while i was goofing around with #globalTalk, I ended up searching for some old Simpsons icons for my classic Macintosh (an LC 475), and stumbled upon an entry on the garden called Banned Simpsons Icons. (Who could resist downloading something with a title like that?)
They were called the "Banned Simpsons Icons" because Fox once sent the artist - Jeanette Foshee - a cease & desist letter for her uncannily perfect renderings of the copyrighted characters. they planned on suing her for every penny she made ($0.00) on them. this was back in 1995.
i thought - hell, what a wild story. why don't I get a hold of the artist - jeanette - and find out more about her banned icon set?
what i stumbled upon broke my heart, and i ended up spending a week digitally preserving what i could find.
I've decided to take the old #Macintosh HIGs & merge them into one large collection of topics while modernizing them in the process.
The original #HIG would give actual examples w/ usable metrics & mention possible exceptions to the rule. The incredible level of detail gave developers the guidance to create delightful UI users have come to expect from their #Mac.
😮
OG Macintosh team will gather today at the Computer History Museum to talk about the Mac at 40.
All star cast:
Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps, Andy Cunningham, Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce Horn, Susan Kare, Dan’l Lewin, Mike Murray, Chris Espinosa, Guy Kawasaki, Steven Levy, and David Pogue.
It'll be live on-line, register for a free virtual ticket here, scroll to the bottom of the page (pass it along)...
a few years ago i was able to get my hands on one of the only surviving copies (in the world) of the interactive book Portal, for the Macintosh Plus.
no, not that Portal. the original one, from 1986, by novelist Rob Swigart.
thank the gods the ~40 year old diskettes were still viable, and I was able to image it on my Color Classic.
but, no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get the damned thing to run properly. my CC hated it. mini vMac hated it. System 7 hated it. System 6 hated it. everything caused the game to lock up after a few seconds, or get hung playing random music.
that was until today. in a moment of utter insanity, i realized that the creators of Portal did something very special for the Macintosh Plus: they made the game a f'ing BOOTER. it was never meant to be run from within the OS. you just inserted the diskette, turned on your Plus. the entire game is an operating system of its own, executing instructions from the CPU and ROM. this isn't anything new for C64 or Apple // users, but for the Macintosh it was practically unheard of. they replicated the Macintosh System 2 gui perfectly, just for the game.
the Macintosh port is still gorgeous today: a mouse-driven point'n'click UI with high-res 1-bit icons, and high-res text. it feels good in a way that none of the other versions (C64, DOS, Amiga) do.
but what stands out to me, nearly 40 years after its release, is that this is a hypertext game through and through. the story unfolds as you click around, wandering from computer network to computer network, reading documents and piecing together how the Earth became abandoned hundreds of year ago.
as far as I know, Portal's creators (Rob Swigart and Brad Fregger) were never credited for producing a very early Hypertext game. Portal predates Hypercard by an entire year.
recorded some gameplay in mini vMac for posterity. as far as I know, this is the only footage of Portal for the Macintosh that has ever existed on the web.
if you had a #macintosh in the early 90s, you probably played the multiplayer tank battle game, Bolo.
and if you played Bolo, you probably visited jolo's Bolo Home Page. it was the bolo resource on the web, and it began its life on the authors' Duke University Med School web space, before it moved to lgm.com where it lived for ten years.
lgm.com was cybersquatted in the late 2000s, and the bolo home page disappeared from the public consciousness.
the site has hundreds of individual pages, and exploring its pages truly feels like an exercise in hyperlinking.
i spent the last few days recovering the site from IA and rebuilt its absolute link structure. please enjoy the Bolo Home Page for the first time in 15 years :)
So I need (yes, need 😄 ) to get the full 128MB of RAM for the #Macintosh IIci.
That would be 8 x 16MB 30-pin SIMMs, parity (I think?), 60ns probably preferred. Mac experts feel free to correct me if you know better though.
Anyone have any they don't need lying about? As always, shipping would be covered by me and if I do have anything you need of equivalence, we can of course swap! (I don't tend to have spares for very much but I'm willing to try!)
Hey there. Just your typical #Liberal#Atheist outdoorsy single dad living in deep red rural Georgia. Love #RetroTech, especially classic #Macintosh. I am owned by a rescue #Cat and do a lot of hiking so expect a lot of cat and nature pics. I am an #LGBTQ and #BLM ally and vehemently anti-fascist. Figured I’d move to beige.party since that’s where all the cool folks seem to hang out. 😂
Recycled an old laptop screen into an external monitor with micro HDMI and USB C input. All thanks to a cheap epd video board from AliExpress. Everthing mounted onto a sprayed piece of wood from the shed.
Seen here running Macintosh System 7.6.1 on Raspberry Pi Zero W.
A new build of the Mini vMac emulator brings BlueSCSI disk image support and no longer "pauses" the emulator when your cursor isn't in the window. This is so very useful! 🎉
New video! I'm starting to restore a very interesting Apple Macintosh Performa 630 in the DOS Compatible variant. It has both a 68040 Mac and an IBM compatible 486 PC in one machine. In the first episode of this series, I try to make it safe to run by replacing capacitors on the main board and in the power supply. More to come!
TIL that microprose did an in-house port of Railroad Tycoon to the Macintosh Plus/SE in the early 90s.
it is adorable. they went through an incredible amount of effort to mac-ify the interface, and repainted all of the art in high-res black & white. and the mouse is fully functional, unlike the ms-dos version
best compliment i can give to its porting team: it feels like a genuine maxis game.
Tonight, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA will host a live event called “Insanely Great” to celebrate 40 years of #Macintosh. The event is at 7 pm PST (3 am GMT).