[HN Gopher] Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9
___________________________________________________________________
Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9
Author : Aloha
Score : 327 points
Date : 2021-07-31 20:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| cmiller1 wrote:
| This is perfect! Just replaced the battery in my SE/30 and will
| have to try this as soon as I find an ethernet solution. There
| are PDS ethernet cards but they're rare and expensive, or SCSI-
| ethernet adaptors but they're slow.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Pity it uses Retro68 instead of MPW and PowerPlant.
|
| Other than that, great work.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| >input latency feels high because redrawing the screen is slow
| (along with all the encryption, which is also slow)
|
| Is modern encryption a challenge to those old machines? Is it
| because of specialized encryption hardware or sheer brute force?
|
| Or is it just this implementation that's slow?
|
| I used telnet back in the 68k days.
| johnklos wrote:
| For reference, using modern ssh to connect to a 15 MHz m68030
| Mac LC II with 16 bit memory bus takes literally just under ten
| minutes (NetBSD 9 to NetBSD 9). An LC III+ with 33 MHz, 32 bit
| bus m68030 takes a little over 3 minutes.
| anthk wrote:
| I've seen an xterm displaying sixels (mikutter) under nbsd
| for m68k, it was so slow that it looked an sstv render from
| the ISS.
| classichasclass wrote:
| It's the encryption. For Crypto Ancienne, it may take 20 or
| more seconds for a cacheless 25MHz '030 to do a local TLS 1.2
| transaction, and that's with skipping a whole bunch of steps.
| Pretty much anything under 40MHz will have timeouts because
| most servers won't wait.
|
| https://github.com/classilla/cryanc
| techrat wrote:
| > Is modern encryption a challenge to those old machines?
|
| Ooooooh yeah. It's got some serious overhead on single core
| systems several-hundred-megahertz systems without the
| instructions that are used to accelerate encryption these days.
| AES is what modern CPUs use to help with that. It wasn't until
| Power7+ before encryption was accelerated on that class of
| CPUs. The latest Mac to use Power CPUs was discontinued 6 years
| before that.
| blibble wrote:
| not sure that's right...
|
| for interactive use, compared to rendering to the display and
| pushing the packet out the crypto overhead is going to be
| minuscule
| retrac wrote:
| Once you have authenticated each other and agree to a nice
| symmetric cipher and exchange the keys for that, yes.
| Bytes, even kilobytes per second. But note the "once you
| have authenticated". Public key crypto is brutal number
| crunching and takes minutes to hours on systems of the 80s,
| and some noticeable seconds even in the late 90s. I think
| that's why something like RSA-4096 was not just universally
| adopted 30 years ago. It was too expensive to compute for
| casual use.
| blibble wrote:
| even the crappiest laptop CPU can do 10000 x 4096-bit RSA
| signature verifications per second
|
| my 2014 laptop (on battery, no hardware acceleration):
| sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 4096 bits
| 0.006200s 0.000096s 161.3 10468.9
|
| (not to mention everyone's using ec these days, which is
| quite a bit faster)
| wpearse wrote:
| This is a 68040. I had a cut down version (68LC040 -- low
| cost) in my Mac LC475 in the mid '90s. You have _no idea_
| how slow it is haha.
| retrac wrote:
| Since you mention EC, it uses floating point. Good ol'
| FLOPS is not a wholly useless metric there. The first
| commercial processor sold with a floating point unit
| integrated was the 486 in 1989. Some rough, unsourced
| numbers: 1984 - Cray X-MP (expensive!)
| 800 MFLOPS 1989 - Intel 486 @ 33 MHz
| 3 1993 - Pentium @ 60 MHz 10
| 1997 - Pentium II @ 233 MHz 200 2000 -
| Pentium III @ 1000 MHz 2000 2004 -
| Pentium 4 @ 2800 MHz 5650 2007 - Core
| Quad @ 2400 MHz 38400 2009 - Core
| i7-950 @ 3100 MHz 92820 2013 - Apple A7
| (smartphone) 115000 2020 - Apple M1
| 2844000
|
| A FP calculation that takes 1 second on an Apple M1 will
| take 11 hours on the original Pentium, approximately.
| Hope that gives some perspective.
| blibble wrote:
| even if it's 15000 times slower than my 2014 laptop
| (which it isn't): the ECDH operation still takes under a
| second
|
| and that's the expensive operation (done once per
| connection)
| [deleted]
| retrac wrote:
| I am making the same mistake that the other poster did,
| in assuming too much background familiarity. Those are
| 90s chips. This software runs on machines from the late
| 1980s. The trend scales further back as it does forward.
