Clearly Obsessed

At the risk of being typecast as some sort of vintage Macintosh nut, I couldn't help but find myself agog at the following piece of retro mac heaven (especially considering my previous loving tribute to the Mac SE/30).

So, without further ado, I present the completely transparent Mac SE:




So pretty.

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Pseudonym: COMPLETELY transparent?? No.

With the right fabrication skills, you could have a carbon fiber mac. Now THAT'd be badass.

Old-School Mac Games: Uninvited

Unlike most people who play video games these days, I cut my teeth on early Macintosh games. Growing up, our first real computer we had around the house was a Mac SE (well, the real first one was a Trash 80, but that's a whole different story).

Though it was a tiny market, early Macs had a surprising amount of quality game software. One of my favorites was the MacVenture series of point-and-click adventure games. First released in 1985, the four MacVenture games can lay claim to being the very first point-and-click adventure games.

Taking advantage of the high-resolution graphics and the standard Mac window interface, the MacVenture games let a player simply drag items from the first-person screen int the inventory, or onto another item. The writing was top-notch, frequently witty, and in many of the games, downright unsettling.

While the series began with Deja Vu, my fondest memories of the MacVenture series was Uninvited, an atmospheric haunted house story, where the protagonist awakes to a crashed car and a missing little brother, and must venture into a creepy old mansion to rescue him.

While the games were made for the Mac originally, their popularity led to them being ported to other systems. The DOS and Amiga versions made the transition relatively unscathed, but the NES ports were savagely cut down, with huge portions of the gameworld excised, gameplay simplified, and most horrifyingly, most of the text was gutted and replaced with simple, short, declarative sentences. Unfortunately, the popularity of the NES compared to early-era Macs has meant that most of the people who know of Deja Vu, Uninvited, or Shadowgate, are only familiar with the simplified, zombie versions released for the NES.

So if you're hungering for a nostalgic trip to the early days of adventure gaming, grab an early Mac emulator for current-vintage Macs, or for other operating systems, including Windows and Linux, and dig up a copy of Uninvited (or Deja Vu or Shadowgate), and revel in the joys of really old-school adventure gaming.

The Mac SE/30: Adored by Spies and Psychopathic Geniuses Alike!

Ah, the venerable Macintosh SE/30. Wired recently declared it 'the best Mac ever.' With a 16 MHz 68030 processor, it was many times as fast and powerful as its similar cousin the Mac SE. Essentially, it was the internals of a Mac IIx poured into the diminutive case of a Mac SE, and at half the price. It quickly became a favorite of Mac fans everywhere.

Well, you know who else loved the SE/30? unspecified government intelligence agencies, that's who! The Tempest Mac Model CSI-1891T was a 'black Mac,' not because of its color, but because of its military-grade electromagnetic 'Tempest' shielding, which shielded the computer from passive observation due to electromagnetic signal leakage.

But it's not just spies that adored the SE/30: when the production designers for the film version of Alan Moore's Watchmen needed a computer for supergenius Adrian Veidt's desk, what did they choose? Why, the Tempest-shielded black Mac, of course. This time painted black to match its heritage.

Fun fact: in the old days of Macs, when the faster 68020 processor came on the market, it was put in the new Mac II. When the the 68030 processor was later introduced, Apple dictated that an "X" be added to the end of the model number. So the Mac II became the 68030 Mac IIx. Well, that naming scheme worked fine until Apple decided to upgrade the SE to a 68030. I guess Apple didn't want to try and explain the Macintosh SEx.

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Pseudonym: If they wanted to avoid the Mac Sex, they shouldn't have released the 3rd-Generation iMac without some demureifying changes. Rawr.


As for Adrian Veidt, I hereby revoke his title of "smartest man in the world". His password was easily-guessable, subject to dictionary attacks and visible on the spine of a book on his desk (in the movie). Also, his vision is supposed to be excellent, and therefore using the high contrast (invert) mac desktop is in questionable taste at best.


However, I do love the idea of him typing up his grand-scale plans in MacWrite (Chicago font, obviously) and illustrating them carefully in MacDraw.


Eldritch: And the hits don't stop there! On NBC's goofy spy drama Chuck, the valhalla of all government computers, the Intersect, is apparently capped off with a Mac SE/30. Okay, it's not an SE/30. It's a Classic II. But it's almost the same thing. Stupid 16-bit data path.



Pseudonym: This is why vendor lock-in is bad. You start off just getting a PC for say, spreadsheet and financial reports software, and your business grows, and as it grows, you end up requiring backwards-compatibility with that original machine until you have a supercomputer that runs Mac OS 3 while Apple laughs all the way to their moneybin (aka Bank).

