All the Macs Are Back Home
I got my Mac Plus back yesterday from repairs, thanks to my Mac Guru, Jeff, who has been overseeing the health of my Macs for several years. Our love (okay, obsession) for Macs continues to bind us even after he has moved on from being a student to a full-fledged, well-paid programmer. He is my go-to guy for all things Mac at the Electronic Literature Lab. The Plus (System Code Name: “Mr. T”) was produced from January 1986 to October 1990. Mine was manufactured in 1988, runs System 6.0.3, and has 2K of RAM installed on it. It came with System Finder 5.1 and could, if pressed, run System 7.5.5,…
Vintage G3 iMacs Are Now Online Running Netscape Communicator
We can now show Talan Memmot’s Lexia to Perplexia and other works of electronic literature requiring Netscape Communicator in the lab, thanks to our terrific IT team and my research assistant Greg Philbrook.
Visitors to ELL
I invited Nathan Stahlman and Jim Voorhies, from Instructional Technologies, Inc. (ITI), to visit the lab today to show them the computers and talk about the kinds of research we do in ELL. ITI has been partnering with the CMDC program for the last year and a half, sponsoring our 2D simulation summer study last year and our iPublishing summer study this one. Since meeting them, they have hired five of our students and Nathan now sits on the CMDC’s Advisory Committee. But the most important issue to mention about Nathan and Jim is that they are both geeks. So, when they saw the vintage computers, it did get them pretty…
Getting Ready for Pathfinders
Big doings in ELL this week. We are getting our Mac Plus back from repairs in time for the first Pathfinders’ traversal featuring Stuart Moulthrop. Fresh paint, new tables and chairs, and cabinets for storage should be in place by the end of the week. Seti has organized the media library, and Greg and Jeff have been working to develop specs for each of the 24 computers.
