G4 cube (was Re: 68K Macs with MacOS 7.5 still in production use...)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 09/13/2016 09:58 AM, Al Kossow wrote:

> yea.. another project. Getting an Apple 20 pin drive working with a
> flux transition reader.

Not that much of an issue--after all, the old CopyIIPC deluxe option
board came with a bunch of 400K/800K Mac utilities and uses standard
drives.   I might have used that, but the system was buried at the
bottom of a pile and I wanted to preserve the Apple file structure as
much as was possible, not translate it into MS-DOS.

> The one example that directly involved me was I asked them to support
> NTP internally on the engineering network, so I didn't have to set
> the clock constantly (I had a prototype machine with an RTC that ran
> fast). Around 1997 at the peak of the "dark times" an email (which
> was FINALLY SMTP and not some stupidity like AppleLink) went out that
> there was no budget to maintain the NTP server any more. Fortunately,
> the NeXT purchase of Apple happened, the people that groked Unix came
> in, and that bit of stupidity was killed.

Heh, the first message that I got after I changed the PRAM battery and
booted MacOS was that the system time didn't match the NTP time within
reasonable limits.  But there the oddity hit--if I wanted to get rid of
the message, I had to open the Control Panel and manually set the time
to something close to NTP--Mac OS did not offer to do it for me.

--Chuck