What have you done with a PowerPC today?

[eyoungren]

The days of Internet or Phone, not both.....
When someone in the house picks up the phone and hears the squeals and squarks.

That usually pissed my dad off no end!

I had to wait until after 9pm on weekdays and noon on weekends because he got tired of hearing the tones when he wanted to make a phone call.

 

[TheShortTimer]

This subject reminds me of the old C64 with cassette tape.
Damn it was so easy to copy games......🤣

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During the early days when you loaded the game into the C64's RAM but didn't run it and you could then save it onto a blank tape which you were then able to keep as a backup - or far more likely give to someone else. However that didn't last long and the software publishers soon introduced measures to prevent this and other tricks.

Well before the days of DRM! That is very cool.

Oh, we had forms of DRM back then - I can assure you of that. See below...

Could you copy them using the high-speed dubbing some decks had?

Yes and no. I recall seeing teens during the early 80s sharing games by producing illegal copies by connecting the audio jacks of two portable cassette recorders and pressing play on one and record on the other. Depending on the size of the game you'd have a pirate copy ready to be shared in 5 to 10 minutes. Hi-Fi's with dual cassette decks soon became affordable and thus, a common sight in many UK households with youngsters making full use of their parents' new acquisitions in order to facilitate their copyright violations on a much more efficient and Fordist level.

It didn't take long for the software industry to devise countermeasures which often made it difficult to duplicate cassettes at home thanks to encoding schemes which I still do not fully understand, even though they were explained to me in detail as a child by someone in the know.

Throughout the 80s my father owned a professional AIWA twin dubbing deck that's regarded by enthusiasts as one of the best dubbing decks ever produced. From what I was informed at the time, the RIAA and BPI were displeased by the extent of its capabilities and they allegedly pressured AIWA to remove it from sale. I once used it in an attempt to make copies of my C64 games so that I could share them with my schoolmates and even that exhaulted machine was unable to produce successful clones.

 

[Dronecatcher]

 

[TheShortTimer]

I remember the original version and encountering it on quite a few of my UK produced vinyl releases. More than 40 years on, the music industry still exists despite ongoing piracy... Is that available as a t-shirt? @Dronecatcher?

 

[Dronecatcher]

Is that available as a t-shirt? @Dronecatcher?

No, this is an exclusive, limited edition MR graphic

 

[galgot]

The days of Internet or Phone, not both.....
When someone in the house picks up the phone and hears the squeals and squarks.

I remember trying something with my PB Lombard the first time I got internet at my place, was thinking :
"And ... what appends if I put someone's tel number in Remote Access (apple PPP stuff) instead of the provider's one ?..."
So tried putting my mom number. It rang , she picked up the phone, and Allo allo ... ? ? I could hear her through the PB speakers, but couldn't respond... funny. Anyway, called her back from a phone later to reassure her ;p

 

[Amethyst1]

I remember trying something with my PB Lombard the first time I got internet at my place, was thinking :
"And ... what appends if I put someone's tel number in Remote Access (apple PPP stuff) instead of the provider's one ?..."
So tried putting my mom number. It rang , she picked up the phone, and Allo allo ... ? ? I could hear her through the PB speakers, but couldn't respond... funny. Anyway, called her back from a phone later to reassure her ;p

I once did the same and rang my father’s mobile phone.

 

[Amethyst1]

I come from the generation that cut it's teeth on the BBS, modems and war dialing.

I’m just a wee baby compared to that, but there are four things I distinctly remember from my dial-up period (2000 to 2004):

• My modems only connecting at 42kbps due to my crappy telephone line.
• My first modem randomly disconnecting because it was an unreliable piece of ****.
• Having lists of “call-by-call” dial-up providers and selecting the cheapest among them depending on what time of day it was.
• My parents complaining when they wanted to use the phone.

Good times.

 

[eyoungren]

I’m just a wee baby compared to that, but there are four things I distinctly remember from my dial-up period (2000 to 2004):

• My modems only connecting at 42kbps due to my crappy telephone line.
• My first modem randomly disconnecting because it was an unreliable piece of ****.
• Having lists of “call-by-call” dial-up providers and selecting the cheapest among them depending on what time of day it was.
• My parents complaining when they wanted to use the phone.

Good times.

I had my own phone line around 17 I think. That would be 1987-1988. That pretty much eliminated any conflict with calling out and allowed me to run my BBS 24/7. Of course, I lived in the boonies so it didn't see a lot of calls…and I only had one line.

That said, because of it, I got to know four high school kids in 1992 (I would have been 21) that collectively we started a gaming group (AD&D at first) that lasted for three years.

I made a hand-written list of favorite BBS numbers. A lot of them advertised either in computer magazines or on the BBSes I called in to.

In high school I had a Hayes 1200 which was one of the top of the line modems you could get at the time. Paid $100 for it in $10 monthly installments to another SysOp who was selling it (because he had gotten US Robotics 14.4k modems).

1984 to around 1998 was a great time period for me. No major bills, not a lot of responsibility, my own transportation and pocket money. Then I got married, moved out and had to pay my own bills, LOL!

