 Older
Macs
- January 10, 2000
I received a phone call last night from an excited
first-time owner of a Mac. The young lady is an experienced
Mac user, having held several graphics arts jobs, but has
never had a home computer. A friend had given her a
Mac IIci. It had a 250 MB
hard drive and 20 MB of RAM. It also came with Adobe
Illustrator 5.5. She'd already given the IIci a pretty good shakedown and
determined that for the "price," she could live with a 25
MHz computer. Her question was pretty
straightforward:
"Can I upgrade the RAM on this machine, and if so, how far?"
She was using most of her RAM to run the system and
Illustrator and often couldn't open anything else. A quick check in Newer
Technology's GURU
(428K) revealed she had a bank of four 1 MB SIMMs and
another of 4 MB SIMMs (30-pin).  While
she could theoretically go as high as 128 MB of RAM with
eight 16 MB SIMMs, I suggested she go to RAMseeker
to look for the best price for just four 16 MB SIMMs to
replace the ones. This would give her a total of 80 MB,
retaining the use and value of the 4 MB chips. When I did a
followup check of RAMseeker, I found that even going this
route made the upgrade come in at around $100, a
considerable sum for an aging machine. I forgot to check the current Apple
Memory Guide (1673K PDF document) and got to make a
return call to tell her to check for the parity chip as
noted in the guide. The same info is also included in GURU,
but I didn't scroll down and read very carefully.  I
was a bit surprised that she didn't already know where to
look for answers to her questions. It reminded me of the
whole topic of how computers should work. You should be able
to turn them on, do your stuff, and be on your way.
In this user's case, the places where she'd worked with
Macs insulated their users from anything but the most
rudimentary troubleshooting with skilled Systems
Administrators and PC (Mac) troubleshooters. I'd even
lightened the wallet of one of her employers on one occasion
to clean up some system problems on a Performa
6500/300 she was using (grin). It's a fairly typical
scenario. That's good in one way, as they are paid to put
out graphics products, not tinker with their machines. In a
time when computers are a mature technology, that should be
the case every time. As ably noted by Charles
Moore in a column
for MacSimple, we're
just not there yet: - Computers, despite their
technological sophistication, are not a mature
technology. A good analogy is the automobile early in
this century. Computers, even Macs -- which are the best
of the lot, are still at about the stage of
sophistication as cars were when you had to manually
crank the engine to start them, fiddle with manual spark
advance and carburetor mixture controls to keep them
running, use a clutch to get underway, and wrestle with a
non-synchromesh manual gearbox that required
double-clutching for downshifting. Computers will get
easier to use, but meanwhile, like people who wanted to
drive in the age of the Model T Ford, you have to work
around the machine's shortcomings.
I had an ugly reminder of this fact while putting
together this column. I was searching for a shareware item
on a CD and somehow managed to trash my system. While I
could do an "extensions off" restart, a full restart
produced a type 10 bus error. Norton Utilities 5 couldn't
discover the problem, but TechTool Pro 2.5.3, which ran
great off the hard drive even though I'd started from the OS
9 CD, detected unrepairable problems with the system
file. While the Mac was doing a System 9 clean install and a
Conflict Catcher system merge, I got to work on this column
on our aging Acer Aspire. While I like the Acer about as
well as any PC on which I have to work, I'll take my Mac any
day over it. It did help that I have Claris Home Page on
both my Mac and Acer. I just copied the column folder onto a
zip (the zip drive works even with a startup from the OS 9
CD) and worked with it on the Acer. I do, however, have the
soon to be released MacDrive
2000 (oops, did I break my NDA?) installed on the Acer
to read my Mac formatted floppies and zips. Whether the young lady decides to shell out the bucks for
a major RAM upgrade or not, I found all of this an
interesting example of older Macs still in use. What was one
person's castoff has become an exciting "new" Macintosh for
another! Last week I wrote about a Mac
SE/30 that was returned to regular use in a classroom. I
always love to do columns like that, as I get some of the
most interesting, and in the first case below, moving,
emails from readers. - Hello Steve,
-
- Your article on the Mac SE
adoption caught my eye. You see, I have (er, had) an old
SE/30 which as time went on and computers progressed, my
cool older kids refused to use for anything, due to the
small B&W screen and its perceived slowness. I also
have 2 little boys adopted recently from Romania. How do
these 2 facts fit together?
-
- Because of our new connection
to Romania, I was put in contact with a woman who helps
run an orphanage for rescued street kids in Bucharest,
Romania . . . they currently have a dozen or so boys aged
8 to 18. As you might expect many of these kids have
little formal schooling and their prospects for
productive life work can be dismal. This little orphanage
has a PC (older, but color and since it's a PC, prone to
crashes) which they use for fundraising and newsletters
but really can't let the kids near. So . . . Mac SE to
the rescue! I boxed up my old SE, complete with software
and ImageWriter printer (all of which was "worth" nothing
here in the U.S.) and sent it with a friend to Romania
who delivered it to this little orphanage. They love it!
(and acted like they just got a new G3 with a 20"
monitor) . . . the kids can use it, maybe learning some
keyboarding and other skills that may allow them an "in"
to a job eventually, and even more importantly have a
"cool, American computer" that is their own!
-
- I love knowing that my first
Mac is doing good somewhere in the world! I adopt their
kids, they "adopt" my baby-Mac . . . what a
concept!
