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geekhack Marketplace => Great Finds => Topic started by: trievalot on Fri, 26 March 2010, 17:15:14

Title: Apple Extended
Post by: trievalot on Fri, 26 March 2010, 17:15:14: http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Apple-Extended-Keyboard_W0QQitemZ120548760584QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAU_Computers_Vintage?hash=item1c11441c08

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Apple-Keyboard-M0116_W0QQitemZ120548756250QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAU_Computers_Vintage?hash=item1c11440b1a\

s-video cable??????? really??????
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: EverythingIBM on Fri, 26 March 2010, 17:17:40: Quote from: trievalot;167155
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Apple-Extended-Keyboard_W0QQitemZ120548760584QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAU_Computers_Vintage?hash=item1c11441c08

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Apple-Keyboard-M0116_W0QQitemZ120548756250QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAU_Computers_Vintage?hash=item1c11440b1a\

s-video cable??????? really??????

What do the monitors run on then? PS/2?
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: trievalot on Fri, 26 March 2010, 17:24:57: .....and firewire 800 mice.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: kishy on Fri, 26 March 2010, 17:27:01: ADB happened to use a connector equivalent to S-Video (only so many combinations you can get out of a mini-DIN plug, right?), so yes it works (though you won't find coiled ADB cables...but some view the coils as a bad thing)

Monitors used a really dumb plug...DA-15 I think. Whatever d-sub was used for PC joysticks.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: EverythingIBM on Fri, 26 March 2010, 17:34:43: Quote from: kishy;167164
ADB happened to use a connector equivalent to S-Video (only so many combinations you can get out of a mini-DIN plug, right?), so yes it works (though you won't find coiled ADB cables...but some view the coils as a bad thing)

Monitors used a really dumb plug...DA-15 I think. Whatever d-sub was used for PC joysticks.

That's interesting. Phone cords, s-video cables, nice. Too bad the keyboards are all YELLOWING and not backwards compatible.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: trievalot on Fri, 26 March 2010, 17:35:13: why cant they just use a standard connector like pcs
with serial
or din
or ps2
or usb

(at least these are all sideways compatible)
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: EverythingIBM on Fri, 26 March 2010, 17:40:43: Quote from: trievalot;167170
why cant they just use a standard connector like pcs
with serial
or din
or ps2
or usb

The same reason why you can't run any legacy apple software on new apple machines (they keep changing their hardware/software so NOTHING is compatible).
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: trievalot on Fri, 26 March 2010, 17:48:24: can we turn this thread into a apple bashing session?
i only ask because i went to a friends house last night and got to use his apple 27" thing.
usual keyboard that looks like scrabble tiles and that godawful magic mouse.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: ch_123 on Fri, 26 March 2010, 18:54:25: Oh boy, more anti-Apple wankery!

Quote from: trievalot;167170
with serial

Apple had their own RS-232 compliant serial connector which was compatible with DB-9 serial with an adapter. Back in those days, everyone and their mother had their own connector type for serial, so IBM's was no more standard than anyone's else.

Quote
or din

Same story, hell, I'm pretty sure some PC compatibles back in those days used different connectors to DIN but used the same protocol. Hardly standard.

Quote
or ps2

ADB predated PS/2 (and it was quite some time before people other than IBM adopted PS/2... mice where the vendor bundled their own proprietary ISA controller card survived for some years after PS/2 appeared)

Quote
or usb

Apple are generally regarded as having pioneered the adoption of USB for things like keyboards and mice.

Quote from: trievalot;167172
can we turn this thread into a apple bashing session?
i only ask because i went to a friends house last night and got to use his apple 27" thing.
usual keyboard that looks like scrabble tiles and that godawful magic mouse.

Wow, let's bash every vendor that bundled bad keyboards and mice... So basically, all of them?

Quote from: EverythingIBM;167171
The same reason why you can't run any legacy apple software on new apple machines (they keep changing their hardware/software so NOTHING is compatible).

I admire the guts of a company like Apple that's not afraid to completely shake up their hardware platform and not stick to selling the same old **** over and over again like 99% of all other PC vendors. Surprisingly, trying to keep backwards compatibility with a 30-year old design that was deliberately designed to be mediocre has its issues...

Sure Macs are very similar to current PCs, but I think that's more to do with the lack of proper competition to Intel rather than any particular superiority of the x86 architecture.

Wait, didn't we all have this discussion previously?
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: ricercar on Fri, 26 March 2010, 19:08:04: Quote from: ch_123;167191
apple had their own rs-232 compliant serial connector which was compatible with db-9 serial with an adapter.

This was RS422.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: ch_123 on Fri, 26 March 2010, 19:22:12: Quote from: ricercar;167202
This was RS422.

But what were those adapters I've seen?
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: EverythingIBM on Fri, 26 March 2010, 19:25:38: Quote from: ch_123;167191

Apple are generally regarded as having pioneered the adoption of USB for things like keyboards and mice.
I admire the guts of a company like Apple that's not afraid to completely shake up their hardware platform and not stick to selling the same old **** over and over again like 99% of all other PC vendors. Surprisingly, trying to keep backwards compatibility with a 30-year old design that was deliberately designed to be mediocre has its issues...

