Extensions – System Folder

Cool accessories from the past

Posted on December 17, 2009December 17, 2009 by Riccardo Mori

Issue 59 (January 1998) of MacFormat UK Magazine starts with a section called Gadgets Galore!, and lists a series of ‘seasonal gift suggestions’ for those who want to make a last-minute purchase of a useful geeky present for their Mac friends. There are mice, joysticks, PDAs (Psion Series 5!), webcams (Connectix Color Quickcam!), but what caught my attention was the last entry, two products for PowerBooks manufactured by a company called Keep It Simple Systems (KISS): PowerCover and Mercury II.

Here’s the except taken from the magazine:

The one problem with Apple’s portable PowerBooks is that the battery tends to run out pretty quickly — a mere four hours after you’ve switched it on in some cases. Unless you have additional batteries or a handy mains socket, you’ll be reduced to notepad and pencil. Or perhaps not, if you get one of these clever gadgets from Keep It Simple Systems.

The products in the KISS range bring the power of the sun to your portable system. The Mercury II [you can see an image here] is a solar panel that plugs into your PowerBook and charges the batteries, extending their life by up to 45% (depending on how sunny it is). You can also leave batteries connected to the panel to charge them fully throughout the day.

The PowerCover is especially neat because it fits into the BookCover slot on PowerBook 1400s, so you can leave it on more or less permanently. This will extend the battery life by around 35% (the PowerCover is, after all, a bit smaller than the Mercury II). KISS claims you can expect its products to give you up to 20 years of free energy. An extreme example of these devices’ usefulness is that of Ralph Harvey, a research scientist who uses a solar charger on his PowerBook in the Antarctic where power’s clearly at a premium. […]

The entry also mentions another solar recharger from KISS for the Apple Newton, called the Luna II.

It’s interesting to note that the excerpt talks about ‘a mere four hours’ as regards to battery life in the PowerBooks of that time. It is actually a good performance, and it shows that even 11 years ago Mac laptops generally lasted more than their PC counterparts on battery alone. Anyway, I completely forgot about those solar chargers, and I very much like the PowerCover. Of course today it’s not possible to purchase them new from the manufacturer. Googling ‘Keep It Simple Systems’ gives little results, but maybe one can find something on eBay. If you’re into vintage Macs, or you’re still using your trusty PowerBook 1400 for writing (it has a really nice keyboard, by the way), perhaps you can try to locate these products to give an eco-friendly boost to their (surely aging) batteries.

[The excerpt from MacFormat UK Magazine is © Future Publishing Ltd. It has been reproduced in the spirit of fair use. It can be deleted any time if the copyright holder requests me to do so.]

OpenDoc: an introduction

Posted on March 22, 2009March 22, 2009 by Riccardo Mori

The following article was written by Chris Cain for Personal Computer World and published in the March 1996 issue of the magazine. For a more general overview of the OpenDoc technology and what that meant, the Wikipedia has an interesting entry about it. I’ve chosen to reprint this article because I find it to be a good, simple introduction to OpenDoc, which was in my opinion one of the most promising features of the Mac OS system. Sadly it was terminated even before it could grow and improve.

Apple recently released the first version of its component software architecture, OpenDoc, which plays a major part in the company’s future plans. OpenDoc could completely reshape the way in which we work with Macs, PCs and other platforms. In fact, it’s my Utility of the Month.

OpenDoc is officially described as a multi-platform, component software architecture that enables developers to evolve applications into component software, or create new component software applications. In more simple terms, it’s about breaking down today’s monolithic software apps into smaller, more manageable components that can then be mixed and matched to suit every user’s needs.

At the moment, if you wanted to create, say, a newsletter containing text, graphics and spreadsheet data, you would probably edit each piece of data in a separate application and either export it as a file and import it into your main application, or cut and paste info using the clipboard. Either way, you end up loading three or four different packages and using only a subset of the tools on offer. It takes a long time and you can experience problems such as unsupported file formats and lack of memory.

With OpenDoc you have “Part Editors” instead of applications and your work is based around documents called “Stationery”. Part Editors are small sets of tools for doing jobs like editing text, manipulating pictures and so on, and Stationery files are templates for doing certain types of work. Each different type of Stationery contains links to the Part Editors used for that type of job.

To prepare the same newsletter with OpenDoc you would use a piece of stationery that has been set up with links to text editing, drawing and numeric data Editors. You’d then create your data using these and if you wanted to import a file created with something else, you’d just drag it from the desktop onto your document. If you’ve set up a stationery file without a certain set of tools, you just drag the appropriate Editor onto your document and they appear.

The beauty of working like this is that you use only as much RAM as you need for the job, and all tools are available whenever you want them without loading lots of individual applications. Part Editors should also be much easier to develop and maintain than larger applications, and will give small developers more of a chance to compete with large companies like Microsoft.

