The Vintage Computer Festival East 2023 Report

April 26, 2023 by Dan Vincent in podcast

Whirring hard drives, clackety keyboards, and CRT monitors—ah, the sounds of spring. Unable to resist this siren song, certain species of migratory nerds find themselves congregating at the source of this cacophony: the Jersey Shore. Here, in Userlandia, we’re taking a road trip to the east coast’s finest antique computer event: the Vintage Computer Festival East.

Ah, New Jersey. Home of the Devils, Bruce Springsteen, and Rum Ham. My last visit was back in 2021 for VCF East. After missing the 2022 event due to a scheduling conflict, I cleared my calendar to attend in 2023. I enjoyed the vibe of the 2021 show—check out my review from back then—and a five hour drive from my home base northwest of Boston is reasonable for a long weekend getaway. Driving to the show makes it possible to buy or sell big, bulky computers that won’t fit in a carry-on. With a car packed full of hardware to sell in the consignment hall, I set my course to the Garden State and hopped on the highway.

VCF East’s usual venue is the InfoAge Science and History Museums in Wall, New Jersey. Not much has changed since my last visit, and the same rooms (save for one) played their same roles. Hundreds of antique computers and the people that love them congregated in these halls over the course of three days. With exhibitors that exhibit! Vendors that vend! And consignments to consign! So let’s dive in to the highlights, lowlights, and LED lights surrounding VCF East.

Exhibits and Vendors

Flipping through the show booklet or scrolling through the VCF website reveals an impressive slate of exhibitors and special guests. Keeping a show fresh and attracting new visitors without sacrificing its soul is a tough job, but the VCF crew is up to the challenge. By selecting broad themes like “computers in education” and “keeping computing alive” the team fostered a museum road show vibe. Saturday and Sunday promised over forty tables of exhibitors and vendors across three halls. Some familiar faces returned, while others were new to the show.

One thing I appreciate about many of the exhibits is that they’re not just static machines on display, but active demonstrations of what the computers can do. The first hall was a wonderful microcosm of the entire show. Dan Fitzgerald’s Making Music with the Macintosh featured a Mac Plus, SE, and Mini running various MIDI and DAW apps. You could compose and record your own digital music and take it home with you thanks to a giant TASCAM mixing board.

Across the room was Tech Dungeon, selling some Commodore equipment and accessories like their Freeloader 64 cart. For $25 the Freeloader 64 gives you a system monitor, enhanced DOS, a reset button, and fast load functionality. Maybe I’ll write an in-depth review it in the future. Next, Eli’s Software Encyclopedia had hundred of boxed software titles for sale. Three for $20? Sounds like a fair deal to me. C64, Apple, IBM, and Amiga titles were on hand, many still in their shrink wrap. Foenix Retro Systems had a very interesting booth, demonstrating their F256K “modern” retro computer. It’s a system powered by a 6502 family CPU and its own custom TinyVICKY video system. It’s the first I’ve heard of the project, and I liked what I saw. A Fire Emblem-style demo will always catch my eye. Rounding out the room was Cosmic Void, selling some very cool retro hair dye and computer themed accessories.

The next room offered even more systems to play with. Want to read and punch some paper tape? Corey Cohen’s got you covered. Vlado Vince’s collection of eastern European micros gave a glimpse into a world of computing that many of us hadn’t seen. A magnetic core memory demo reminded us what life was like before DRAM and SRAM. The one-two punch of The Unseen World of PowerPC and Workstation Overload featured many expensive machines I only read about back in the day. Alpha, PowerPC, PA-RISC, and more were on tap to show that Intel wasn’t the only game in town.

Eric Rangell’s booth displayed Apple computers used in education back in the eighties. The centerpiece was an Apple IIGS wired to a MIDI keyboard running music tutor software. But just as important was a IIC running Broderbund’s Science Toolkit. Live experiments ran all weekend thanks to working sensors monitored by the program.

The role of Macs in education and edutainment were well represented on the northern half of the hall. Peter and Heather Fletcher’s exhibition on the Living Books CD-ROM series was a nostalgia bomb for people like me who grew up on the cutting edge of multimedia. Across the way was the Macintosh Classroom, a series of Apple computers running learning software and common educational apps. It was like being back in a 90s middle school computer lab, when Apple was the principal computer in American schools.