IBM used USB before Apple made their multi-coloured boat anchors.

Considering Apple stole the majority of IBM's designs (and employees), I wouldn't say they are doing *anything* innovative.
I LIKE backwards compatibility, I can still run most windows 95 apps in windows 7. OSX is just a pathetic clone of linux that is a COMPLETE rewrite from previous apple operating systems.

FINALLY, Commodore did way more amazing things: reducing the prices of presonal computers, making good sound a standard, and graphics.

Quote from: ripster;167203
Oh. You guys must LIKE the Windows key then. Those Ebay keyboards are great candidates for the "Windows Key Hate Mod" (http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:8572).

Show Image
(http://geekhack.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=7455&stc=1&d=1264090294)

What windows key?
(http://www.poweralley.com/1images2008/IBM_Keyboard_White_89P8440_1.jpg)
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: ch_123 on Fri, 26 March 2010, 19:39:00: Quote from: EverythingIBM;167216
IBM used USB before Apple made their multi-coloured boat anchors.

Everyone and their mother had USB on their computers from when it came out, but the peripherals weren't there. Apple really put USB on the map when it ditched all it's old connectors and said that USB was the way to go.

Quote
Considering Apple stole the majority of IBM's designs (and employees), I wouldn't say they are doing *anything* innovative.

Quantify this.

Quote
I LIKE backwards compatibility, I can still run most windows 95 apps in windows 7.

I'm pretty sure you can emulate old OS 8/9 software under OS X (even Intel OS X, they have a PPC emulator built in)

Quote
OSX is just a pathetic clone of linux that is a COMPLETE rewrite from previous apple operating systems.

You're just demonstrating your own ignorance at this stage. Go read up about it a bit more and you'll find that it came from a completely different branch of UNIX from Linux. Linux was not really in a usable state for the general market when OS X came out, let alone when OS X's predecessor came out. Also, what about Windows NT? That was a complete rewrite too.

OS 9 was **** (and that's not my opinion - that's coming from serious Mac users that I know) and needed to be replaced. It's a pointless argument because you're the sort of person who, if they never rewrote it, would complain about Apple releasing the same crappy OS over and over again.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: ricercar on Fri, 26 March 2010, 19:53:46: Quote from: ch_123;167211
But what were those adapters I've seen?

RS422 and RS232 were different connectors for the same signals. I was always using hand-me-down RS232 modems on my RS422 Macintoshes (with adapters) to annoy my friends who claimed Macs required proprietary modems.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: EverythingIBM on Fri, 26 March 2010, 19:54:08: Quote from: ch_123;167220
Everyone and their mother had USB on their computers from when it came out, but the peripherals weren't there. Apple really put USB on the map when it ditched all it's old connectors and said that USB was the way to go.

Quantify this.

I'm pretty sure you can emulate old OS 8/9 software under OS X (even Intel OS X, they have a PPC emulator built in)

You're just demonstrating your own ignorance at this stage. Go read up about it a bit more and you'll find that it came from a completely different branch of UNIX from Linux. Linux was not really in a usable state for the general market when OS X came out, let alone when OS X's predecessor came out. Also, what about Windows NT? That was a complete rewrite too.

OS 9 was **** (and that's not my opinion - that's coming from serious Mac users that I know) and needed to be replaced. It's a pointless argument because you're the sort of person who, if they never rewrote it, would complain about Apple releasing the same crappy OS over and over again.

Mark Papermaster and Don Estridge (I already mentioned that somewhere else).

I absolutely HATE emulators. There are always issues, I know because I've used a lot of them (even the stupid rosetta ones; cursed piece of headache-inducing-rubbish).

EDIT: and I have no clue where you are going with the windows NT kernel (the only difference, was, 98's was monolithic). You should know XP and 98 generally have backwards-compatibility concerning drivers. The kernel really didn't do anything in that regard: in fact, I can run some DOS games natively in XP. I'd suggest you do your homework on the windows driver standards, and, just how compatible they are. Vista/7 use a completely different driver framework however. But most things still run: I can play age of empires 1 just fine.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: ch_123 on Sat, 27 March 2010, 04:22:18: Quote from: EverythingIBM;167233

EDIT: and I have no clue where you are going with the windows NT kernel (the only difference, was, 98's was monolithic).

Go read it on wiki. NT was a complete rewrite of the OS written by a load of engineers that Microsoft hired in from DEC. The 9x series were just extended versions of DOS, which is why they sucked so hard.

Earlier versions of NT (3-4) were quite different to the contemporary consumer Windows. It wasn't until Windows 2000 that they had an NT version that could reliably run software designed for the 9x series. I remember game boxes used to specifically state "Not compatible with Windows NT"

Quote
Mark Papermaster and Don Estridge (I already mentioned that somewhere else).

