Douglas Adams's Mac IIfx

http://www.vintagemacworld.com/iifx.html

by yankcrime • 13 years ago

146 39 13 years ago

mmastrac• 13 years ago

[2003]

ido• 13 years ago

How is that important in a story about a 1990 computer used by an author that died several years ago (and last used said computer 15 years ago)?

AlexanderDhoore• 13 years ago

He's going to come back using an improbability drive though. I expect him to pop up when the Vogons leave.

Normality restored in 642842942424842424284328...

city41• 13 years ago

One reason is it gives people an idea if they've read this before or not.

noonespecial• 13 years ago

"Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly ... , we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.”

colanderman• 13 years ago

Nice. I used to run A/UX [1] on one of these. Could never get networking working though; figured it was a bad Ethernet card or something.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX

larrys• 13 years ago

"When switched on for the first time, it was clear that the last user had little understanding of how to store files on the hard disk."

In the early 90's I was helping a high school student (son of a relative) [1] with problems he was having with his Mac Powerbook duo 210 [2].

Noting that he had no files on the desktop or anywhere I said "hmm looks like you don't use this computer much!". To which he replied a bit snottily "You mean I don't use the hard drive. I do use the computer".

[1] He is now a Physician with a high end dermatology practice and several offices. He went to a 7 year MD and undergrad program and graduated first in his class. He always had to appear smarter than the rest as displayed by his comment to me (much older and using computers for quite some time at that point).

[2] http://support.apple.com/kb/sp154

lectrick• 13 years ago

So... where did he save his files?? Network drive?

pudquick• 13 years ago

Duo Dock floppy drive, likely (Howdy! -- friendy@Freenode)

carlob• 13 years ago

Maybe he was just under the impression that files on the desktop were not in the hard drive.

I just fired up sheepsaver to check: in the olden days of mac the desktop appeared to be the root of the filesystem, so the hard drive was just one level inside the desktop.

cstross• 13 years ago

I met Douglas just once, in the summer of 1996. I was in London and I was visiting a friend and former co-worker who, after the startup we'd been in together in Edinburgh collapsed, had moved on to become one of the syadmins at The Digital Village, Douglas's game production house. (At the time they were working on Starship Titanic.) So I dropped round at TDV to say "hi" to my friend C. and a couple of other former acquaintances, and was taken aback when I was ushered into the boardroom, given a cup of tea, introduced to the MD, and then this tall, gawky fellow was wheeled in to shake my hand.

(I was so overawed I couldn't string enough words together to embarrass myself. (So that's okay then.) I only figured out afterwards that they were expanding and looking for new hires, and C. or another acquaintance (the UK internet scene was rather small in the mid-90s) had suggested seeing if I'd bite. As it would have involved moving to London and I'd just bought a flat in Edinburgh and high speed internet meant 56K modem dialup at £3 per hour, the answer was "no, but thanks" ...)

Anyway. Anecdote time:

Back around 1996-8, Apple went through a spot of bother with the Powerbook range -- during the Amelio years, the number of models proliferated and the build quality fell through the floor. In particular, Douglas had been toting around a Powerbook 1600cs or similar, and the blessed thing was exhibiting a tendency to halt and catch fire.

C. got a bit annoyed about this, because Douglas was about to depart on a speaking tour of the US, and C. was responsible for ensuring his laptop worked. And this machine had been sent back for repair about three times, and replaced twice. So he phoned TDV's Apple technical support contact.

"Hello? It's about this Powerbook 1600CS, serial number blah, that we keep sending back. Our CEO needs it fixed, urgently, but every replacement you send us is dead."

"Uh, well, there's a bit of a problem with that model. Send it in and we'll get a working one to you next week, I promise."

"I don't think you understand. Our CEO is about to go on a speaking tour tomorrow."

"Yes, we'll get you a replacement next week --"

"Our CEO is Douglas Adams, one of your company's leading evangelists. Do you want him to spend the next month going up on stage and explaining to everyone why he's carrying a Compaq?"

...

Three hours later a motorcycle courier turned up with six Powerbooks.

Now that's what I call AppleCare!

patrickdavey• 13 years ago

That's what I call Apple Caring for itself ;)

xyzzy123• 13 years ago

I started reading, then looked at your username and had a recursive hero-worship moment :p

DrStalker• 13 years ago

I just started reading The Laundry Files two hours ago, the first of his books I've read. I never would have noticed the username there if you hadn't pointed it out!

noir_lord• 13 years ago

Same, cstross...C Stross..it can't be the Charles Stross...holy crap it is the Charles Stross.

Only tpratchett would have elicited the same response.

poulsbohemian• 13 years ago

Wish I'd been able to get the same service... my 5300cs was off somewhere at applecare for 6 months... those were some seriously dark days for Apple.

cfontes• 13 years ago

I am from Brazil and read a lot. But had never heard of you.