Southeast Pennsylvania’s Kennet Classic Computer Museum was on the road here at VCF. An SGI Indigo was on hand to detail new museum exhibits and it looked good doing it. Make sure to stop by the next Kennet Classic events in May and September!

I can’t forget to mention the Motorola 88000 exhibit. One of the rarer RISC chips, it’s hard to find working examples of these machines. In an alternate universe, this is what Apple switched to instead of PowerPC.

Dave from Usage Electric had some of his antique terminals and tubes on hand, along with a teletype that could have been ripped from the pages of a steampunk comic book.

The other main exhibit hall was jam-packed with even more variety. It also had its own array of workstations, featuring 50 Years of Unix by System Source. It’s the greatest hits of workstations by Sun, NeXT, Apple, HP, and more. An Apple Workgroup Server running A/UX, a BeBox that seemed a little out of place, and SGI workstations rounded out this colorful clique.

You might remember the hype surrounding Ken and Roberta Williams’ virtual reality remake of Colossal Cave Adventure. It’s not just hype anymore—the game was released earlier this year! Marcus Mera had a full VR setup for you to try the game, as well as an exhibit celebrating its journey from text to VR. If the VR headset was too new for you, then you could play along with a teletype machine in all its clattering glory.

Working Digital Equipment Corporation into the education theme isn’t as tricky as you’d expect. Indeed, Ethan Dicks’ DEC in Education exhibit had a learning PDP-8 and some fun DEC workbooks to teach you about mini computing. Once you’re done with your lesson, you can get your photo taken and converted to ASCII art at the PDP-8 photo booth.

SGI also had some serious representation, with several booths showing various SGI systems and applications. Multiplayer Quake was on hand, along with Alias demos and the SGI Web.

Alastair Hewitt is back again with his TTL logic computer, now with many upgrades and improvements. This time I didn’t forget to bring my LaCie ElectronBlue monitor hood for his monitor! My monitor may be long gone, but his monitor is now complete.

RetroTech Chris’ IBM Classroom had a full network setup featuring IBM’s Classroom LAN Administration system, or ICLAS. This might be the only operational Token Ring network I’ve seen in person. Props to the PS/2 Model 30 286—I’ll get one back again some day!

You might remember Behind the Screens, the folks who preserve old Weather Channel and Preview Guide systems. They were out in full force, and they’ve expanded a bit. Want to know how cable scrambling worked? It’s right there! Just, uh, don’t tell ASCAP about the live performances of music videos.

I also spent some time talking to Dave from Dave’s Retro Video Lab about his collection of vintage camcorders. Despite the fact that I’m producing videos these days, I don’t really consider myself a “video guy”—it’s never been my forte, and I’m usually more comfortable with audio and writing. But Dave and I had a great chat about the invention of electronic image stabilization and our struggles with “doing it live.” His enthusiasm is infectious and his live stream of the event is worth checking out.

Friends of the show Steve from Mac 84, Sean from Action Retro, Ron from Ron’s Computer Vids, and Mike from Mike’s Mac Shack were all gathered together at their Totally Normal Computing table. Their greatest hits were there, like Mike’s prototype iMac G5 and Shaun’s cursed SE/30, but they brought some new material as well. The Apple I replica attracted a lot of attention, as did the ImageWriter LQ and the 20th Anniversary Macintosh G4.

Want to see how digital retouching and painting for video was done before we had Photoshop on commodity hardware? Adrian Wilson presented a working Quantel Paintbox, which allowed many attendees to give live demonstrations of their artistic abilities.

If you’re a TRS-80 fan, then you’ll love Mike Lowen’s Tandyland. S-tier name, no notes. A TRS-80 timeline from the 1977 original all the way up to the mighty model 4P celebrated the life and times of a foundational microcomputer.

