Re: Just wondering, any vintage Mac experts resident here?

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Stephen Thomas Cole <notlikely@nowaymail.com> wrote:

> In article <dog_cow-1351615505@macgui.com>, D Finnigan
> <dog_cow@macgui.com> wrote:
> 
> > The funny thing about the Mac versus that Apple II newsgroups is that while
> > the discussions in comp.sys.mac.system, for example, flow from System 6 and
> > 7 in the early 90s up to OS 8, 9, and OS X today, the Apple II is frozen in
> > time in many regards so the discussions have indeed evolved over the past 20
> > years, but not to the same advanced degree as the Mac discussions.
> > 
> > Though the discussions about cracking software that we have today are
> > probably the most wild evolution in the Apple II newsgroups. ;-)
> > 
> > However, I think that a few of the regular posters in the Mac groups are
> > older people who have been using Macs for quite awhile, so you may be able
> > to post your topics about older Macs in the Mac newsgroups and still get
> > some good discussions. It should be entirely obvious who actually knows and
> > remembers about the old Macs, and those people who don't.
> 
> Cheers David. I will certainly have another look at the comp.sys.mac.*
> groups, only gave them a cursory glance before and didn't see a lot of
> relevant posting going on. I shall drop some messages into the mix and see
> if I can scare up some response!

I'm actively involved in the comp.sys.mac.* groups and I'm aware of
several people there who know about older Macs and Mac systems,
including a small number who are still using systems around Mac OS 9.x.

There isn't much posting relevant to old Mac systems going on because
hardly anyone is still using those systems, or isn't using them for
anything new that is worthy of discussion. I'm sure relevant questions
or discussions would be fine but relatively quiet threads.

I personally would only be of limited help for 68K era Mac questions as
I mostly skipped that era. I switched from the Apple IIgs to the Mac in
1996, starting with a PowerMac 7600 running System 7.5.3. I did use Macs
a bit before that, but not intensively. Since then I've kept pretty
close to the latest system version on my main Macs, but still have a
couple of older Macs set up which are running earlier systems
(10.4.11/9.2.2 and 9.1), which I use on rare occasions (mostly for
answering questions or converting data from old computers to new ones).

> Interesting what you say about the nature of the discussion around the
> different platforms. I guess the Macintosh discussion is going to be that
> much more fractured, or diluted maybe, inherently due to the scale and
> breadth of the Mac platform.

Also the evolution it has been through. Apple likes pushing major
platform changes (PowerPC, Mac OS X, Intel) and orphaning old
technologies (Classic, Rosetta) and Mac models, which tends to result in
a split between those able to keep up with the latest system software,
and those who are stuck running older systems for software compatibility
reasons or inability of their Mac to run anything newer.

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz