March 23, 2008

My MacBook Pro like my Mac Pro, is being backed up hourly by Mac OS X Leopard's "Time Machine" backup system. For the first time since installing Leopard on either of my Macs, I had need to put its full-restore capability to the test. I laid my trust in its ability to fully restore my system and...did it bite me? Nay! It worked perfectly. My MacBook Pro now looks just like it did when the last backup occurred. Wonderous.

Less nice is the sequence of events that invited me to put Time Machine to the test. I have OS X's "Boot Camp" feature to thank for this.

I recently described the saga of getting Boot Camp going on my Mac Pro. The desire to play a certain Windows-only game with my wife on the comfort of our couch lead me to setup Boot Camp on the MacBook Pro, as well. So I cleaned up my boot volume and began the now-familiar Boot Camp setup drill.

It is here that I will say that rather near the top of the list of times when one would very particularly not be interested in experiencing a kernel panic would have to be when one's OS is in the middle of performing a live re-partition of said OS's boot volume. Sadly, such tragedy befell me early in the weekend. The result? Roughly one quarter of my MacBook Pro's internal, 100GB drive became some sort of nether-partition that, after repeated attempts, I could not reclaim. Since low-level formats are a thing of the SCSI past, I was thinking I would actually have to go out and purchase a new drive. But finally, jiggering about removing and adding and adjusting the partition map in Disk Util forced said nether-partition to slacken its icy grip on one quarter of my hard drive. A tidy, little 14GB Windows XP partition now sits along side my Leopard partition. Things are in order.

So about six hours of my weekend was burned in getting things back to happy on my beloved laptop. It did necessitate a jaunt into the district to retrieve my Time Machine backup drive from the office, as I'd heard that a full restore can take hours to complete and since this Mac that I ferry in to and out of the office daily is my development workstation, I couldn't afford to start the restoration drill on Monday morning (after all, office time is all about fully productive web development from arrival to COB). I've got a photo of my daughter dancing gaily upon our meeting room table to prove it. But, thankfully, all is right with the world once again.

March 20, 2008

Let me first say "no." I am not in the process of transforming this retro computing blog of mine into Byte Cellar: All Things As Mac OS X Dumb Terminals. Honest!

But yes, I do seem to suffer from a woeful addiction. I admit it to you, my readers. (I can feel a weight lifted already.) And the undeniable evidence of this addiction? I've wired up yet another vintage system as a dumb terminal to Mac OS X. Hey -- third time's the charm, right?

First, a bit about the vintage system in question. Both of my regular readers may recall that about six months ago I was intrigued by what I heard of Earl Evans' interest in and restoration efforts concerning one of the first laptop computers, the Epson PX-8 "Geneva" (circa 1984), on his Retrobits podcast. I remembered the unit well thanks to a review I read of it back in 1984 in an issue of Computers & Electronics magazine. In fact, I still had the magazine on hand so I dug it out and scanned in the review, along with a nice two-page Epson PX-8 advertisement. I was pleased to hear back from Earl who rather enjoyed having the review to read and let me know that new-in-box PX-8s were still available for purchase from Star Technology! And, of course, I did.

The PX-8 is a great little machine. It weighs 5 lbs, features an 80-character by 8-line LCD display with angle adjustment, is powered by a Z-80 compatible CMOS CPU, runs CP/M 2.2 out of ROM and runs for 15 hours per charge. It comes with several extremely basic apps on-board (including BASIC, actually), and additional programs can be added by way of pop-in ROM chips or via floppy, if you're fortunate enough to have gotten your hands on an elusive FP-10 floppy drive. Epson sold the PX-8 for $999 back in its day.

I brought the unit in to the office some time ago to fiddle with occasionally during free time at lunch. I noticed it sitting there the other day, next to my Apple //c which acts as a dumb terminal tied to my MacBook Pro when it occurred to me that I had an oldschool Mac mini-DIN 8 serial cable tucked in a drawer here...and that the PX-8's RS-232C port is likewise a mini-DIN 8.... After a few minutes of hunting down pinouts on the web and sketching out a crude null-modem signal mapping by hand I pulled out the Swiss Army knife and started stripping cable. I was at work and had no soldering iron on-hand, so it was twist, twist, twist and time to cross the fingers. I connected the PX-8 to my USB-to-serial converter, opened an 80x8 terminal window in Mac OS X, issued the magic commands and voila!

It's not a particularly ideal terminal -- I don't believe the system's terminal app is even VT-52 compliant. Like the eMate 300 I put through the same drill, I don't picture the PX-8 being a permanent fixture in the office. But hey, it was a fun way to spend lunch!

I hope you enjoy the photos.