
Douglas Adams's Mac IIfx - yankcrime
http://www.vintagemacworld.com/iifx.html
======
cstross
I met Douglas just once, in the summer of 1996. I was in London and I was
visiting a friend and former co-worker who, after the startup we'd been in
together in Edinburgh collapsed, had moved on to become one of the syadmins at
The Digital Village, Douglas's game production house. (At the time they were
working on Starship Titanic.) So I dropped round at TDV to say "hi" to my
friend C. and a couple of other former acquaintances, and was taken aback when
I was ushered into the boardroom, given a cup of tea, introduced to the MD,
and then this tall, gawky fellow was wheeled in to shake my hand.

(I was so overawed I couldn't string enough words together to embarrass
myself. (So that's okay then.) I only figured out afterwards that they were
expanding and looking for new hires, and C. or another acquaintance (the UK
internet scene was rather small in the mid-90s) had suggested seeing if I'd
bite. As it would have involved moving to London and I'd just bought a flat in
Edinburgh and high speed internet meant 56K modem dialup at £3 per hour, the
answer was "no, but thanks" ...)

Anyway. Anecdote time:

Back around 1996-8, Apple went through a spot of bother with the Powerbook
range -- during the Amelio years, the number of models proliferated and the
build quality fell through the floor. In particular, Douglas had been toting
around a Powerbook 1600cs or similar, and the blessed thing was exhibiting a
tendency to halt and catch fire.

C. got a bit annoyed about this, because Douglas was about to depart on a
speaking tour of the US, and C. was responsible for ensuring his laptop
worked. And this machine had been sent back for repair about three times, and
replaced twice. So he phoned TDV's Apple technical support contact.

"Hello? It's about this Powerbook 1600CS, serial number blah, that we keep
sending back. Our CEO needs it fixed, urgently, but every replacement you send
us is dead."

"Uh, well, there's a bit of a problem with that model. Send it in and we'll
get a working one to you next week, I promise."

"I don't think you understand. _Our CEO_ is about to go on a speaking tour
tomorrow."

"Yes, we'll get you a replacement next week --"

"Our CEO is Douglas Adams, one of your company's leading evangelists. Do you
want him to spend the next month going up on stage and explaining to everyone
why he's carrying a Compaq?"

...

Three hours later a motorcycle courier turned up with six Powerbooks.

Now _that 's_ what I call AppleCare!

~~~
xyzzy123
I started reading, then looked at your username and had a recursive hero-
worship moment :p

~~~
DrStalker
I just started reading The Laundry Files two hours ago, the first of his books
I've read. I never would have noticed the username there if you hadn't pointed
it out!

------
Aqueous
I remember the IIfx...it had a 68030 with an FPU, which made me jealous
because I had a Performa 475 with a 68LC040. The 68LC40 was a deliberately
crippled 68040 with no FPU, which made it in some very important ways worse
than the 68030, a previous generation processor. This left me with the
unfortunate inability to run NetBSD, which I desperately wanted to do as I was
just getting into computers at the time and wanted to use an OS that, unlike
the friendly classic Mac OS, was closer to bare metal and let me do things
like write my own programs ( which I couldn't really do in classic Mac OS
because the main development tools were either insanely expensive or had
critical features disabled, such as the ability to create new projects. ) So
all the IIfx owners were flooding the NetBSD users mailing list with their
successful boot-up stories, and I couldn't get beyond the bootloader prompt. I
eventually had to take the 68LC040 out and replace it with a 68040 so I could
use NetBSD and other powerful software like Infini-D...

We've come a long way. Now I'm running Mac OS and it _is_ BSD. And all i have
to do to create a new programming project is type git init in some
unsuspecting directory.

~~~
webwielder
That's the second Infini-D reference I've heard in the past couple of months
after not hearing it mentioned once in the past 10 years. Warm fuzzies.

------
Tloewald
Back in the 90s macs had a serious virus problem. Two of the things apple did
to address it were pretty effective — most importantly they gave a tiny bit of
support/encouragement to John Norstad who wrote Disinfectant -- a very good
and free virus checker -- and they put virus checking into all of their
Claris-branded software (including Resolve, MacWrite Pro, Filemaker, and so
on).

I had a Mac IIfx I got for free from my office (it was six or seven years old
at the time) with a radius pivot display. Two once awesome pieces of tech that
aged very badly...