| Five years is always a long time in computer performance.
|
| The 486, the slowest chip on my list blasts the early
| Macs (which this software runs on) out of the water by
| 100x. I went and researched it and the the 68882 FPU at
| 25 MHz is about 0.25 MFLOPS:
| http://www.faqs.org/faqs/motorola/68k-chips-faq/
|
| Stunning, but that is the difference between 1985 and
| 1989 technology.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| The first Macs were 8 MHz 68000 chips. The GUI was still
| very responsive. The menus popped down and Quickdraw (the
| graphics library) properly handled arbitrarily shaped
| overlapping windows. There was a demo with a round window
| and windows in the background updated perfectly. Bill
| Atkinson invented the Regions data structure (and the
| rest of Quickdraw) that allowed among other things,
| background windows graphics calls to be clipped to
| arbitrary combinations of foreground windows super
| efficiently. Atkinson is one of the greats.
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s
| tor...
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s
| tor...
| blibble wrote:
| > I am making the same mistake that the other poster did,
| in assuming too much background familiarity. Those are
| 90s chips. This software runs on machines from the late
| 1980s. The trend scales further back as it does forward.
|
| my point was on interactive use (i.e. using AES or
| ChaCha)
|
| you are the one that diverted the topic towards RSA-4096
| (which no-one uses), moving the goalposts (twice)
|
| (and yes, I saw the deleted post)
| retrac wrote:
| Yep. AES will run fine on any of these machines. These
| machines are in practice still sort of usable with SSH,
| with some patience for login depending on protocol.
|
| I deleted the post because I was a bit too aggressive,
| but apparently the damage was done. I apologize for
| lecturing you like a prat.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| The 68k Macs are < 60MHz and the early PowerPCs were not
| a lot faster. Your 2014 laptop will run circles around
| them doing just about anything.
| tubularalloy wrote:
| It just occurred to me while reading this comment that
| people born after Intel CPUs mostly leveled out perfwise
| are probably peers now. That realization came hard, it
| came fast, and I wasn't ready to live with that knowledge
| by a long shot.
|
| It was a long, long road to your 2014 laptop, friend.
| There was a time when division was a luxury, and
| desperate folk offered their firstborn for forbidden
| tricks to compute inverse square root. Elliptic curve,
| you say? You mean floating point math? Whoo-ee!
| fzzzy wrote:
| Cmon now, intel chips didn't level off till around 2010.
| [deleted]
| techrat wrote:
| Power7+ came out in 2012 which was the first gen of Power
| CPUs to include AES acceleration. [1]
|
| The most powerful Power Macs with non Intel CPUs were
| discontinued in 2006. (G5, released 2003.) [2]
|
| Your laptop from 2014 was already running at LEAST a
| 64bit CPU and likely has AES instructions as they were
| introduced in 2010 [3]
|
| So even if your laptop from 2014 onward didn't include
| AES instructions like some Intel Atom/Celeron/Pentium
| models... (Acer C720P Chromebook, for example came out in
| 2014 and has a Intel Celeron 2955U [4] and [5]) It was
| still an architecture that is/was ELEVEN YEARS NEWER. A
| Celeron 2955U is roughly equivalent in performance to a
| Core 2 Duo E4700 or an AMD Athlon 64 x2 5200+ ... which
| is still quite ahead of a PowerMac G5. [6] and [7]
|
| TLDR: Time marches on and along with cpu improvements
| come instructions and other benefits not immediately
| visible to the end user.
|
| Try using your old 2003-era system to generate keys again
| and tell us how fun it is. Bonus if you try it on a
| Pre-2000 era Performa Mac as a user typically had with
| SystemOS 7, 8 and 9. Those ran at 16 to 66mhz. [8]
|
| For reference, SystemOS 7 came out in 1991. [9] OS8 came
| out in 1997. [10] And OS9 came out in 1999. [11]
|
| The CPUs inside the Performa Macs running System 7, OS8
| and OS9, at best, can be compared to the 486s on the
| Intel side. Not even Pentium level. This places the
| architecture at LEAST a dozen architecture generations
| behind what you're generating keys on. This means if the
| CPUs we're looking at here were aged up, your laptop is
| starting first or second grade while the actual CPUs of
| the time are now finishing their masters' degrees with a
| kid or two on the way.
|
| Rather than naively using your _extremely modern in
| comparison 'crappy laptop' cpu_ as a reference point,
| perhaps you should use something more typical from the
| time these OSes were considered relevant.