Lastly, a big shout-out to Amiga of Rochester, Retro Innovations, and DosDude for performing live repairs, custom board assembly, and upgrades. One such upgrade was soldering G3 CPU upgrades in ball-grid-array Mac logic boards. Turns out that you can upgrade many 604 Macs to a G3 processor if you can solder ball grid array chips! I happened to catch one of these upgrades live, and he made it look so easy. Don’t try this at home, kids.

Panels and Guests

Scheduled along with the exhibitions were three days of talks, classes, and special guests. Hands-on learning has been a part of the Federation’s mission for years now, and the tradition continues in 2023. A learning space dedicated to Commodore computers was one of the headline events for this year’s show, and it didn’t disappoint. Beginner and advanced classes on Commodore BASIC and assembly language were available on all three days to teach you how to keep up with your Commodore. Learning about Commodore wasn’t limited to programming, either. Dave McMurtrie of commodore.international hosted history classes where you could learn about the business dealings of Jack Tramiel and company.

Next door in the Computer Deconstruction Lab was a mini-repairathon as well as build-your-own-board sessions. XT-IDE kits were on hand along with other projects to test your soldering skills. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to solder, because classes were available to help teach you how to wield an iron.

All three days had a jam-packed panel schedule. You could spend eight hours a day watching all the talks, with subjects ranging from the Apple Lisa, the Nabu, computers in schools, and advanced C64 sprite programming. Unfortunately I missed most of Friday’s panels, which means I’ll have to catch the VODs that the Federation conveniently posts on their Youtube channel. I did catch the Friday Streamer Roundtable, featuring Adrian Black, Jeri Ellsworth, David Lovett, and Fran Blanche. Casting Bill Herd as the moderator was a brilliant choice. I love Bill’s candor—he’s able to get away with some good-natured ribbing, especially with this group of guests. Bill also hosted Saturday’s roundtable, which featured David Murray (the 8-Bit Guy), Steve from Mac 84, Sean from Action Retro, and Mike from Mike’s Mac Shack. Both panels were worth attending as the guests had very different answers to Bill’s questions.

My favorite non-roundtable panel award goes to Jeri Ellsworth. Retro nuts know her best as the wizard behind the C64-on-a-chip found in the C64 Direct to TV joystick. But that device is only part of her story. She told tales of her time as a computer shop owner, race car builder, and augmented reality startup CEO. I highly recommend checking out the VOD once it’s live.

Consignment

One of the big draws of VCF East is the consignment hall. It’s open to anyone willing to schlep their stuff and fill out a form. It’s like stepping back in time to an old computer store, which means you can see some seriously cool stuff. At previous shows I’ve arranged some trades ahead of time with other attendees, but this year I decided to try my luck as a seller. Overall the consignment sales experience was excellent, with only a few minor hiccups that were handled by the VCF team.

Life as a seller starts with signups. Back in 2021, you had to list your items for sale on a paper form. 2022 overhauled the process by introducing an electronic inventory system and bar code price stickers. This carried forward to 2023 and it was a pleasure to use. After sending an email expressing your interest in consignment, the staff replied with a Google Sheet linked to their inventory system. All I needed to do was itemize my items, proclaim my prices, and quantify my quantities. At check-in the staff printed out a string of price stickers using that spreadsheet data. When the barcodes are scanned, the point of sale system looks up the price and seller info. This makes tracking who sold what and how much they’re owed a breeze. Checkout and payments are handled by VCF staff, saving consignors from babysitting their wares.

Not that I would have been able to babysit anyway. Unlike 2021, which hosted the consignment in the large open hall in building 9010-C, 2023’s consignment was in the two adjacent cafeteria rooms. Apparently this is because that hall is under renovation. These smaller, cramped quarters meant a maximum capacity of 25-ish people, and that meant a long wait just to browse. If you weren’t in line first thing in the morning, then you were going to miss out on some of the unique items for sale.

Being a consignor also grants some advantages as a buyer. After bringing in my items, I was able to browse around and see what’s for sale. There were some legit deals on those shelves. I bet this $100 A600 was bought by the first person in line. But what caught my eye was a Compaq ProLinea 4/33. If you’ve read my Computers of Significant History about this machine, you’d know why I want it. $70 was a reasonable price and I knew I had to get in line early to have a good chance at buying it.

