| << Shuffling perspective | 1995 > October | Jitter Analyzer >> |
Thursday, 5 October 1995
New PowerMac 8500 ::
Let’s dispense with the philosophical twist this week and visit techno-geekdom. You have been warned!
I now have a PowerMac 8500 thanks to my employer. It’s a bit frightening what I had to go through to get it put together. It’s certainly no worse than my experiences with Windows, but there’s a difference: with my Mac I’m pretty self-sufficient; with PC’s I keep feeling like it’s 1983 and I’m an inexperienced kid...
Adventure #1 was with my Sony monitor, which has some sort of PC connector and adapter. The 8500 booted just fine but the screen remained black. Finally I saw some interesting text on the Mac/VGA adapter about DIP switches for external sync and figured it wouldn’t hurt. Presto.
Adventure #2, by far the worst, was trying partition the new 2GB internal drive. Silverlining 5.63 was out of the question (it doesn’t work with Jasik’s debugger and I have heard other evil rumblings about it) and FWB 1.7 crashed when I tried to use it. Eventually I found Apple’s partitioning setup deep in some dialog off a dialog, and settled for 8 equally-sized partitions. But in the process I somehow managed to corrupt the drivers on my old 1GB external drive such that the 8500 would freeze at startup if that drive were connected. Fortunately my Quadra didn’t mind the drivers and I was able to replace them with a fresh FWB 1.7 reinstallation.
Adventure #3 was no fun either. The PCI Macs ship with this new, long-awaited network software redesign called Open Transport. Unfortunately its documentation refers you to Network Administrators (as if anyone else were incapable of understanding anything) and it’s buggy and incompatible, according to the consensus on comp.sys.mac.comm. Thank goodness for that newsgroup; the recommendation is to remove the Open Transport Internet libraries and the new TCP/IP control panel, and replace them with MacTCP 2.0.6. Ah, the email junkie got his fix. Then there was the minor detail of Netscape 1.1.2. 1.1 crashed.
So what’s the 8500 like? Emulated code still looks a little sluggish. Native code screams; CodeWarrior links things extremely quickly.
My favorite geeky little feature: My Roland S-760 sampler has a video out to connect it to a TV or computer monitor for a graphical user interface. It’s not a Mac, but it’s closer to one than a front panel. I have an ancient blinky TV occupying way too much office space. So I connected the sampler to the 8500's video input and ...
[old image removed]
Cool, eh? By the way, this is the S-760 performance setup for my tune “Invisible People,” which you can hear on my Music page.
| << Shuffling perspective | 1995 > October | Jitter Analyzer >> |