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a time capsule of my early-1990s computer experience
Thursday, December 11 2025
I spent nearly all my productive time today still trying to zero in on the weird bug that kills off serial on my ESP8266 firmware after a few seconds. I'd isolated it to the setLocalHardwareToServerStateFromNonJson() function but so far couldn't figure out what within it was causing the issue.
Later in the day, I took a break by trying to implement some code on an ESP32-based board with a built-in 320 by 240 pixel touchscreen. That seems like the ideal platform for some little customizable internet-capable device with the ability to run complex apps, perhaps with shared multitasking. But the best I could get it to do (with ChatGPT's help) was turn on its backlight. I know it can do much more than that, as a demo program that had been on it displayed user interfaces and found WiFI SSIDs.
Perhaps in hopes of achieving something today, after taking a nice hot bath, I decided to try powering up Hoagie's (my late mother's) old Power Macintosh 6500/225. It was one of the last things I'd salvaged from the Shaque the last time I'd been there, and it had almost been an afterthought. I think I'd discounted that thing for decades, since it hadn't been used since 2010 at the latest, having long before been displaced by a Windows XP machine. Hoagie had been interested in computers in the 1990s as part of her general pattern of developing superficial interests in things that had interested me first. She and my father had glommed on to my old Macintosh IIsi in the Shaque after I'd moved out, though by the late 1990s that machine was no longer up to the tasks that even they expected of it. So Hoagie had gone out and bought a then-current Power Macintosh, following my advice. But then that machine suffered from various problems, most of which were really just user error. This led them to buy a Windows 98 machine at some point. By then, my father was the only one with any remaining interest in computers, as he found them a good way to put his forest research online while also looking up things on Google. (I suspect that dementia had already started robbing my mother of interest in text-based forms of media, which was really all that dial-up internet could provide.) The old Power Macintosh languished after that, gradually yellowing beneath piles of catalogs and unread mail.
Meanwhile, I'd had a dream of perhaps releasing a collection of all the classic Macintosh software I'd collected from various university AppleTalk networks. Some of that software was very esoteric, and much of it needed to be cracked in order to get it running. Cracking software became a major passtime of mine circa 1994, and I saved all of my work on floppy disks. With the goal of some day curating all that old software, I'd brought those disks up to Hurley and put them aside. But then I encountered problems reading them, as the GCR format of the first Macintosh disks cannot be read by just any floppy drive. Perhaps, I thought, I'd be able to read those disks with my mother's old Power Macintosh. That was the main reason I'd decided to rescue it from the Shaque.
But when I finally hooked that old Macintosh up to the auxillary electronics needed to connect it to a modern monitor and PS/2 peripherals and initiated its first boot in decades, it sounded a satisfying full-throated boot chord, made all the richer due to the subwoofer contained within the Macintosh itself. It wasn't long before I was sucked into the nostalgia. That computers was, it turned out, a time capsule of my early-1990s computer experience. It contained essentially the modified direct clone of the setup that had been on my old Macintosh IIsi, which was in turn a modified direct clone of a setup that had been on a Macintosh SE dating to 1990, the first computer I'd had since the Commodore 128 and VIC-20 of my teenage years. The Power Macintosh, despite its name, took forever to boot, but once it did, all that great software was still there, complete with my many customizations. I'd even made customized folder icons for Hoagie, my father, and me. I fired up the carefully customized ResEdit I'd used to crack all that software I'd copied to a portable SCSI drive, and it worked just as well as it had when I'd spent hours a day using it back in the years before I had access to the internet. The upshot of all this is that I am very happy I brought that computer back to Hurley with me.
The way things look on my mother's old Power Macintosh. Click to enlarge.
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