Happy Birthday, Bob

Seven minutes remain in Bob Dylan’s 70th Birthday. I’m listening to Eliza Gilkyson’s new cover of “Jokerman,” and remembering that on the occasion of Bob’s fiftieth birthday I hosted a 24 hour Orgy™ of his music on WHRB-FM. I collected an array of bootlegs for the event, a project that was a lot more fun in the days before digital piracy. During the show, in the middle of the night, an enormous manic-depressive named Wombat stopped by the studio to join us. The station got appreciative letters for weeks, including some from people who drove their cars to a parking lot near our offices in Memorial Hall and sat, listening for hours. One man wrote about holding his young son in front of the radio in the hopes the boy would grow up to appreciate the music the way his father did. Funny the things you remember, decades later.

I found a copy of the Adobe Pagemaker 4 file for the poster we used to advertise the event. The screenshot below is from an emulator running Macintosh System 7 without Adobe Type Manager but I don’t think it looks too terrible.

Bob Dylan Poster

The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information, and the worst graphics I’ve seen in a really long time

The current issue of Science includes an article by Martin Hilbert and Priscila López entitled “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” The content of the article seems to me unremarkable, a laborious estimation of the total quantity of data stored on different media in recent decades. It’s hard to see anything useful coming out of this, but to paraphrase Muhammad Ali — if they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, perhaps they can make something useful out of this study.

I mention the article only because of the astoundingly bad graphics it contains. Take this for example,

bad graph

And as confounding as that is on screen, it was far worse in print, where the various colors and patterns were harder to distinguish. Scientific graphics should illustrate trends and/or to encapsulate voluminous data in useful summaries. Beyond the trivial point made by the line graph in the background that we’re storing more data now than we used to, and that it didn’t used to be digital but that now it is, this graph seems to tell the reader “we don’t know if any of this matters, so we’re going to print everything.” Meanwhile, the pie charts are so hard to read that the reader would almost certainly have been better off had he just been given the tables of underlying data.

Another pair of sleddogs bites the dust

I was on the slopes again with my Sled Dog snow skates, and my friend Gary was there too. He nuked a pair last month, a feat I had tried to replicate but failed.

A great weekend of spring skiing. The kids are so charming as they learn. And Gary, of course, disintegrated another pair of Sled Dogs.
Sled Dog Snow Skates bite the dust

This ends his collection. Unless the Norwegians restart the assembly line, he’s going to have to move on to skiboards or something.

Another old computer — the Powerbook 180c

In 1993, Apple released the PowerBook 180c, which sold for over $4100 new. It was, I think, the final PowerBook with the iconic form factor that had been introduced with the PowerBook 100 in 1991.

powerbook

Somewhere along the way I picked one up for a percentage point or so of the original selling price. The memory had been upgraded to 14Mb, an amount that would have been astounding at the time, and almost unimaginably expensive, considering the Sumitomo Chemical Plant fire of July 1993 that caused RAM prices to spike. Consider this in comparison to the recent Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which put much of northern Japan at least briefly underwater and had virtually no impact on the global economy. In 1993, a fire in one Japanese factory caused computer memory prices to remain elevated for two years.

about this mac 1993

I hauled the computer out of the basement recently to convert some old floppy discs, and put it through some paces online. Unlike the Apple Lisa I recently connected, indirectly, to the web, this machine has a true TCP/IP stack, and can run mail clients, web browsers, and the like.

The machine was made before Apple routinely put ethernet ports on their computers, so an adapter is needed. There probably exist AppleTalk-to-Ethernet adapters that can be connected to the machine’s serial port. I am lucky enough to have an Asante Mini EN/SC 10T adapter, which allows older Macs to be connected to ethernet via their SCSI ports. The driver software was well coded, and the Mac regards the resulting connection as built-in ethernet.

asante en/sc 10T

Network access in Mac OS7 was handled via the MacTCP control panel, not the network control panel, which back then related only to the AppleTalk protocol I think. If you have a similar device and are having trouble configuring it, select “Ethernet Built-In” in MacTCP, then click the “More” button. If you plan to talk to the world, find the names and addresses of your DNS servers and enter them by hand. Your ISP can tell you, if you don’t use OpenDNS or another alternative.

Set your router address (called a “gateway address” here).

I do not think MacTCP handled DHCP correctly. Anyway, I set a manual IP address just in case.

macTCP 1993

Numerous older web browsers and FTP clients, etc., are available online. I used NCSA Mosaic and Fetch. Then I logged into IRC using the venerable Ircle client, which unfortunately killed itself after 30 minutes to punish me for not buying a license.
irc on a PowerBook 180c

Mathematica 2.2 was loaded on the machine, and I ran a couple of quick problems through it.
mathematica 2.2, 1993

The syntax for simple problems like this has not changed, and those problems can be solved using the exact same commands in Mathematica 8.01. On my home Mac Pro, the first problem can be solved a bit better than 8x as quickly on the modern machine, and the second problem about 127x as quickly.

Using NCSA Mosaic, here’s how this website would have looked in 1993:

monkeywrench as rendered in NCSA Mosaic