Ivan still loves his Apple II, which he started using in the late 1980s. He attends an Apple II conference every year.

These cufflinks, made from Shrinky Dink material with silver-tone metal attached at the back, are in the shape of the old Happy Mac icon.

How has Apple evolved? Has using computers become more or less creative? What tradeoffs have we made between accessibility and empowerment?

I’d like to take a moment to tell you about my favorite Mac. The Macintosh PowerBook 2400c, the subnotebook version of the more widely known 3400c, is one amazing Mac. It’s almost usable today if you have replaced its PowerPC 603ev CPU with a G3, which of course I did. In fact, I have the [...]

How to get a 5.25″ floppy onto a modern Mac Warning: this post contains some serious Apple retro geekery. I’ve actually had to exercise serious restraint with the details. You may want to skip this one unless Apple II’s, Color Classics, SCSI ethernet interfaces, PowerBook 2400′s, and other Apple ephemera get your blood flowing. Here’s [...]

A while back I planned to pull my beloved Apple //e (circa 1993) out of storage with the intent of a) having fun, and b) archiving anything noteworthy I found on my many 5.25″ floppy disks. I did, and the experience was both better and worse than I imagined. The experience was wonderfully tactile: the [...]

Well, for the time being this is going to me my retro computing blog, because that’s been what I’ve been putting a chunk of my spare time into lately. This all started with my desire to preserve my Apple II 5.25″ floppy disks. The short answer there: to my surprise and delight, they’re fine. Most [...]

I’ve got a box, filled with 5.25″ floppy disks. Most of them are for the Apple II computer. There are also disks for old IBM PC’s, a Kaypro 4 , and who knows what else. It’s time to excavate and salvage, which is not real easy. There’s basically three hurdles: 1) reading the disks at all, 2) getting them on to something modern computers can read, and 3) getting those files to be usable on a modern computer. So it’s time to bust out my 1983 Apple //e and get disking. The plan right now looks like I will copy the disks to a flash memory card like those in a camera, but I’ve also got an unusual older Mac which is one of the few which can use Apple II software, so I might be able to copy the disks to that. I’m pretty excited about it. It will be like seeing old friends. Friends made of bits. I’m not a computer person or anything.