processor power (a 133 MHz PowerPC versus a 33 MHz Motorola 68040), more RAM (272 MB versus 28 MB), and also a CD-ROM drive and a USB card, I thought about putting the PowerMac 9500 to do the Quadra’s job. The reason why I have not done this before is that the Quadra had its own ‘office space’, with its beautiful 14-inch CRT Macintosh Color Display (which weighs several tons), the keyboard and everything. Having to make room and then remove the monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.. I thought I could use the Quadra 950 in a headless setup, controlling it remotely from the PowerBook G4 with a VNC client. But for this the best candidate is the PowerMac 9500 hands-down: in addition to the aforementioned advantages, the 9500 can run Mac OS 9.1, and simply installing Vine Server for OS 9 (formerly OS9vnc) is enough to do the trick.

The migration was fast, the PowerMac configured within minutes, and everything worked at once. At boot, the PowerMac automatically turned AppleTalk on over the Ethernet port and activated Sharing. Vine Server was initiated too (just put it in System Folder > Startup Items). On the PowerBook G4 I launched Screen Sharing, manually entered the PowerMac 9500’s IP address, and in a few seconds, a window with the PowerMac desktop appeared.

Four hours later, the beginning of the end: the internal 8 GB SCSI drive with a complete Mac OS 9 system and some folders containing backup stuff stopped working, just like that, without even a farewell rattle. Any attempt to open files or folders gave me an error (element not found) and after a restart, the hard drive was no longer recognised. So I tried to reboot from the other internal 500 MB drive, but there wasn’t installed any valid System capable of running a PowerMac 9500 — only the minimum System 7.1 installation included in A/UX.

I turned off the PowerMac, disconnected everything, opened it, removed the dead drive, and while I was at it, I looked for another good one. Rummaging in my cartons filled with old hardware, I could find a 1.3 GB Quantum Fireball which in a previous life was the boot disk of a Quadra 700. I connected it and restarted the PowerMac 9500. The Mac restarted exactly from that volume, which (I had remembered well) still contained the Mac OS 8.1 installation of the old Quadra 700. At that point the idea was to insert the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM and update the existing Mac OS 8.1, but — surprise — the Mac did not see the CD. Why? Long story short, after some researching I discovered that in order to recognise that CD, the PowerMac needed the updated Apple CD-ROM extension… from Mac OS 9. It was not even possible to boot directly from the CD by holding down the C key during startup. And I was stuck in a vicious circle.

And there’s more. To further complicate things, after one of the many restarts, the recently found 1.3 GB hard drive died too (or at least was hanging in a loop and you could hear a repeated clicking noise, much similar to a car not revving up, so to speak). The Moral: No matter if you are experiencing a moment of unique shakespearian inspiration — never, ever call a pair of hard drives “Rosencrantz” and “Guildenstern.”

My work at this point gets complicated, because unfortunately the last survivor is also the less capacious disk, only 500 MB (and 180 free). The optical drive of the PowerMac does not see the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM, then one possibility is to extract the disk, insert it in an outer SCSI shell and connect it to the PowerBook 5300. This PowerBook, connected to the Titanium PowerBook G4 via Ethernet, can see and access all the volumes connected to the Titanium. So I inserted the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM in the TiBook, had the PowerBook 5300 mount it on its own desktop, and from there I launched the OS 9.1 Installer, specifying a base installation on the 500 MB hard drive of the PowerMac 9500, now temporarily become an external unit. At approximately 60% of the process, the installation failed because the Installer apparently couldn’t extract files from the Big System Morsels compressed archive. Also, the Ethernet connection with the TiBook fell suddenly.

I started thinking that perhaps the problem was the OS 9.1 CD itself. Plan B is soon put in place: restore the Ethernet connection between the TiBook and the PowerBook 5300, and brutally copy the System Folder on the Mac OS 9.1 CD, which is a bare-bones system setup to be able to boot the Mac from the CD. The plan is expected to proceed this way: reinsert the hard drive in the PowerMac 9500, restart the PowerMac using the minimum System Folder previously copied into it, and finally put the OS 9.1 CD in the 9500’s optical drive (which now should be recognised) and do a full installation of Mac OS 9.1.

The installation fails twice: the first time for an undefined error during copying; the second time because, near the very end of the process, there’s no more disk space left (now that we’re all spoiled by having gigabytes and gigabytes of storage, we have forgotten “Disk Full” errors). But now, thanks to the minimum OS 9.1 System Folder, the PowerMac’s Ethernet port is recognised in the AppleTalk control panel, so I can retry the installation by putting the OS 9.1 CD in the TiBook and mounting the CD on the PowerMac’s desktop. (In the previous Mac OS 8.1 installation, I had removed all Ethernet-related extensions, since the Quadra 700’s Ethernet connection was AAUI and not 10Base-T — that is why I had to remove the hard drive and link it to the TiBook via the PowerBook 5300).

I try the installation one more time and during the process the connection between the two Macs falls. The last resort before surrender is to do a full install of Mac OS 9.1 on an external FireWire drive connected to the TiBook, mount the disk on the PowerMac 9500’s desktop (the 9500 being connected to the Titanium via Ethernet), and copy that System Folder – now truly complete — from the FireWire disk to the one inside of the 9500. This time everything goes smoothly.

I disconnect everything and restart the PowerMac 9500. The system loads correctly, but the Mac is suspiciously slow. Twelve minutes from the happy Mac icon to the fully loaded desktop are indeed too much. (As an aside, I can’t help noticing how starting times with Mac OS 9 and earlier are always much faster than any version of Mac OS X. The old Quadra 950 with System 7.5.3 is ready in 40 seconds. The PowerMac 9500 before the disaster did a complete boot in just over a minute, with Mac OS 9.1). Starting with extensions off everything works fine and the PowerMac is quite reactive, I’d say even more than before. The problem is obviously one or more extensions, or even a conflict amongst them. Perhaps by not installing Mac OS 9.1 directly on the PowerMac and instead using a Titanium PowerBook, some components might have been added that trigger a rejection in the PowerMac. Now starts the Hunt For The Evil Extension, in pure pre-Mac OS X style, and if the topic has entertained you so far and was fun to read, I’ll let you know how it goes.

I know that the first reaction, after reading this adventure, is to think that I must have a lot of time in my hands, and that I must have nothing better to do. In reality I only spent a couple of mornings with this. I found myself with some free time and I just wanted to have some fun, most of all. The beauty of these undertakings is to never give up and see who succeeds. The beauty lies in succeeding and having a diversified and efficient home network, with the PowerMac 9500 mounting all the volumes of my vintage Macs, thus allowing me to access all my files from one location. But if you don’t consider the playful side of this and look at all I went through to make things work from a strictly productive point of view, then we can see how life with Mac OS X is much, much easier.