I joined the line on Saturday at 8:30 AM in preparation for a 9 AM opening. By any reasonable measure I had a decent spot in line, and I was in the room by 9:30 or so. Fortunately nobody had snagged the ProLinea, so I was able to bring it home. My buyer’s experience was painless. A Square cash register meant customers could pay with cash or cards, and the barcode scanning made checkout a breeze. The easier it is for people to buy things, the easier it is for consignors to make money, and the easier it is for the show to earn a 15% commission.

There were hiccups and adjustments, of course. Most were born from good intentions. The free pile was originally located in the corner of one of the consignment rooms. Between the crowds and issues with checking receipts, it was eventually moved outside. Good thing it didn’t rain during the day. This change wasn’t immediately obvious, since there was no signage or announcements, but consignment staff informed people when asked.

Another inconvenience to shoppers was a perk for others: the consignment hall closed for an hour or two to serve lunch on Saturday. That’s because lunch was served from inside the hall. I believe this food service is in partnership with the JROTC or something, as I saw volunteers serving various foodstuffs from the larger consignment room. I overheard grumbling from various attendees about this, and I see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, offering lunch for sale is a great idea because there’s not much around for food unless you want to give up your parking spot and drive off the campus. On the other hand, the crowd was enormous and losing a chunk of the day to browse and buy might have messed with your availability for shopping. Still, VCF did what they could within the constraints put upon them. An outdoor food tent for the volunteers or a food truck would be a good idea. I also didn’t really like the idea of food mixed in and around stuff for sale, but as far as I know there were no spills or disasters.

I did have one consignment problem during the weekend. One of my items for sale was a Sun Ultra 10 workstation with various accessories included. Sometime on Saturday the matching keyboard and mouse disappeared. I only noticed this late in the day because I was busy at panels and couldn’t really check the room due to the long lines. I notified the show staff, who made it a priority to find the missing items. Luckily, they did—the keyboard and mouse were reunited with the tower before the hall opened on Sunday morning. The system eventually sold later that day. I can’t thank the VCF staff enough for taking the problem seriously and saving the day.

This leads to another tricky part of consignment, and that’s item lots. I had two lots to deal with—the aforementioned Sun workstation and a TI-99 collection I was selling on behalf of a friend. The TI-99 was easy enough—I had the machine and a box of software and accessories. I attached a readme and price tag to the box, and set the computer next to it. Seemed fairly obvious that they went together. With the Sun, I laid the accessories on top of the case. In my mind, this implied they went together, but I can see the ambiguity there. I want the accessories to be seen to increase the attractiveness of the lot, but with the way things were laid out on the shelves it’s hard to tell where one group stops and another begins. I’m not sure of a good way to improve this, other than to use more readies and tape and boxes to keep everything together.

Another conundrum is dealing with the rush. Given the number of Saturday attendees this year, there still would have been lines and wait times if the larger hall was in use. But with how tightly packed the merch was and how few people were let in, the whole thing had a Black Friday kinda vibe, and I don’t think that’s the atmosphere the show runners were angling for. I hope there isn’t an escalation of either camping or backroom dealing in our future. That said, the lunchtime break did have one benefit: it cleared out the line, which reset the vibe of the room.

My other points about consignment are more towards fellow sellers and, to a lesser degree, buyers. I’ve done a lot of conventions where I’ve tabled and sold things, and the key to making sales is knowing your audience. I saw a lot of Mac Pro towers, and the vast majority didn’t sell. Odds were that they were asking for too much money, but let’s be honest: people aren’t going to this show to buy ten year old Xeons. Haggling was an option, but that required getting contact information from the volunteers. I bet most buyers didn’t even know that was an option. If you’re a seller open to negotiations, I’d recommend attaching signs with your phone number to your items. Most consignors who wanted to cut prices opted to update their spreadsheets and print new price labels on Sunday morning.

Another piece of advice: don’t bring a bunch of late-model office or home PCs. They might be useful to somebody, but it’s not in the spirit of the show, and it’s no surprise there were still a bunch around at the last call. I saw a lot of plasticky Pentium 4 Dell towers and late aughts HP boxes from various sellers. Now, I know a decent number of them sold, but the leftovers implied that supply far outstripped demand. These machines have very little collectible value at the moment. Of course, we said the same thing about Pentium MMX PCs a decade ago. Just give it time.