 

[wicknix]

Had time to mess with VPC again over the weekend. OpenBSD does install and run, but its slow compared to WinXP and Damn Small Linux. That's to be expected i guess. Bleeding edge vs dated. Whats odd is that XP sees the machine as 400mhz, Linux sees it as 500mhz and OpenBSD sees it as sub 300mhz. At any rate, it's still cool that it runs at all. Sadly otter-browser wont install, so the best i get for browsers is links2 and dillo3.

Cheers

 

[Amethyst1]

Whats odd is that XP sees the machine as 400mhz, Linux sees it as 500mhz and OpenBSD sees it as sub 300mhz.

Probably related to different ways of measuring/establishing the speed. In any case, I wouldn't worry too much; it's slow no matter what.

 

[wicknix]

Actually XP runs really well. Boot time, opening apps, playing mp3's, watching videos, etc is very fluid. Web browsing isn't horrible either. It's about as fast as TFF on a G4. Then again, this 11,2 doesn't really have a problem handling VPC either.

 

[Amethyst1]

Actually XP runs really well.

I've only ever seen VPC on G3s and G4s, where XP (a normal install, not MicroXP or anything) was painfully slow.

 

[eyoungren]

I've only ever seen VPC on G3s and G4s, where XP (a normal install, not MicroXP or anything) was painfully slow.

I ran it on a G5 to start with, then brought it home to a G4 in 2015. When I upgraded to the DC and then the Quad it migrated.

At one point I had Windows 7 running on it.

 

[galgot]

Had time to mess with VPC again over the weekend. OpenBSD does install and run, but its slow compared to WinXP and Damn Small Linux. That's to be expected i guess. Bleeding edge vs dated. Whats odd is that XP sees the machine as 400mhz, Linux sees it as 500mhz and OpenBSD sees it as sub 300mhz. At any rate, it's still cool that it runs at all. Sadly otter-browser wont install, so the best i get for browsers is links2 and dillo3.

View attachment 2023666

Cheers

I think there are more browsers option with FreeBSD.

7.2. Browsers

Seems there are more packages in FreeBSD in general, but alas for us none build for PPC...

Here, I've been trying to have Netatalk 2.2.5 on my R-PI working as I want...
I can mount the R-Pi volume on OSX machines without problems, but it doesn't want to it OS 8/9 machines...
Doesn't want the more than 8 characters passwd. Even though I've updated the Appleshare Client on all OS 8/9 machines I've tried (a Wallstreet in 8.6 and a SheepShaver in 9.0.4), and I can mount OSX volumes (even El Cap machines w/ more than 8 characters passwd) on these ...

 

[Amethyst1]

At one point I had Windows 7 running on it.

What was performance like?

 

[eyoungren]

What was performance like?

About as awful as you can expect. It took 10-20 minutes to boot to the desktop and launching apps took around 10 minutes. I did it mainly as a proof of concept and I also learned in the bargain that VPC has BIOS and you can change it.

 

[Amethyst1]

I also learned in the bargain that VPC has BIOS and you can change it.

Both VPC and VMware have a BIOS you can mess with. VPC 4.0 notably uses a BIOS from Microid Research.

 

[DoFoT9]

The days of Internet or Phone, not both.....
When someone in the house picks up the phone and hears the squeals and squarks.

That usually pissed my dad off no end!

I had to wait until after 9pm on weekdays and noon on weekends because he got tired of hearing the tones when he wanted to make a phone call.

Oh totally! I was so glad when we got the DSL splitter so we could run them concurrently. But then we started to run into other bottlenecks (aka download limitations). 400MB per month even back then wasn't much!

 

[galgot]

Out of disgust of Netatalk... I've made a vid :

There is at least one real PPC in there.
btw, YT editor takes forever to add music to vids :/

 

[Amethyst1]

VPC 4.0 notably uses a BIOS from Microid Research.

 

[eyoungren]

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I love the old ANSI graphics!

 

[Amethyst1]

I love the old ANSI graphics!

Yeah. Well spotted!

 

[eyoungren]

Yeah. Well spotted!

Hehehe!

I had an ANSI editor at some point, designing the different pages for my BBS.

 

[netsrot39]

I've done a couple of things today with my 2.5 GHz DC PowerMac G5 (SSD, 16GB RAM, Radeon X1900):

• shopping on Amazon and Ebay
• preparation for an exam I have in a couple of days (mostly editing and viewing .pdf and .docx documents)
• light internet research (looking up stuff for my exam and also some web browsing related to my hobbies)
• watching tv series (1080p .mkv) – over eSATA

The PowerMac G5 has done everything I asked it to do today. Some web pages can really slow down the system but all in all it didn't feel 17 years old. InterWebPPC really rocks by the way!

It just feels cool and is a joy to use that Mac. Also I get work done quickly when I'm on a computer I really like Only downside to using the G5 is the increased power usage. It really sucks the power and right now electricity prices are climbing. So unless that changes it will be a "one day in a week computer" or something like that. Luckily, I have many other not so power hungry Macs that I can use for extensive work.