|
| TLDR to the TLDR: Get off my lawn.
|
| [1] https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=
| /common...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G5
|
| [3] https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/
| article...
|
| [4] https://www.amazon.com/Acer-C720P-2666-Chromebook-11-
| 6-Inch-...
|
| [5] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/
| 75608/i...
|
| [6] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-
| Celeron-2955U-vs-...
|
| [7] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=P
| owerMac...
|
| [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Performa
|
| [9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7
|
| [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_8
|
| [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_9
| blibble wrote:
| > Your laptop from 2014 was already running at LEAST a
| 64bit CPU and likely has AES instructions as they were
| introduced in 2010 [3]
|
| I'm totally sure the RSA operations are using the AES
| instructions
|
| > Try using your old 2003-era system to generate keys
| again and tell us how fun it is.
|
| generating (fresh) rsa keys? you don't do that on
| connection to a SSH server
|
| as for what actually happens on connect, 2004 laptop: 33
| signatures/second and 2200 verifications/second
| (+DH/ECDH)
|
| the RSA operation (verifying the server's host key) took
| a total of 0.0005s
|
| even my raspberry pi 1 can do 240 4096-bit
| verifications/s and several thousand ECDH's/second
|
| and I have yet to see a SSH server with 4096-bit host
| keys
|
| tldr: even old computers are fast (and data >
| supposition)
| techrat wrote:
| TLDR: You're not using era appropriate examples.
|
| I told you to get off my lawn.
| blibble wrote:
| I did exactly what you told me to
|
| I suggest reading up on how the SSH protocol works
| kalleboo wrote:
| There are people in this thread with actual experience
| and actual bench times using these protocols on machines
| of that period
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28022299
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28023337
| anthk wrote:
| You must be young. The gap between 1989 and 1999 in
| computer terms is inmense, far more than the gap between
| 2010 and 2020. You could emulate a 1989 m68k Mac/Amiga on
| a Pentium 3 from 1999, for example with BasiliskII/UAE.
| retrac wrote:
| Performance increase did not stop; smaller, better
| designs. The exponential is just a bit lower.
|
| We don't realize it, just as someone using a text
| terminal may have not realised it between 1985 and 1995,
| if every response after a key press was already instant.
|
| For typical GUI interfaces, tasks like tossing video data
| around, and so on, computers became approximately
| inifinitely fast sometime c. 2005 - 2010.
| anthk wrote:
| Your damn 2004 laptop could emulate the Amiga and the Mac
| with a 68k CPU in _parallel_.
|
| The Rpi? For FFS, an Rpi B+, a PSP, or a 2003 Athlon XP
| could emulate a System7 era Mac with a Quadra setup
| without a single slowdown.
| Aeolun wrote:
| We're talking about an unoptimized 1990's 44mhz CPU here
| aren't we?
|
| How is it at all comparable to a relatively state of the
| art 2014 laptop?
| Lammy wrote:
| There was MacSSH, supporting SSH2 and up to MAC-SHA1/AES-256,
| but it required System 7.5 and 32MB rather than this project's
| System 7.1/2MB:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20071016100910/http://pros.orang...
| fzzzy wrote:
| Cool, thanks!
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| > Is modern encryption a challenge to those old machines?
|
| I've used modern encryption/mac routines on small embedded
| micro's and they seem reasonably efficient. Couple of
| operations per byte. They have to be fast because they are used
| for decrypting stuff like streaming video. I think an exception
| is password hashing algorithms which are slow by design.
|
| That said some of the older algorithms are really inefficient.
| Hundreds of ops per byte.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Yes, modern SSH is a challenge even on the fastest 486-class
| machines, which are very roughly comparable to this 68030.
| Takes several seconds to complete a connection.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Why is redrawing the screen slow? Old Macs had pretty good DMA
| for 2D sprites IIRC.
|
| As for encryption, can you use a preshared key instead of
| public key?
| cy384 wrote:
| more specifically, I should say that re-rendering everything
| is kinda slow, the DrawText function which, uh, draws text,
| seems very heavy
|
| blitting from a buffer onto the screen is, indeed, pretty
| fast, I've been experimenting with it and have some ideas for
| speeding things up
| camhenlin wrote:
| For real. I've tried porting several modern UI libraries to
| classic Mac, such as Nuklear, uGUI, and a couple of others.
| And I've succeeded in getting them working, but as soon as
| you start doing something with text, they fall on their
| face. Just having a text input is nearly impossible on an
| 8MHz 68000!