What about pricing? Most of the gear ran the gamut from “bargain” to “expensive but fair.” I think the most expensive item was an Amiga 4000 tower with a Video Toaster and some accouterments which stickered at $3,000. Yes, that’s a lot of money, but given that they’re generally unobtanium, I’m willing to allow it. One of the gotchas of trading in vintage gear is that you might have something that’s rare, but if you don’t have a buyer, then it doesn’t matter what it’s valued at. The guidelines warned that eBay prices were “too high,” and I think most people heeded that warning. You also have to factor in the show’s 15% commission into your price, which I think is a fair take. Everything sold at the consignment hall benefitted the Federation in some way—not a bad idea for a fundraiser.

I think people like using these events as an opportunity to pass gear along to someone who needs it. If you bought something with the intent to flip, you’re bad and you should feel bad. That’s why I’m glad when good people find a good bargain. A great example is this Macintosh LC 575 picked up by Ron from Ron’s Computer Vids. It was tucked away with the faceplate off to the side, and the price label listed the Apple ML model number, which most people don’t understand. A perfect recipe for being overlooked until noticed by a discerning eye. The machine powered right up to a desktop with no problems whatsoever. Maybe the person who brought didn’t have an ADB keyboard and didn’t know about soft power. Had I seen it, I would have bought it. For only $85, this was an incredible bargain, much like the $100 A600. Good find, Ron!

Things slowed down as Sunday wore on. Some otherwise decent machines didn’t sell, either because they were spendy or a little niche. Still, I don’t think anyone was unhappy with their experience. The only thing of mine that didn’t sell was an old boat anchor dual socket Pentium III Dell server, and it was kind of a reach anyway. Getting paid was easy too. Give your name to the staff, they look up your sales sheet, and print it out. After signing with your John Q. Nixon you can request Venmo, Paypal, or cash monies. Aw yeah.

The Experience

As I wandered around the show, I heard some chatter that their Eventbrite presale numbers were more than triple the previous year. The number was somewhere in the range of 650, and that didn’t include at the door tickets. I totally believe it, especially on Saturday. The main exhibit halls were crowded with people, and latecomers on Saturday had trouble finding a parking spot. Sunday was considerably less busy, which made it easier to explore and spend time with the various exhibits. There was still plenty of people, but it felt far less claustrophobic.

What did I bring home from the show, you ask? Unlike VCF Midwest, where I went all-out on that NeXT kit, the neat and weird stuff I would have bought (like the Amigas) were all gone by the time I made it into the consignment hall. I picked up the ProLinea and a $3 new-in-box Compaq keyboard, both of which will be featured in an upcoming video. The Freeloader 64 cart was the other tech item I bought. I also bought a few T-shirts, including the C64 one that I missed from last year’s show. T-shirts and other VCF merch were on sale next to the consignment register, which also has its pros and cons. Yes, you have to wait in line to get into consignment, but I think it’s great for impulse buys—might as well get a shirt while you’re buying a computer, right?

What does the future hold for VCF East? Crowd management has to be high on their list. I’m not sure if the growth trajectory will continue like this, but if Eventbrite pre-sales look similar for next year’s show they’ll surely make some adjustments. I’m sure having some very popular YouTubers on hand goosed the number, as people around here rarely get the opportunity to meet David Murray or Adrian Black. I heard a few people saying that attendees “should really consider some of our other events” like the swap meets, but unless you’re within day trip distance it’s tough to justify the swap meet, especially if you’re east of New York. If I were to go to the swap meet, I’d have to spend a minimum of two tanks of gas (probably $90), $30 to $40 worth of tolls, and a $150 night at a hotel for the chance of finding something interesting. And that isn’t even talking about the traffic. There’s also no guarantee that there would be stuff I’d want to buy, although I’ll grant that the odds are very good. It’s a lot easier to justify that kind of expenditure on a long weekend with a lot of events.