I've just added "The Laundry Files series" to my reading list... The description of the series on your site is great!

I just finished "Do androids dream of eletric sheep?" so I am in the right mood I guess.

Cheers

lucian1900• 13 years ago

You'll love the Laundry files.

Also check out Accelerando.

talmand2• 13 years ago

It's strange, but it seems kind of fitting for Douglas Adams to have had a computer that would tend to "halt and catch fire".

It's as if the poor thing was depressed and was trying to put itself out of its own misery. As usual, the pesky humans kept pushing it to do things it clearly did not want to do.

Typical.

Aqueous• 13 years ago

I remember the IIfx...it had a 68030 with an FPU, which made me jealous because I had a Performa 475 with a 68LC040. The 68LC40 was a deliberately crippled 68040 with no FPU, which made it in some very important ways worse than the 68030, a previous generation processor. This left me with the unfortunate inability to run NetBSD, which I desperately wanted to do as I was just getting into computers at the time and wanted to use an OS that, unlike the friendly classic Mac OS, was closer to bare metal and let me do things like write my own programs ( which I couldn't really do in classic Mac OS because the main development tools were either insanely expensive or had critical features disabled, such as the ability to create new projects. ) So all the IIfx owners were flooding the NetBSD users mailing list with their successful boot-up stories, and I couldn't get beyond the bootloader prompt. I eventually had to take the 68LC040 out and replace it with a 68040 so I could use NetBSD and other powerful software like Infini-D...

We've come a long way. Now I'm running Mac OS and it is BSD. And all i have to do to create a new programming project is type git init in some unsuspecting directory.

webwielder• 13 years ago

That's the second Infini-D reference I've heard in the past couple of months after not hearing it mentioned once in the past 10 years. Warm fuzzies.

Tloewald2• 13 years ago

Back in the 90s macs had a serious virus problem. Two of the things apple did to address it were pretty effective — most importantly they gave a tiny bit of support/encouragement to John Norstad who wrote Disinfectant -- a very good and free virus checker -- and they put virus checking into all of their Claris-branded software (including Resolve, MacWrite Pro, Filemaker, and so on).

I had a Mac IIfx I got for free from my office (it was six or seven years old at the time) with a radius pivot display. Two once awesome pieces of tech that aged very badly...

salgernon• 13 years ago

To this day I cringe when the orientation of my iPad or iPhone changes. There were lots if apps that didn't cope well with orientation changes when the pivot first came out, early 90s timeframe and I expect to find myself dropped into tmon (at which point I would probably advance the PC and try to recover from the crash.)

Tloewald2• 13 years ago

Actually most apps on the mac coped pretty well — the big exception was Finder (ironically) which would screw up your desktop and window layout every time.

coldtea4• 13 years ago

Back in the 90s macs had a serious virus problem.

Yes, as did Amigas and Ataris. And they had 1/30 the market share OS X has had the last 10 years, and 1/50 the share of early Windows/DOS at the time.

Which goes to show that all those people claiming OS X didn't have viruses because "it had too few users" compared to XP so writers weren't interested were full of crap.

It didn't have viruses because it made it more difficult than Mac OS/Amiga/Atari to have viruses, with those UNIX permissions et al (basic as they are).

asveikau4• 13 years ago

I don't understand this argument. Windows XP has the NT security model. The file permissions are more granular than the Unix equivalent. If this is what is supposed to make the difference it should be the other way.

CGudapati• 13 years ago

In his autobiography, Stephen Fry mentions about Douglas Adams in a chapter. He mentions how they stayed close to each other and whenever he was free, he used to go to Adams house and "play"(in his own words) with Adams' mac. He wrote that they were the only two people who he knew had macs. He also mentioned that unlike regular users, they hacked away at their macs. They used download some small programs and tried running them till their computers crashed. He also writes about his disdain towards the ibm machines of that time. His autoBio is a wonderful read and he talks about his love for tech a lot.

gallerytungsten• 13 years ago

This post brought back some memories. Back in the early 90s, I put together a maxed-out IIfx for use at my job at a prepress service bureau. The bare IIfx alone was $11,000, and the complement of 16x 16MB SIMMs, for a then-staggering 256MB of total memory, added another hefty amount. Add in a couple top of the line graphics cards and dual 21" CRTs (the largest generally available at the time) and the whole thing came to some $30,000.

Adjusted for inflation, that's around $50,000. Something to keep in mind for anyone who might complain about the cost of the latest Mac Pro.

bensherman• 13 years ago

I gave Mr. Adams a 2600 shirt that had been inadvertently printed backwards and he was amused (only a dozen of those existed!). It was after a reading in Charlotte, NC, 20 something years ago. I miss him a lot.

Douglas Adams's Mac IIfx

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