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Proper text rendering is hard.
| brandmeyer wrote:
| Depends in part on the cipher suite. For software
| implementations, the current generation of chacha20-poly1305
| and ed25519 are tolerable. But earlier generation ciphers were
| designed with hardware acceleration in mind.
|
| This tool is relying on libssh2 for its SSH implementation
| core. chacha20-poly1305 and ed25519 are both extensions and are
| not included.
| cy384 wrote:
| the crypto code actually has some 68020 assembly (credit to the
| mbedtls devs), it could probably be made faster, but I would
| need to sharpen my assembly skills a lot
|
| doing the initial key exchange before timeout is barely
| possible for a 68030 at 16MHz, takes the better part of a
| minute!
|
| of course, on the later PPC machines it's a complete non-issue
| anthk wrote:
| A g4 with Altivec can play 720p video...
| bibinou wrote:
| the machine it's probably tested on:
| http://www.cy384.com/projects/centris-650.html
| Aeolun wrote:
| Whenever I see these I'm baffed we could ever run a full GUI on
| these things, when the machines of today often have issues
| running one.
| userbinator wrote:
| The faster the hardware gets, the more software becomes
| inefficient. Unfortunately, hardware hasn't become much
| faster outside of niche cases (massively parallel vector
| computations etc.) for the past decade or so.
| snotrockets wrote:
| Efficiency isn't limited to execution speed. Memory
| protection is efficiency, even if it has cost in execution
| speed. Better abstractions make it possible to write more
| complex programs, at the cost of some execution speed.
|
| I've programmed on very slow hardware in the past, and the
| only thing I miss from those days is my hairline.
| cy384 wrote:
| the GUI code for the earliest macs was absolutely a great
| feat of engineering
|
| by getting my hands dirty with the system, I'm impressed by
| the way things were designed for the wimpiest processors (and
| also getting a lot of insight into the flaws of the OS that
| were exposed as machines became more powerful)
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I, and I'm sure a lot of others here, would love to read
| about that.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| https://www.folklore.org
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I'm aware of folklore.org, thanks. I've read it through
| and through.
| fzzzy wrote:
| They really managed to find ways to make it work despite
| the hardware of the day. There was a lot of hand coded
| assembly until the mid 90s.
| rvense wrote:
| With the exception of (high-resolution) video, I still do
| much the same things I did on my computer 20 years ago. Most
| of it involves fetching and sending text over the internet.
| It's a little prettier now, the protocols are more advanced,
| and (crucially) it's a lot easier to develop and distribute
| applications[0], but in the abstract sense there's absolutely
| nothing new and nothing older machines couldn't handle given
| the right set of protocols - i.e. less JSON, less downloading
| raw application source code and expecting to run them in less
| than 100ms.
|
| [0] The web is good, actually. It sucks, but it's also pretty
| good.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Funny, to me this machine as described is a monster. My brain
| still registers a 68040 as a powerful processor. My Atari ST
| ran a full GUI in 8mhz and 512K of RAM (+192KB of ROM) on a
| 68000. The original Mac had 128MB onboard RAM. GEOS on a C64
| runs a convincing GUI in under 64K... on a 6502!
|
| My first PC was a 50mhz 486 with 8MB RAM, and I ran X11 +
| various things (netscape, xemacs, etc.) on it without a whole
| lot of issues.
| grishka wrote:
| You can do wonders if you know what you're doing and avoid
| the web stack.
| slavapestov wrote:
| And it's sitting on top of a VAX. Perfect pairing
| King-Aaron wrote:
| I still flick between After Dark (or at least, an After Dark
| clone) and the old windows 95 maze screensaver on my work
| machine. I get a lot of positive comments from people in the
| office that spot it and talk about how they miss those old
| screensavers.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| What's the After Dark clone? Inquiring minds want to know!
| King-Aaron wrote:
| I think it was this site I got it from, though it was a long
| time ago:
|
| https://www.screensaversplanet.com/screensavers/after-
| dark-f...
|
| Seems to work fine on Windows 10, just not across multiple
| screens
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| This is a real work of art. I have no words.
| Lammy wrote:
| This is fantastic! I love the CLARIS-inspired "box" art too
| https://i.imgur.com/P9G7jOx.jpg
| cy384 wrote:
| thanks, I had fun making it!
|
| there's full design for a box and a floppy label that I've made
| for the upcoming 1.0 release
| fzzzy wrote:
| Are you going to do an actual release on floppy? You should.
| I will buy it.