Estridge et al. were given a year to hack together some off the shelf components to make a computer that was sufficiently good to be competitive in the personal computer market, but not too good so that it wouldn't compete with IBM's higher end machines. There was nothing innovative about what they did, in fact, it was exactly the opposite. They considered using superior CPUs such as the Motorola 68k or the IBM 801 (the ancestor of the POWER architecture) but eventually settled on the 8088 because they thought that more people would want to program for it given the amount of Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 machines that were around. IBM projected that they'd make 50,000 of them before they'd scrap it and sell something better.

And we've been stuck with it ever since.

Quote
You should know XP and 98 generally have backwards-compatibility concerning drivers.

To an extent. 98 could use the newer driver type and the DOS type. NT couldn't use the DOS drivers. A lot of old hardware that worked under 98 didn't under XP.

Either way, as you pointed out, none of those drivers work under Vista and 7, and weren't you trying to make some point about new versions of Apple stuff being incompatible with older ones?

Quote
The kernel really didn't do anything in that regard:

It's not just the kernel, it's the whole back end of the OS. NT introduced the concept of a Hardware Abstraction Layer, which as the name would imply, acted as a layer between the software running on the OS and the machine's hardware. DOS (and by extension 9x) software could deal with the hardware directly, which caused pretty serious problems if the software did something wrong. NT's HAL ensured that if software did something wrong, it wouldn't take the system down. This is why you generally get an awful lot less blue screens under Win2k or later unless you're using dodgy drivers. It's also why NT had to have a different driver system.

Quote
in fact, I can run some DOS games natively in XP.

I highlighted the important part of this sentence. I remember quite well when I got my first Win XP machine, discovering to my horror that a load of my old DOS games (and even some 95/98 games although thankfully not all) just didn't run any more.

In fact, NT doesn't run any DOS stuff natively, it does it through a sort of virtual machine if memory serves me correct, which is why compatibility can be a hit and miss afair. 9x could run them natively because it was DOS, which meant better compatibility but had a lot of reliability issues.

Either way, it's a pointless debate given that all 64-bit versions of Windows have zero DOS compatibility anyway, so again you're criticizing Apple for having a failing that Windows also has.

Quote
I'd suggest you do your homework on the windows driver standards, and, just how compatible they are.

I already have, kktnxbai.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: Rajagra on Sat, 27 March 2010, 12:58:05: Quote from: ricercar;167231
RS422 and RS232 were different connectors for the same signals.

Except RS422 used differential signalling. I'm surprised they worked together reliably, without risk of damage.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: ch_123 on Sat, 27 March 2010, 13:08:48: From what I've just read, Apple's serial ports could support both RS-232 AND RS-422
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: Rajagra on Sat, 27 March 2010, 13:23:25: I suppose it depended on the chipset, it could have been dual-mode. In a similar way, the serial ports used in PCs *far* exceeded the RS232 standards. You could use them over longer distances and faster speeds than the standard would suggest.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: kishy on Sat, 27 March 2010, 13:26:13: Everything I've ever read suggesting the mini-DIN serial plug on older Macs was 100% equivalent to PCs (using DE9) in functionality.

Doesn't mean I've read the truth, but presumably that came out of people using it and finding it to be the case.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: microsoft windows on Sat, 27 March 2010, 13:28:41: Quote from: kishy;167164
ADB happened to use a connector equivalent to S-Video (only so many combinations you can get out of a mini-DIN plug, right?), so yes it works (though you won't find coiled ADB cables...but some view the coils as a bad thing)

Monitors used a really dumb plug...DA-15 I think. Whatever d-sub was used for PC joysticks.

You're right. Although with the monitors, they use VGA, just with a different pin-out. (I think 11 pins if I remember correctly).
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: kishy on Sat, 27 March 2010, 13:38:37: Quote from: microsoft windows;167400
You're right. Although with the monitors, they use VGA, just with a different pin-out. (I think 11 pins if I remember correctly).

15...DA15 lol.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: microsoft windows on Sat, 27 March 2010, 13:42:29: Quote from: kishy;167404
15...DA15 lol.

That sounds about right. It was a little bigger than the standard 9-pin serial.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: kishy on Sat, 27 March 2010, 13:46:29: Quote from: microsoft windows;167409
That sounds about right. It was a little bigger than the standard 9-pin serial.

Well, it's a DA15 plug...so it's 15 lol.

D = D-Sub class
A = shell size
15 = pin count

9 pin serial is DE9

D = D-sub class
E = shell size
9 = pin count

25 pin serial is DB25

...you get the idea.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: ch_123 on Sat, 27 March 2010, 13:49:49: SGI also used Mac's serial connection on their earlier machines.
Title: Apple Extended
Post by: D-EJ915 on Sat, 27 March 2010, 14:04:12: SGI's are RS-232 though, just the connector is the same. Also I just won a mislabeled one of these on ebay...so I'll be reviewing it I guess compared to the #2 version.