Yes, consignment and trading equipment is a large part of the show’s appeal. But visitors want to see the panels, they want to see the exhibits, and they want to talk to the guests. The venn diagram of people who would go to the swap meets or smaller events doesn’t completely overlap with a VCF crowd. I saw license plates from as far away as Washington—jury’s out on whether they were rental cars.

But in spite of the crowds, the lines, and the cost, VCF east was a smashing success. The best part of these shows is always the people. I owe a lot of thanks to Steve, Mike, Sean, and Ron for letting me be part of the Macinsquad, as I dubbed it. Friends don’t let friends take questionable laser printers, even if they’re free. I also met some new people and made several connections, which is another important part of these events. Waiting in line could be boring, but it’s actually an opportunity to make friends with your fellow waiters.

If you’re considering attending next year’s event, try going for the whole weekend and not just Saturday. The VCF team has done a good job spreading events across the three days, and I expect they’ll continue tweaking their schedules to balance the load. Given the changes and updates they’ve implemented already over the past few years, I’m fairly confident they can handle the growth in interest and attendance. The Federation staff put in a Herculean amount of effort into the show, and it really does come through in their presentation and enthusiasm. So if you’re interested in going to the show, make a vacation out of it and enjoy everything New Jersey has to offer. Maybe I’ll see you there.

Which SimCity is the Greatest SimCity?

March 02, 2023 by Dan Vincent in podcast

This originally appeared in Pixel Addict Magazine. It’s been expanded and revised for a video version. You should subscribe to Pixel Addict for more content like this!

Here in Userlandia: I dunno. I never heard ‘ah no mayah.

It’s rare when a game combines art and science in such a way that it becomes a cultural phenomenon. SimCity’s one of them, and I became a SimAddict the first time I plopped a zone. It doesn’t matter if it’s new or old, because I always enjoy a good city building experience. But you never forget your first love, which is why I always come back to the one that started it all. Poll a random gathering of gamers and chances are you’ll find many with happy memories of Will Wright’s SimCity. Whether you’re dutifully detailing a downtown district or marshaling monsters to make mayhem in midtown, there’s no wrong way to play. But maybe it’s been a while since you’ve micromanaged a microcomputer micrometropolis, and you’re ready to dive back into city planning. Thankfully, classic SimCity is the choice for you, with the right amount of charm and complexity to entertain newbies and veterans alike.

Or it would be, if it existed. What is “the original SimCity,” anyway? There's over a dozen “original SimCities,” each for a different platform, each with its own perks and quirks. Just check out this list—Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro and Acorn Electron, Macintosh, Atari ST, IBM PC, Super Nintendo, UNIX, Psion, Palm Pilot, Sharp X68000, FM Towns, Amiga, enhanced Amiga, Amiga CDTV, and a partridge in a pear tree. The same gamers polled earlier will probably share their fond memories of whatever system they played it on too. Before you know it, they’ll all be arguing about which SimCity is the true classic.

“The BBC Micro version did the most with the least!”

“No, the PC version had the most add-ons!“

“Oh yeah, well, the Super Nintendo version had the best graphics and sound!”

“Fools, the UNIX version had network play!”

There’s nothing gamers love more than an old-fashioned platform fight, and I’m happy to oblige. My history with SimCity started on the C64, where I treated it more like a drawing app than a city builder. I soon graduated to the SNES version, where I spent countless hours crafting copious cities. I even played my fair share on PCs and Macs at school. SimCity ignited a love of city building games that still burns in me today. I’ve played every SimCity sequel and spinoff—even that weird one on the Nintendo DS. So fear not, because as a SimCity expert who's spent years preparing for this moment, I'm here to tell you which classic SimCity is the true classic SimCity.