-
- Thanks again for your
story.
-
- Edward
Kolb
- Omaha, NE
In a world that has so many problems, it's uplifting that
there are people like Edward doing the things they do. This email also caught my attention: - Hi there. My name is Al Miner.
I am the computer teacher, excuse me, the Technology
Coordinator :-), for a medium sized Catholic
elementary/junior high school in Omaha NE.
-
- When I got this job 4 years ago
we only had a few LC family Macs in the computer lab, and
every classroom (25 of them) had a hard-drive-less MS-DOS
i286 in it talking Novell on an ethernet
network
-
- We also had a science teacher
who was participating in a grant from the University of
Nebraska which gave her classroom a computer, and our
school a frame relay connection and router.
-
- Not being an expert in
Ethernets or Novell, I asked the techs from the local
university to come over and connect the router to our
Novell network. After three tries, they assured me it was
still definitely something Novell could do, but they
couldn't seem to make THIS Novell network link up to the
router. I really ought to upgrade to the next version.
The price for the upgrade at the time for as many
machines as I would be running was something like 3 times
my yearly budget.
-
- So about three years ago I was
sitting there with a decent connection to the internet, a
decent physical network wiring setup, and a school full
of PCs that were not up to any of the tasks the teachers
were asking for.
-
- Send in the Macs.
-
- At about the same time I began
dropping memory and network cards into my LC computers in
my classroom, and with very little fuss and bother I
suddenly had 6 internet stations in my computer lab.
"This is so easy," thought I. "I could do this for all
the classrooms if I could get my hands on enough cheap
Macs."
-
- So I started hitting the
newsgroups (this was the pre-eBay days mind you), and I
found a fellow in Texas who would sell us SE 4/40s with a
network card installed for $75 and an SE/30 16/200 for
$150. Seemed fair to me, so our school invested $450 in
four SEs and a SE/30, and my teachers began their near
psychotic love affair with in-school e-mail.
-
- I set up the SE/30 with a
freeware web server (Quid Pro Quo) and a freeware e-mail
server (Apple Internet Mail Server, now Eudora I.M.S.),
made us a modest web page, contacted our provider about a
DNS
name for the machine and
gave all my teachers an internet e-mail
account.
-
- I then set up the four SEs in
convenient teacher places around the building, and showed
everyone how to use the very simple kiosk style e-mail
checker (POPmail/Lab, the perfect solution to having more
than one e-mail address per computer).
-
- The response was immediate and
favorable. Very little of educational value probably took
place at first, but the teachers soon realized it was
easier to e-mail a memo as it was to pass a memo and a
checklist ("read this and check your name off the list").
Our principal has even given up his old weekly
handwritten blue dittoed weekly newsletter for an
e-mailed version.
-
- Since then we've had some fund
raisers and replaced the "Mushroom Macs" with a member of
the Mac II family or a rare Quadra in every classroom. We
still use POPmail/Lab on all of them and Netscape version
2. The children have all signed an internet
agreement, and use them
for research or rewards.
-
- We haven't abandoned the SEs.
They are sharing a LaserWriter IInt, word processing for
the junior high kids. They play an occasional game of
Choplifter or Hangman as well.
-
- Still talking on the network,
and still useful. How many other 12 year old computers
can you say that about. (Don't get me started on our
Apple IIgs/e collection.
-
- POPmail/Lab
is getting a little long in the tooth, but it really is a
useful, hard drive saving app.
-
- Keep up the good work with the
MacInSchool site. It's one of my frequent
bookmarks!
-
- Al Miner
-
- Al Miner
- Computer Guy
- St. Thomas More
School
- Omaha, Nebraska
- mineral@stm.creighton.edu
 Now
that we've rounded the Y2K corner, I suspect that more than
a few older labs of PC's have had their dates permanently
rolled back, but there are lots of folks out there with
similar vintage or older Macs still in productive use (with
the correct 2000 date!). It probably is not the only option,
but when I get questions from readers about what they might
do with say, an old 286 machine, the word "doorstop"
immediately comes to mind!
While rambling a bit, I'll answer a question before it's
even asked. The image at right has been altered considerably
to hide the identity of the two former students shown. I
have tons of great classroom photos that I enjoy going back
to again and again. Showing recognizable images of students,
especially elementary students, is first probably not legal
without a signed release form. With the dangers inherent in
our society and on the world wide web for children, I simply
choose not to use photos that include recognizable images of
students. Send your feedback to Steve
Wood - <this article available in a printer-friendly
version>
Recent Views From the ClassroomRecent Editorials at Low End Mac- Choosing a good printer,
Chris Lawson, Mac Daniel, 4/12. "What's a good printer for a
vintage Mac, one you can still get toner or ink cartridges
for?"
- AOL@school, Evan, iMac
Musings, 4/11. "AOL will be soon releasing a new version of their
software specifically for schools...."
- Complete PC nut goes Mac, Fred
Forney, My First Mac, 3/29. "I played around with [an LC
III] for a couple days, and I was hooked."
- iMac sites reviewed, Dan
Knight, iMac Channel, 3/21. An iMac webmaster looks at other iMac
sites.
- The compelling Mac, Sean C.
Cunningham, My First Mac, 3/21. "I've finally become a Mac person.
It feels pretty good."
- New @ Low End Mac:
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