There will still be room for big applications in an OpenDoc world, but they will need to support embedded OpenDoc parts.

Apple’s OpenDoc 1.0 contains a Control Panel for setting up associations between Editors and different types of data, a few sample Stationery files and some very simple Editors to accompany them. I’ve been putting these through their paces over the past few weeks and have successfully managed to build a document using this method. Although it’s difficult at the start, once you get into it everything begins to make sense.

If you want to see for yourself what OpenDoc is all about, you can download it from Apple’s World Wide Web support sites.

Remember PowerTalk?

Posted on February 22, 2009 by Riccardo Mori

I didn’t. Well, I did, of course, but sometimes memory can’t retain all the details. Especially when it comes to yet another potentially brilliant idea Apple tried to implement, but dropped in a relatively short time frame.

PowerTalk was the later name of the Apple Open Collaboration Environment (AOCE) that was released in 1993 within the System 7 Pro bundle. There is quite an informative entry on AOCE in the Wikipedia, which will help in putting things in context. AOCE was created to solve a series of issues related to the electronic mail and delivery systems of that time, and the solutions it proposed were indeed promising. From the aforementioned Wikipedia entry (my comments are italicised in brackets):

At “one end” of the system, AOCE focused on the underlying delivery and addressing systems, generalizing the e-mail concept so the system could be used to deliver anything from e-mail to word processor documents to print jobs. Addressing was another issue the market was struggling with, so AOCE would offer a single universal addressing mechanism and address book, one that could support not only people’s e-mail addresses, but the “addresses” of things like printers and fax machines as well. These could be looked up in an interface much easier to use than the existing solution, the Chooser.

AOCE would normally store a user’s e-mail on their computer, as opposed to a server. This not only allowed the user to read their mail offline, but also removed the need for a single machine with huge storage space. Small networks could be set up simply by installing the standard “client” software; the machines would discover each other on AppleTalk and communicate directly. AOCE understood that users were not always connected to the network, so outbound mail was cached on the sender’s machine until both the sender and recipient were online. Even on a LAN this would be valuable, as many people turn off their computers at night and the mail would have to wait until the next morning for delivery.

Since the mail was stored locally, users with laptop computers would be able to read and compose mail while on the road. Everything would automatically update the next time they returned to the office and connected back to the LAN. AppleTalk Remote Access, Apple’s “standard” solution for supporting the AppleTalk protocol over modems, was also supported for those users who wished to sync up remotely. [This model can be seen today with services like MobileMe and the so-called ‘Cloud computing’, but it was 1992 when Apple had the idea].

For security over the potentially “open” phone lines, all communications could be secured using RSA encryption and digital signing, even on the local network. Additionally, Apple provided the Keychain, which stored various login credentials in an encrypted file. This allowed the users to use a different username and password on the various systems they used, placing them in the keychain for secure storage. This way they only had to remember a single password for the keychain; AOCE would retrieve the credentials for a particular service on demand. [Keychain has survived and it’s part of Mac OS X].

I’ve found a nicely written breakdown of PowerTalk in the March 1995 issue of a vintage UK magazine called The Mac. In that issue, the main feature was a 16-page special on the then-new System 7.5. The excerpt on PowerTalk I’m about to ‘reprint’ is taken from that special (pages 74-75). It is written by Cliff Joseph. (For better readability I won’t be formatting it with the blockquote tab; the text will be in italics enclosed in two separating lines).

PowerTalk

PowerTalk isn’t just a single new feature, it’s an entire system designed to handle communications with other Mac users and with sources of information such as online services.

It’s easy to connect your Mac to a network or subscribe to services such as Cix and CompuServe, but in the past all these different connections had to be handled separately. You might get e-mail delivered to you from several different sources — from colleagues on your office network, from CompuServe and so on — but each set of e-mail would be stored in different parts of your hard disk. The network and each online service will have all their own passwords, and for business users there’s always the issue of security for sensitive information.

PowerTalk provides a central communications system that handles all these different sources of information, stores e-mail and network addresses for all the people you work with and controls passwords and security features.

Other software developers can design their applications to work in conjunction with PowerTalk so that you can share the information and documents you create within those applications. WordPerfect 3.1 supports PowerTalk, for instance, so when you set that program to type a memo you can instantly send that memo to a colleague without having to leave WordPerfect at all. Just select the e-mail option within WordPerfect and off it goes. [RM note: It’s the same thing you would do today using Mac OS X Services feature.]

The following is a quick guide to the main features of PowerTalk.

Catalogues

Rather like a contact management program, a PowerTalk catalogue is simply a collection of ‘information cards’. Each card holds details about a colleague on your office network, or about anyone else to whom you send mail or other types of information. The card stores personal details such as the person’s name and telephone number, plus their e-mail or network address.