First to be eliminated, and first chronologically, is the Commodore 64 version. Yes, it's the first game to bear the SimCity name, but it's not the best. Its gameplay was limited, and slower than rush hour traffic when you didn't build enough roads. And its presentation was noticeably worse than the other 8-bits. Think of C64 SimCity as a historical curiosity, like Action Comics #1: something to check out to see where the series began, but not the definitive take. Speaking of the other 8-bits, the Acorn, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC versions manage to cram the complete gameplay experience into their tiny memory footprints, which is an impressive feat on its own. They have better graphics and sound than the Commodore version, but obviously they're not up to the caliber of the 16-bit platforms. The PC-98, FM Towns, and X68000 versions are nice to play for gamers fluent in Japanese—or so I assume, because that group doesn't include me. The UNIX version may have multiplayer, but it’s so hard to run that you’ll never get to try it, much less find a buddy to share it with. PDA versions are right out. These may be good SimCities, but they are not great SimCities.

This leaves the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Apple Macintosh, IBM PC, and Super Nintendo. Now it gets tougher. You can play the Amiga, Atari ST, or Mac versions and be confident you'll get the complete gameplay experience. There’s even a terrain editor and custom graphics packs, for those who like to customize. Of these three, the Mac supports larger, higher-res screens, but the enhanced Amiga version has better graphics. Still, actually running these versions is more challenging than using the Deluxe PC CD-ROM or emulating the SNES. They’re still not the greatest SimCities.

That leaves us with two contenders: the IBM PC and Super Nintendo. The IBM PC itself had multiple versions—MS DOS, OS/2, Windows 3.1, and Deluxe 32-bit for Windows 95. The DOS version is more like the Amiga and ST versions, but in the interest of fairness, we’ll use the Deluxe 32-bit Windows version as a point of reference. It’ll even run on modern Windows, making it the easiest way to experience classic SimCity. Playing SNES SimCity is almost as easy, thanks to ubiquitous SNES emulation.

The Super Nintendo version makes a strong opening argument thanks to its audiovisual prowess. A crack team of Nintendo pixel artists created brand new graphics, taking full advantage of the system’s capabilities. Watching the seasons change to the tune of Soyo Oka’s brilliant soundtrack is one of the most Zen experiences in gaming. Not satisfied with just updating the graphics and sound, Will Wright and Shigeru Miyamoto teamed up to tweak the gameplay too, crafting the best SimCity possible on a console. New mechanics like bank loans, special rewards, and enhanced tiers of city services are major improvements over other versions of SimCity. Computer gamers wouldn’t get these features until SimCity 2000!

The PC version’s graphics and sound might not be as good as the SNES, but it takes the lead in performance and usability. As good as the SNES version is with a controller, a PC gamer with a mouse and keyboard is a master of multitasking. Maps, tools, and charts are displayed in their own windows alongside your city view, which makes it easier to track your city’s growth without interrupting construction. Plus, the gameplay is literally faster—a 486 PC runs rings around the Super Nintendo’s 65C816. I appreciated these advantages when playing SimCity on a PC, even though I missed the SNES's changing seasons. Plus, PC gamers can create their own custom maps, which is impossible on a console.

It’s a tough call, but SimCity for Super Nintendo is the greatest SimCity. The PC version might be a better simulation, but the SNES version is a better game. It’s the definitive version of a classic that still endures because it’s the complete package. You’ll be charmed by the graphics and sound, but you’ll keep coming back to try to reach the next population milestone. Or you can just enjoy the bonsai experience of putting roads and residences wherever you like, because you’re the mayor and it’s your city. Just remember that happy citizens make for a happy mayor.

What’s Inside A NeXT Computer Accessory Kit?

November 23, 2022 by Dan Vincent in podcast

Here in Userlandia, we’re entering the NeXT dimension.

Ah, NeXT. Now there’s a corporation as lousy as it was brilliant. With their bold black hardware, their object-oriented software, their memorable marketing—and unfortunately, their problematic pricing—NeXT workstations were unlike anything the competition put out. Steve Jobs often bragged that the NeXT was five years ahead of its time—hence the name. But being ahead of your time is no guarantee of world domination—just ask the creators of the Amiga. After five long years selling very few of its very expensive computers, NeXT retreated from the hardware business and shuttered its highly automated Fremont factory. It survived as a software company long enough to be acqui-hired by Apple in a last-ditch effort to save the faltering Macintosh. RIP NeXT Computer Corporation. It died as it lived: spending Ross Perot’s money.