I have some .nfo for you

Let's talk a little bit about MIME-types. These are embeddable bits of data in a file on the computer that lets the operating system know what sort of file they are. A music file asks to be opened in iTunes, a movie in Mplayer, etc. This is more typically done by the most common operating systems as the extension, that three-character (usually) jobbie after the . in the filename. People use the extension because they've always used the extension. DOS required an extension because that system had no idea what MIME was. Macs also rely on the extension, which is strange to me, considering that they are based on a modified BSD kernel and subsequently UNIX, which doesn't rely AT ALL on extensions. In fact, POSIX-compliant systems, like UNIX and Linux, as well as BSD will gladly open anything as plain text. It expects you to know what type the file is, for the most part, and Desktop Environments like Gnome and KDE basically tack on extension information to go along with MIME-type just as a convenience for the user, so they know what's going to happen when they double-click.

Fair enough. Extensions aren't the bees-knees and neither are MIME-types. Each system picked their desired way of doing this, and stuck with it, though they all somewhat support the alternate system as well.

So here's my beef: .nfo files.

Someone, somewhere back in the 8.3 days of DOS, decided that a "cool" way to give out "info" would be to rename a simple text file so that the extension was .nfo, indicating that the text file contained information, unlike other text documents which contained odors. Back then, it didn't really matter. You didn't or couldn't double-click on something. If you wanted to read a document 'edit lnchcods.txt' was the same as 'edit lnchcods.nfo'. Same number of characters, same difference. The problem is that people still use it. This is ridiculous, as on the three main systems, all of which I use, it's a big bag of fail to have to modify the name or extension of a file before reading it, remembering that it's a PLAINTEXT document.

On OS X, .nfo has the unknown type icon, so when you double-click it goes "whoa whoa... we don't know what to do with this. It's clearly plaintext, but we'll try to open it in iTunes, since that's what we do with everything". And don't even think about Quicklook. So you have to click on the file, hit Enter, and since OS X helpfully highlights the name of the file, but not the extension, move the cursor to the end, remove the .nfo and add .txt. Then OS X asks you if you REALLY want to change the extension. Of COURSE I do, because you didn't even know what to DO with the .nfo ANYway. All this comes with one very big assumption to begin with - that you have file extension visibilty turned on. Power users will. Regular users will be double-clicking that README file for eternity.

Think it's any better on Windows? Of course not. I started with OS X because it's more elegant than the other OSes. Windows decided that the .nfo extension would be perfect to use for its completely useless msinfo32.exe, a program which helpfully pops up when clicking on a .nfo file, and immediately locks your system while it checks out the hardware and software specs of your current computer. Has anyone ever saved a computer's specs and then opened it on ANOTHER computer with the friendly .nfo exchange format? No. I guarantee you that all 330,000 times msinfo32 was loaded in the past year, every single one was from someone wanting to see what the password to a zip file was. So, repeat the above steps for OS X, except replace Enter with F2. Annoying.

Ah, linux. You're supposed to do text files right. But just like with all linux issues, this sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. On my Openbox system, it Just Works. On my Gnome system, a Dialog pops up that has the following options: Display, Run, Run in Terminal, Cancel. If you want to see what the file contains, which would you choose? Display or Run? A lot of people might not know that in linux, any file type can be executed with the right flag, but to them, "Running" a text file means opening it for editing. But at least I don't have to change the extension to do it, once I know that "display" is the one for me.

This problem affects nearly no one, but it's large enough that there are several programs out there to open .nfo files. What? Why?? Literally every operating system has a text editor, including VM hypervisors. (The OS X software listed on the Wikipedia page is, hilariously, the end result of Apple's own Getting Started in Cocoa/XCode document with a different title.)

So here's a thought, hax0rs. Make all those problems obsolete by abandoning your own attempt at making text-files purposefully unviewable and just use .txt like it's meant to be used. It will open, viewable as intended, on every computer that tries it! You've already put so much effort into zipping individual .rar files and then .rar-ing the zips together, and making beautiful ascii art for some reason. Why not let us easily actually see it?

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Oh, man, preach on. Mimes? I hate those creepy dudes. Oh, wait.

MAME? Well, I do like playing those old-style arcade games. Not that either?

Meme? Well, that's cool. Truth be told, I never quite understood why somebody found the need to coin a whole new word and set of words to mean... Idea. /shrug

Okay, that's about all the mileage I could wring out of that gag. In all seriousness, Mac users are sitting pretty in terms of filetypes compared to the bad old days of pre-OS X. Back then, the Macintosh operating system had a completely different way of determining file types, which depended on resources stuck in a backwater part of the file data called the "Resource Fork." That's all well and good, and it meant that old Macs didn't have file extensions, but it also had the unfortunate side effect of making Mac files unusable by other operating systems. In fact, if you moved a file through a UNIX server (say, via FTP), it would destroy the resource fork and make the file permanently unusable by any operating system.

I'm glad I read past all the gags to get to the Mac history part. I'm retroactively and smugly chuckling at all those losers who had pre-OS X Macs. Win95 4-ever.