~~~
coldtea
> _Back in the 90s macs had a serious virus problem._

Yes, as did Amigas and Ataris. And they had 1/30 the market share OS X has had
the last 10 years, and 1/50 the share of early Windows/DOS at the time.

Which goes to show that all those people claiming OS X didn't have viruses
because "it had too few users" compared to XP so writers weren't interested
were full of crap.

It didn't have viruses because it made it more difficult than Mac
OS/Amiga/Atari to have viruses, with those UNIX permissions et al (basic as
they are).

~~~
asveikau
I don't understand this argument. Windows XP has the NT security model. The
file permissions are more granular than the Unix equivalent. If this is what
is supposed to make the difference it should be the other way.

~~~
RyanZAG
Um, have you ever seen a WinXP box with anything but 'allow all' for every
permission on every file? Running with everything as administrator? Simply
having a permissions model is not enough if it's never used. If OSX had
everything chmod 777 by default then it would be equivalent to WinXP.

~~~
asveikau
Yeah actually, I have.

Unfortunately it let you boot from FAT which doesn't have permissions. But if
it was using NTFS you would have non writable system files by default.

------
CGudapati
In his autobiography, Stephen Fry mentions about Douglas Adams in a chapter.
He mentions how they stayed close to each other and whenever he was free, he
used to go to Adams house and "play"(in his own words) with Adams' mac. He
wrote that they were the only two people who he knew had macs. He also
mentioned that unlike regular users, they hacked away at their macs. They used
download some small programs and tried running them till their computers
crashed. He also writes about his disdain towards the ibm machines of that
time. His autoBio is a wonderful read and he talks about his love for tech a
lot.

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gallerytungsten
This post brought back some memories. Back in the early 90s, I put together a
maxed-out IIfx for use at my job at a prepress service bureau. The bare IIfx
alone was $11,000, and the complement of 16x 16MB SIMMs, for a then-staggering
256MB of total memory, added another hefty amount. Add in a couple top of the
line graphics cards and dual 21" CRTs (the largest generally available at the
time) and the whole thing came to some $30,000.

Adjusted for inflation, that's around $50,000. Something to keep in mind for
anyone who might complain about the cost of the latest Mac Pro.

------
larrys
"When switched on for the first time, it was clear that the last user had
little understanding of how to store files on the hard disk."

In the early 90's I was helping a high school student (son of a relative) [1]
with problems he was having with his Mac Powerbook duo 210 [2].

Noting that he had no files on the desktop or anywhere I said "hmm looks like
you don't use this computer much!". To which he replied a bit snottily "You
mean I don't use the hard drive. I do use the computer".

[1] He is now a Physician with a high end dermatology practice and several
offices. He went to a 7 year MD and undergrad program and graduated first in
his class. He always had to appear smarter than the rest as displayed by his
comment to me (much older and using computers for quite some time at that
point).

[2] [http://support.apple.com/kb/sp154](http://support.apple.com/kb/sp154)

~~~
lectrick
So... where did he save his files?? Network drive?

~~~
carlob
Maybe he was just under the impression that files on the desktop were not _in_
the hard drive.

I just fired up sheepsaver to check: in the olden days of mac the desktop
appeared to be the root of the filesystem, so the hard drive was just one
level inside the desktop.

~~~
bonaldi
A side point, the desktop was cleverer about that: it was supposed to be a
temporary working space somewhat _outside_ the filesystem, rather than its
root.

Files from a volume still knew where which folder they were supposed to go in
on that volume - if you dragged them to the desktop to work with, the "Put
Away" menu command would put them back there (sadly lost in OS X). If you
ejected a disk that had working files on the desktop they'd vanish, of course.

~~~
talmand
Oh my gosh, you just gave me some serious flashbacks to college.

------
colanderman
Nice. I used to run A/UX [1] on one of these. Could never get networking
working though; figured it was a bad Ethernet card or something.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX)

------
bensherman
I gave Mr. Adams a 2600 shirt that had been inadvertently printed backwards
and he was amused (only a dozen of those existed!). It was after a reading in
Charlotte, NC, 20 something years ago. I miss him a lot.

------
mmastrac
[2003]

~~~
ido
How is that important in a story about a 1990 computer used by an author that
died several years ago (and last used said computer 15 years ago)?

~~~
AlexanderDhoore
He's going to come back using an improbability drive though. I expect him to
pop up when the Vogons leave.

Normality restored in 642842942424842424284328...