| cy384 wrote:
| yes, I think I'm going to make a dozen or so copies, just
| to make it feel real
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Came here for this exact comment. The artwork is spot on.
|
| That, by itself alone, would have been amazing.
|
| I don't miss the lack of memory protection of classic Mac OS,
| but I do miss everything else.
| grishka wrote:
| Didn't last Mac OS 9 versions have memory protection? I mean
| there's a reason it's hard to run 9.2 on an emulator -- it
| requires a working MMU.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| No, after 8.6 the system featured a micro kernel on which
| the old OS ran atop. I think you could opt in for better
| stability, but I'm not sure. But most of the OS and apps
| still ran on the same shared memory space with cooperative
| multitasking, meaning a single app could (and did) bring
| the whole system down.
|
| I think you can emulate 9.2 just fine, but it's been a
| while since I played with this things.
| classichasclass wrote:
| This is an issue for SheepShaver (limited to 9.0.4 because
| 9.1 and up require the MMU as you say), but not QEMU, which
| emulates the MMU and thus runs 9.2 just fine.
| fay59 wrote:
| Mac OS 9 has virtual memory (it uses virtual address
| translation and it can swap pages to disk), but it still
| has a single address space that is shared between every
| application.
| grishka wrote:
| Ah. I remember reading "it has virtual memory" and
| assumed that this includes each process running in its
| own address space.
|
| Was it common for applications to reach directly into
| kernel memory instead of using proper APIs?
| Someone wrote:
| It has preemptive multitasking for compute-only tasks (the
| MultiProcessing library. See http://mirror.informatimago.co
| m/next/developer.apple.com/tec...)
|
| I also think the OS, technically, was preemptive
| multitasking, but ran all 'normal' code in a single
| preemptive task (https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac.p
| rogrammer.help/c/f...)
|
| I also vaguely remember the kernel had some memory
| protection enabled.
|
| Of course, almost none of that mattered for typical user-
| space programs.
| azalemeth wrote:
| I genuinely think it fits right in. Apple always had a good
| aesthetic, even when everything was beige and rectangular. I
| did a giant chunk of my school work on Claris Works, before I
| discovered latex. Happy memories.
| Lammy wrote:
| If only I could still get laptops with the keys printed in
| Univers 57 Condensed Oblique :) https://catalog.monotype.com/
| font/linotype/univers/57-conden...
| [deleted]
| fzzzy wrote:
| well you can on ebay ;)
| dTal wrote:
| That aesthetic was widespread throughout the PC universe in
| the 90s as well. I remember having a giant clip-art library
| that came on a whole bunch of CDs, and actually came with a
| catalog _book_ to leaf through. A lot of it looked like that.
| Another example is Microsoft 's clipart library, (in)famous
| for its images of the "screen bean" guy.
| userbinator wrote:
| i believe that before OSX, the OS itself had no
| terminal/shell/command prompt, and I suspect Macs were very
| rarely used for development back then; it was only with Unix-
| based OSX that it became hugely popular.
| fzzzy wrote:
| That's correct. There was A/UX which was a unix that ran the
| mac finder and MachTen which was a posix implementation for
| classic mac os you could launch like an app, but it wasn't
| until os x that it shipped with Terminal.app
| tomc1985 wrote:
| There was some kind of command prompt you could bring up with
| some really obscure combination of keypresses. I remember
| encountering it on System 7 and MacOS 8. I never did figure out
| what could be done with it
| kalleboo wrote:
| You're thinking of the debugger - the default Microbug that
| was built-in was pretty much only useful for printing or
| writing memory (or typing G FINDER into it, causing the front
| app to crash and bringing you back to the Finder if the app
| was hung).
|
| Macsbug[0] which was an optional install was much more
| feature-rich, but it was still just a debugger and not
| actually a command line environment.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacsBug
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Is that Microbug debugger the one that pops up in a upper-
| centered box with only a prompt character? What I remember
| definitely wasn't MacsBug.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Yeah that's the one!
| Lammy wrote:
| Apple's dev tools did come with one:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...
|
| "The MPW Shell command language was based on the Unix csh
| language, but was extended to support the main features of the
| Macintosh GUI. It had simple commands to create menus, dialogs
| (prompts), and new shell windows. The cursor could be
| controlled, and MPW scripts or tools could easily be attached
| to a menu item. Command key shortcuts could be specified.
| Window size and location could be controlled. These features
| were popular in commercial production environments, where
| complicated build and packaging processes were all controlled
| by elaborate scripts."