DigiSign

DigiSign is a program that allows you to attach an electronic ‘signature’ to a file such as a spreadsheet or memo that you can send to someone via e-mail. Any PowerTalk user who receives that document can then ‘verify’ the signature to ensure that it is genuine. This allows you to authorise documents such as expenses claims electronically, without having to print them out and send them to other departments using traditional, slow mail systems. The verification process will vary, depending on your work set-up. Some organisations may decide to restrict the use of DigiSign so that ‘signatures’ can only be allocated to specific users by a central authority such as the accounts or finance department.

Key Chain

A PowerTalk key chain stores all your different network and online service passwords and access codes.

For example, I have accounts with three different online services, and each one has a separate log-on procedure and its own password. With PowerTalk, I can type all these passwords into a key chain, and give the key chain a single password. By using the key chain I can instantly send e-mail via any of these online services, as all their passwords are stored in the chain and I no longer have to type them in myself. You may need ‘gateways’ to use a key chain with services such as CompuServe or eWorld (see MailBox).

MailBox

Once you install PowerTalk you will see a new icon appear on your desktop. This icon looks like a traditional In/Out tray, and double-clicking on it will take you into the mailbox, where you can sort through all the e-mail that has been sent to you.

PowerTalk also enables online services such as CompuServe to provide ‘gateways’ that connect with PowerTalk. These gateways connect the service to your mailbox so that any e-mail coming from the service is automatically routed into it. This way, mail from several different sources can be stored centrally, rather than being stored in all sorts of different places on your hard disk.

If you want to send a reply to an item of e-mail, the gateway will automatically direct your reply to the required service without the need for you to go and locate the separate communications program that you would normally use to log onto that service.

AppleMail

This is an e-mail application that allows you to send mail to any user who is included in your PowerTalk catalogue, whether it’s a colleague on your office network or just a friend that you send mail to over Cix or CompuServe. [RM note: So the name ‘Apple Mail’ has quite a long history…]

So, with all these fascinating ideas and concepts, why did PowerTalk fail? For a number of reasons. First, its system requirements, that were a wee too demanding for the Macs of that era. It required at least 2.5 MB RAM, but was really usable with 4 MB. Problem is, 4 MB was the maximum available RAM for Macs in the 1993-1995 years, and RAM was awfully expensive. Plus, it was impossible to use together with QuickDraw GX, another Apple innovative and promising technology of the time, again due to lack of memory. Other reasons included a not-really-thought-of user interface (which is strange, considering that we’re talking about Apple; but perhaps not that strange, since we’re talking of 1990s Apple, heh). The Wikipedia article I already mentioned says it all:

For instance, the addressing system was so deeply embedded into the core of the system that simply typing in a new address was an ordeal. First the user had to click on a button, select the address type, type it in, and then finally click OK to have it appear in the message. Disk usage was also a problem; each message was stored as a separate file, requiring 1k or more of space in an era where 40MB and 80MB disks were still common. Thus a few hundred letters would be enough to fill the free space on the drive. Backing up e-mail was likewise almost impossible as a side-effect of the design; the mail was spread out over the network, some of it remote and inaccessible.

Another annoyance was that the system could not know who a user was, because Mac OS did not require users to log in. Thus documents had to be delivered to a user’s machine. This did not work well when the user had two or more machines, making the concept of a universal mailbox difficult to achieve in practice.

Even the remote access functionality was doomed by feature interaction. To ensure that all messages were delivered in a reasonable time on a network where machines might appear and disappear at random (when they are turned on and off), AOCE had a 15-minute timeout in which it repeatedly tried to deliver pending messages. If the user in question was using a dialup connection on a modem, AOCE would keep the line open for a full 15 minutes before giving up on disconnected user, driving up huge long distance bills to deliver a potentially tiny message.

Many of these problems were intended to be solved with the PowerShare server, which acted as an always-on, always responsive “super-peer”. The basic AOCE protocol would notice these machines when attempting delivery, and send to them first, thereby eliminating the delays and centralizing storage and maintenance. Sadly the server was not ready in time for the release, and did not ship for another year. When it did it was likewise slow and resource hungry, largely a side effect of various features of the Mac OS that made it unsuitable for server applications (not that it was designed for this role).

What’s interesting to me about PowerTalk, anyway, is the fact that it shows how Apple was trying to veer toward a document-oriented approach for its system. PowerTalk was bringing that approach to email services, while the immediately following OpenDoc and CyberDog addressed, respectively, document creation/management and Internet browsing. I plan to discuss these in more detail in the future.

Adventures in Vintage (part 2)

Posted on November 21, 2008February 19, 2014 by Riccardo Mori

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)

Posted on November 15, 2008November 11, 2010 by Riccardo Mori

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.