#macintosh

So I’m a week in and no big surprise of course but using the old iMac as a monitor is less than ideal. It works, but the lack of resolution options is a pain, as is having to keep a keyboard & mouse for the iMac next to the ones for the mini. A weird issue is that sometimes when I wake them up the mini keyboard doesn’t respond and I have to unplug/replug it in. Rebooting the mini doesn’t help. Any recs on a 27”, hi-res, cheap monitor? The Apple Studio is $1600!

Ken McLeod @_the_cloud@mastodon.social

**Ken McLeod** @_the_cloud@mastodon.social · Jan 4

Jan 4

Here's another case of a single pixel conveying information. In System 3.2/Finder 5.3, you could distinguish a Mac which had been upgraded with the new 128K Mac Plus ROM by looking at the amount of memory displayed in "About the Finder". If the machine has the newer ROM, then a dot is displayed at the end, e.g. "4096K."

Screenshot of a Macintosh running System 3.2/Finder 5.3, with the "About the Finder" window in the center of the screen. The window shows "The Macintosh Finder" with its authors credited: "Bruce Horn and Steve Capps". Under this, in the lower left corner, the amount of memory is displayed as "4096K."

#macintosh #retrocomputing

**Daniele Verducci** @penguin86@social.ichibi.eu · Jan 4

Jan 4

Daniele Verducci @penguin86@social.ichibi.eu

#retrocomputing question: I'm trying to boot my #macintosh #powerbook 170 from #floppy . So i used a #linux machine with #dd to write a known good #system7 disk image onto a known good #floppydisk .
But dd exits reporting an i/o error while writing. Note that I can create working #msdos floppy with the same drive and same floppy. Also tried other floppies, same error and every time at the same place (44kb from the start).
As expected, the mac won't boot, but for a little while I see the happy mac icon, so it seems the first part of the disk is correct.
Is there any mac-specific parameter to pass to dd? Any other hints?

Replied in thread

**qurly(not curly)joe** @qurlyjoe@mstdn.social · Jan 4

Jan 4

Ok, not finished, of course. As expected, some software is unhappy at moving from Intel to Apple innards. Photoshop was not a surprise. That it was easy to resolve was a surprise. Word is another. Have to buy a new license. I need Word for 1 legacy task. There’s an old version of it on the iMac that I can use when necessary. FTW. I used to enjoy doing this. I’m out of practice and it’s more anxiety-provoking than it used to be.
7/n

Replied in thread

**qurly(not curly)joe** @qurlyjoe@mstdn.social · Jan 3

OMG! It’s finished! Only about 4 hours altogether.
Now I just have to tweak all the defaults.

6/6

Replied in thread

**qurly(not curly)joe** @qurlyjoe@mstdn.social · Jan 3

There’s about 350gb of stuff on the iMac.
Estimate is waffling around 3 1/2 hours +- 20 minutes. At first it was saying transfer rate was 30-40 mb/sec. Now it’s down to 5-6 mb/sec, so it’s bogging down in system and app pieces I’m guessing, thrashing around in the directory.The progress bar is sitting at around 1/4.

5/n

Replied in thread

**qurly(not curly)joe** @qurlyjoe@mstdn.social · Jan 3 *

Jan 3 *

Now it says 4 hours.

4/n
#macintosh #macOS #macmini

Replied in thread

**qurly(not curly)joe** @qurlyjoe@mstdn.social · Jan 3 *

Jan 3 *

Got to the part in setup to point to Time Machine and it told me I needed to run the system update. Was gonna skip that but nah, do it. That took 1/2 hour.
Got the restore started from Time Machine. It’s running now. It’s estimating 51 hours to complete. Yikes!
Oops, just dropped to 33 hours. Ok.
2 minutes later and it says 22 hours.
Time for lunch I guess.

3/n
#macintosh #macOS #macmini

Continued thread

**qurly(not curly)joe** @qurlyjoe@mstdn.social · Jan 3

2nd puzzle was to get the dongle software on the iMac to see the mini. Took several minutes after turning the mini on.
The macOS install app showed up, but wanted to talk me thru setup with voice-over because it couldn’t see the Bluetooth mouse. Another trip to the basement for a wired mouse.
Puzzle 3 was plugging in the time machine backup volume to copy everything over.

2/n

**qurly(not curly)joe** @qurlyjoe@mstdn.social · Jan 3