| fzzzy wrote:
| The mpw shell is much closer to a smalltalk Workspace, but
| yes, it was technically the command line for classic mac.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| Who WAS Apple's customer base during the classic MacOS era?
|
| I remember Apple II's dominating when I was in school back in
| the 1980's. Then in the 1990's when I was in college, all I
| remember seeing anywhere were PC's. DOS and then Windows for
| the masses, and this new thing called Slackware Linux for many
| of us in the CS department.
|
| In the 2000's I started hearing about Macs, but only for
| creative domains like Photoshop or video editing. Then the
| Intel CPU switch happened, and today I'm on a MacBook just like
| pretty much every other programmer I know.
|
| What was Apple's "niche", and who was their "base", back in the
| 1990's?
| Lammy wrote:
| Desktop publishing, especially after the release of the
| LaserWriter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter
|
| It used to be really hard to get printer output to look the
| same on the page as what you saw on the screen, and the small
| details matter when people are laying out a complicated
| magazine (or whatever) page and need text to flow around
| images and other design elements. There was a whole Adobe-vs-
| everyone battle over things like outline (as opposed to
| bitmap) font technology since they controlled the standard
| for PostScript fonts as used by printers like LaserWriter:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_fonts#Type_1
|
| Then Apple created TrueType, and it is the biggest feature of
| System 7 that I never see anyone talk about:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType
|
| Then still lots of back and forth over things like Adobe's
| multi-master fonts vs TrueType GX which despite being part of
| the "failed" QuickDraw GX actually lives on in OpenType
| today:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts
|
| https://atadistance.net/2016/09/20/truetype-gx-model-
| lives-o...
|
| https://tidbits.com/1994/09/26/preliminary-practical-
| primer-...
|
| ---
|
| e: "magazine page" is what always comes to mind because it
| makes me think of the Diehard GameFAN story:
|
| http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/gamefan/GameFAN.htm
|
| "he calls the layout artist (which was probably Jacob Riskin
| or George Weising at the time), 'my trusty [Macintosh] Quadra
| operator'. What an assface."
| kalleboo wrote:
| For publishing, color management was also a huge thing - at
| the time Apple's ColorSync [1993] was vital to getting your
| display, local proof printer, and the printing press all
| color calibrated together. Adobe developed a Windows
| version but it was never as well-integrated/supported.
| JonathonW wrote:
| They were big in education-- student computers in elementary
| and middle school for me (basically, about 1992-2000) were
| basically 100% Macs. It wasn't until high school that Windows
| boxes started showing up in classrooms and computer labs.
|
| They've also always had a decent base in the creative space--
| Photoshop 1.0 being a Mac app had a big impact. Scully's
| mismanagement of the company meant a lot of people dumped the
| company in the mid-1990s, though; Jobs' return, the OSX
| transition, and the Intel switch were all necessary to bring
| the Mac division back up to where it is today.
| anthk wrote:
| Journalists, photographs, printed press guys. Magazine people
| for example.
| classichasclass wrote:
| As one of those customers back then: lots of QuarkXPress and
| Photoshop. Upgrading from a 7100 to a Sawtooth G4 was a dream
| come true. It was still running 9.2 when I left that office.
| Oreb wrote:
| Classic MacOS had Macintosh Common Lisp. Even today, it's the
| most pleasant, elegant and friendly programming environment
| I've ever used.
| lispm wrote:
| Classic MacOS had also ExperLisp, Procycon Common Lisp,
| MacScheme plus two embedded Lisp Machines as NuBUS boards: TI
| MicroExplorer and the Symbolics MacIvory.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Love quirky projects like this
| supernintendo wrote:
| Oh wow, thank you for this. :) I was just restoring an iMac G3,
| the Flower Power edition, and ran into more trouble than I
| expected trying to transfer data via a USB flash drive.
| Filesystems that Mac OS 9 should support were either not mounting
| properly or causing errors during file transfer when formatted on
| a modern Apple or Linux system (exFAT was the only one I could
| get to work for some reason). I've been casually looking around
| for some sort of NAS solution that would be compatible with older
| versions of Mac OS, but with native scp I can just download files
| from a Linux box (perhaps a dedicated Raspberry Pi) and skip
| right to the fun part: exploring all of the weird, cool and
| charming software and games from this era. So cool!
| cy384 wrote:
| unfortunately, file transfer isn't in yet, but it's the next
| feature I'm working on, probably within a week or two
| Lammy wrote:
| > some sort of NAS solution that would be compatible with older
| versions of Mac OS
|
| http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/ :)
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| You have to run the 2.x series to interoperate with older
| "classic" Macs. Nearly everything these days packages the 3.x
| series and thus only works with more recent OS X clients.
| Lammy wrote:
| That is true for AFP over AppleTalk, yes. Netatalk3 only
| supports AFP over TCP, but that's fine as far back as
| System 7 using AppleShare Workstation with MacTCP. System
| 7.6 and later can use AppleShare Client 3.8.8 with
| OpenTransport: https://web.archive.org/web/20110418060150/h
| ttps://support.a...
