Designer, artist, iPhone Notes limit pusher. I know the difference between a "font" and a "typeface", but I'm not obnoxious about it.
📍localhost
A note: while I CW the occasional political post, I don't typically CW things like faces or food. My art is weird, often includes eyes/faces/masks, and can be (I'm told) eerie.
Profile pic: a white pixel rendering of a small computer with a sad face, set on on a black background (Susan Kare's immortal "Sad Mac" icon).
| Art | https://notes.art |
| Site | https://www.csilverman.com |
| Blog | https://shortform.csilverman.com |
| pronouns | he/html |
My parents still talk about watching the moon landing on a small, staticky, black and white screen. I don't think any of the wildest minds at that time ever imagined something like the Artemis live tracker. You had to already be pretty out there to envision even the basic technologies underpinning https://artemislivetracker.com/
I wish America was more about building, and doing, things like this. And less like, well—what we are.
@likesoldmacs Yeah, I remember someone in that MacRumors printout saying that the iBook touchscreen (this device, I assume? https://vintagemacmuseum.com/the-gemini-ibook-a-mac-os-9-touchscreen-tablet-mac/) was manufactured by the same company who made the one for the Freestyle.
And it looks like the Gemini iBook was also made by Assistive Technology, so makes sense that the hardware would look pretty similar.
@rjkwon I wish every consumer product came in a selection of at least six colors.
My preferred palette would be the classic Apple-logo rainbow, but I'd be open to anything as long as it's bright and colorful.
@likesoldmacs Neat. I didn't fully appreciate how much custom engineering they did here. I'll be curious to see if anyone has thoughts on getting the touchscreen to work properly—maybe the problem is with the controller board.
Looks like the company (https://trollsystems.com/) does still exist, technically, although it's probably safe to assume they don't offer support for products from 30+ years ago.
Takeapart time! Primary goals: pull the drive to image it, and touch up the power jack.
Here's the bottom: two Phillips screws and four typical apple hex screws.
And the open-up: fortunately no interlocking plastic tabs, so it just lifted open. As expected, some delightfully well thought out jankiness.
@tuomas_h It's funny, I turned on one of my old phones a while ago (I keep every device I've ever owned) and was disturbed to find that there wasn't much on it: a few texts/photos, and that was it. I thought maybe I'd deleted most of it.
And then I remembered: this was from when I mainly used phones for making calls. I didn't text a lot, didn't keep notes on it. I think I even carried a physical notebook back then. There wasn't much on the phone because I just didn't use it for much.
Jarring.
@RonsCompVids they definitely didn't want management finding these little additions, for sure—although as I understand it, managers were sometimes willing to look the other way, or were even included in them—but I think they wanted friends/users to find them. Like how neat would it be to have your name or face hidden in something used by millions?
I miss these so much.
@RonsCompVids The epic SE egg! There's a great article about that here: https://www.nycresistor.com/2012/08/21/ghosts-in-the-rom/comment-page-1/
What's especially cool is that a couple of folks in these pictures showed up in the comments to explain what they did or provide some background. Like Brian McGhie (top row, second from left, 0:28). He looks a little different from the others because he was out the day they took photos and had to add himself in later.
(Also did not know Michael Tchao, who was a key Newton guy, was on the SE team.)
While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a pictur
LikesOldMacs