brainstorms

Tuesday August 24, 2004

grasshopper's view of the universe

    summer moonlight -
    grasshopper rests
    in shadows.

winter of 1984, york university: my hands are full: BSD (of course) running on a comet (vax 750) other vaxen running VMS, students and researchers. joseph liu, a faculty member, walks in and drops a brand-spanking new macintosh and a printer on my desk and says: "you learn all about this mac, and tell me later what i can and cannot do with it." cool encounter, especially wysiwyp. that first mac stayed on my desk for about two weeks; quite often running macdraw or macpaint. grasshopper's view of the universe was one of the few images i kept from that initial encounter. a few years later, i ended up with my own mac plus, and the images were saved in a 25MB rodyne external scsi disk. earlier this year, i was forced to clean out some of my old equipment, including that old mac plus (fully functional) and its external disk. i do not throw disks without cleaning them out, so it was connected to a power mac 7200 running MacOS 8.5. that 7200 was put on my lab net, and its disks were shared. my G3 running OS X panther could see the disks over the net, and could easily drag/drop those two-decade-old images along with other bits to my auto-mounted ultra10/sol9 fileserver /zoo partition. so, this tiny version of the image comes to my blog courtesy of a bitmap format, a filesystem format, and several network protocols that remained consistent and inter-operational even after two decades.

my new ibook on its way: ibook g4 12, 1/1.ghz/512/60g/combo/ap/ll.

[note: HFS is not, so far as i know, supported by OS X. this meant my old disk could have only been usable with G3 under MacOS, but i did not have a way to connect it directly]

(2004-08-24 08:05:43.0) Permalink