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| It's not the protocols that are entirely the problem.
| It's the authentication mechanisms that also create
| limitations. I had zero luck getting my 6.0.8 thru 8.6
| installs to connect to Netatalk hosts on either my
| FreeNAS box or my Ubuntu 20.10 workstation until I
| manually built and installed the old 2.x tree.
| kalleboo wrote:
| FWIW I've had no trouble connecting to the built-in
| install of netatalk 3.1.8 on my Synology NAS from MacOS
| 8.1. I can't remember if I had to tweak the config or
| not.
| Lammy wrote:
| It's been a few years so I don't remember if I ran into
| any difficulties or what options I may have changed from
| default, but I've definitely used it with my Quadra v(._.
| )v https://i.imgur.com/yjGGN9k.jpg
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| It's entirely possible I just couldn't get the right mix
| and config together with 3.x
|
| It just went from fiddly and non-working to braindead
| easy once I downgraded to 2.x
|
| :shrug:
| rjsw wrote:
| Netatalk 2.2 will work on a NetBSD server.
| jonhohle wrote:
| netatalk is a open source AFP/AppleTalk implementation that
| I've used for years (supports file shares, Time Machine, etc.)
| tikwidd wrote:
| For classic macs with ethernet ports, the simplest method I
| have found is to host a basic FTP server on another computer
| (e.g. you can set one up easily enough on a Raspberry Pi) and
| use an Ftp client such as Fetch on the mac side. I use this
| method to get files to and from my LC III, which also functions
| as a bridge baby to the really old macs via the Appletalk
| serial port.
| classichasclass wrote:
| Or, if you want to do it in the other direction (sometimes
| this is more convenient), NCSA Telnet for the Mac has a
| built-in FTP server. I use this to upload files to the Power
| Mac 7300 directly from this Raptor Talos II.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| This is what I do, and it works pretty well if a little
| cumbersome at times. I have a little museum I've built in my
| office during the pandemic that consists of:
|
| - SE/30
|
| - Docked Duo 280c
|
| - 7100/80
|
| - PowerComputing PT Pro 250
|
| - NeXT TurboStation
|
| My primary Linux workstation is where I browse for old
| software and download it, then I get at stuff from the
| vintage Macs via FTP using either Interarchy or Fetch.
|
| Rather than run a bunch of Ethernet cables all over the place
| I put little Ethernet to Wifi bridge adapters on them. Works
| great.
| tikwidd wrote:
| Neat! I just have an LC III, SE and Powerbook 1400 running
| at the moment. Always wanted to find a NeXT...
|
| > Rather than run a bunch of Ethernet cables all over the
| place I put little Ethernet to Wifi bridge adapters on
| them. Works great.
|
| That's genius, thanks for the tip.
| fzzzy wrote:
| I had a next slab in the 00s but I had to get rid of it
| because of space. Recently, I had a Pentium 3 random
| machine and I finally managed to install OpenStep 4.2 on
| it. The trick is to find the absolute latest patch to
| have the VESA driver so you can have color.
|
| If you are curious about NeXT, I highly recommend finding
| a random intel pc from the 90s and installing the intel
| NeXTStep versions or OpenStep.
| classichasclass wrote:
| NeXTSTEP is also really great on PA-RISC, if you want an
| oddball combination.
| fzzzy wrote:
| Lol there's also the Canon ObjectStation if you want to
| get really obscure
| fzzzy wrote:
| Where'd you get the PowerComputing? Clones like that are
| going to be the most rare.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| Just unrelenting hunting on Craigslist, eBay, and
| Facebook Marketplace. I think I got the PTPro on
| Craigslist.
|
| I actually have a PowerCenter 150 slim-profile Desktop
| (and a spare Sonnet G3 400/1M CPU upgrade for it) that's
| currently in storage. I haven't decided if I should try
| to find a good home for it yet. The PowerTower Pro
| replaced it in my office collection because I wanted a
| box I could cram full of esoteric tech:
|
| - Formac Proformance 3 (3DLabs Permedia3)
|
| - 12MB 3Dfx Voodoo2
|
| - OrangePC 660 w/ K6-III
|
| - Digidesign Audiomedia III
|
| - ATTO Dual UltraSCSI
|
| - Sonnet Encore G4 800/1M CPU (which is both cool and
| also finicky as all get out)
|
| It's got one PCI slot left which I want to plop another
| Voodoo2 into for a vintage SLI setup.
|
| All that said, both my SE/30 and my 7100 are packed to
| the gills with even weirder toys. :-)
| azinman2 wrote:
| What do you even do with the OrangePC? I guess all of
| this is quite obsolete, but to run old windows on it?
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| Well, mostly I just like the novelty. I have a Radius
| Rocket 33 (68040) and an OrangePC 290 (Cyrix 5x86) in my
| 7100/80. It's kinda fun to play with a classic Mac a PPC
| Mac and a classic PC all in one box. I finally got them
| to run DOOM II bots against each other.
|
| The OrangePC 660 has an NVIDIA RIVA 128 on it, so I use
| it to play with old CAD/CAM software sometimes and it's
| kind of fun (similar to the 7100) to fire up some cross-
| platform games (e.g. Myth TFL/II, Quake 1/2, etc. and get
| the Mac side playing against the PC side).
|
| At the end of the day it's all just technological novelty
| and esoteria, of course.
| rcarmo wrote:
| This is amazing. I am going to try running this on a Raspberry Pi
| emulating System 7, and relive the hours I spent logging in to
| remote machines back in the dial-up days.
| vaxman wrote:
| You're holding it wrong..this is for connecting a classic Mac
| to a Raspberry Pi.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think you misread, maybe
| vaxman wrote:
| Nope. You want to run a Classic MacOS emulator on rPi to
| test SSH for MacOS, but that makes no sense.
| cy384 wrote:
| oh hey everyone, author here, ssheven is still beta quality, so I
| wasn't really posting about it anywhere yet, but it's usable and
| has the core functionality working ok
|
| I plan to do a writeup about it, and the experience of developing
| for old macs, once I finish the 1.0 release
|
| edit: btw, this is my first project for the classic Mac OS, I
| hope to inspire others to also jump in, retro68 is a very usable
| toolchain (big thanks to Wolfgang Thaller/autc04)
| tikwidd wrote:
| So far it's working well on my LC III (68030 with 36mb ram)!
|
| I'm writing this comment from the LC III using w3m over ssh :)
| txdv wrote:
| 36mb ram? that is a like a power house!
| phire wrote:
| It's maxed out, 4MB onboard + a single 32MB SIMM.
|
| I think my own LC III has either 12MB or 20MB.
| rvense wrote:
| LC III is a real sleeper. It's much better than the
| previous in the series. The case is great to work with,
| it's small, runs cool (if you replace the hard drive it
| should be no problem to remove the fan), and is faster than
| any compact. And it takes the 36MB RAM.
| tikwidd wrote:
| I would love to read your writeup if you get around to it.
| callinyouin wrote:
| This is so cool. I've been wanting to pick up an older mac for
| the sole purpose of doing some programming on classic MacOS
| myself. I actually have a Macintosh SE, but it's a bit too
| underpowered for my tastes. Anyway, I was hoping you might be
| willing to share what your development environment looks like.
| Language, editor, etc. Thanks!
|
| Edit: I think I started to reply before your edit. Retro68
| sounds amazing!
| cy384 wrote:
| if you want to go period-appropriate, you can run Macintosh
| Programmer's Workshop or CodeWarrior natively
|
| I use retro68 on linux, which is a modern GCC toolchain, so
| it's just like developing any other C/C++ (well, without some
| nice debugging tools, and with the added complexity of the
| mac OS resource stuff)
|
| https://github.com/autc04/Retro68/
| Aloha wrote:
| Sorry for posting it before you were ready! I just thought it
| was really cool, and I thought getting you some more eyeshare
| might be useful in helping you find more folks wanting to work
| on it.
| cy384 wrote:
| it's no problem, the killer feature (that it works at all,
| and can connect to modern servers with default configs) is
| solid, and more people using it will help flush out bugs
| azinman2 wrote:
| I'd love to hear more about retro68, your experience finding
| documentation for the various APIs. Stackoverlow didn't exist
| when these APIs were in use.
| rjsw wrote:
| Apple used to produce good paper documentation, my stack of
| Inside Macintosh is on the floor behind me.
| sharikous wrote:
| This is really wonderful. I can transform my old 68k machine to a
| dumb terminal and do real work!
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