Death for corporations is as certain as it is for humans, but unlike with humans, it doesn't have to be the end. Like your favorite underappreciated artist, NeXT was far more successful after its demise. Every Apple device sold over the past twenty-ish years runs an operating system based on NeXT software. More people know about NeXT today than ever before because of Apple's miraculous turnaround after Steve Jobs rejoined the company. That awareness, combined with the trendiness of retro computing, means a hot market for old NeXT gear. Even a non-functioning NeXT looks good on a shelf. But actually getting a NeXT on that shelf is easier said than done. According to my sources—which, annoyingly, don't cite their sources—barely fifty thousand NeXT computers were actually sold. Most were used in corporate or university settings, which makes finding complete examples even more difficult because institutions have a tendency to sell off unused hardware. The spooks at the CIA loved NeXT machines, maybe theirs were melted down.

Getting the NeXT Box — Victory at the Auction!

But owning hardware isn’t the be-all and end-all of the vintage computer hobby. Tons of peripherals, software, manuals, merch, and media are ready to move in with your old computers. The best way to find this memorabilia are places like swap meets and vintage computer shows, and that’s how I acquired the subject of this episode. Listed in the 2022 VCF Midwest Auction preview was a “Complete NeXT Cube Documentation Set.” “Big deal,” I thought, “it’s just some manuals.” But when it came up for bids, I realized I was wrong to judge an item by its listing. It was actually a complete accessory kit for a first-generation NeXT Computer. This NeXT box contained not only a complete set of documentation, but also software, warranty cards, setup sheets, and the famous NeXT computer brochure. Topping it off was a sheet of NeXT logo stickers, and I’m a sucker for shiny stickers. If no one else had been interested, I could have walked away with it for a mere $50, but apparently I'm not the only one with excellent taste in antiquated computer paraphernalia, and after an honest-to-god bidding war, I paid $270. A small price to pay to support the convention.

Discovering a complete-in-box NeXT Cube or NeXTstation might not even be possible these days. I thought the same thing for a complete accessory kit. This accessory box might be the closest I ever come to getting a new NeXT computer. But buying a new computer isn’t just about the computer—at least, not for me. It’s also about the experience of setting it up and settling in. That means perusing the packaging, browsing the booklets, and enjoying the extras. It’s the same vibe you get when opening up an old big-box computer game and combing through all the feelies. NeXT certainly obliged on this front, providing a hefty accessory kit that held everything you needed to get started.

The NeXT Brochure

Opening the box reveals the famous NeXT computer brochure. Granted, the NeXT brochure has long since been scanned and uploaded, but actually holding a real one is a different experience. This particular example shows some signs of use but it’s in otherwise excellent condition. Actual-sized photographs of the one-foot cubic computer adorn the front and back covers, giving you a taste of what’s to come. Each page is printed on heavy 100 to 120 pound satin text paper, which is almost as thick as the cover. This isn’t some throwaway piece—the designers wanted you to treat this brochure with respect.

In keeping with NeXT's intended user base of academics, the brochure opens with a thesis statement. A NeXT Computer was, and I quote, “the yardstick for measuring computing in the nineties.” This remarkably persuasive argument plays out over twenty-six pages, describing seven unique features. The actual-size depictions continues with the system board and storage sections. These cutting-edge creations are impressively captured in a full-scale full-color reproduction. Each component on the NeXT board is purposefully arranged in a model of engineering elegance where no square inch is wasted. That’s due to an overwhelming usage of surface-mount components. NeXT invested millions of dollars developing an automated assembly robot that could pack both surface-mount and through-hole components closer than ever before. That’s old hat today, but cramming this many circuits and components on to a board was cutting edge in 1988. It was complete overkill, of course, and this very expensive automaton would become a symbol of NeXT’s delusions of grandeur. But it’s hard to argue with the actual finished product. If circuit boards could be art, this would be it.

Magneto-optical didn’t kill the hard drive star.

Turning the page brings us to a magneto-optical disk, which still looks kind of futuristic, even thirty years later. Both the board and cube are tough acts to follow, and the marketing copy makes a case for the disk by promising vast rewritable storage that wasn’t chained to one computer. You could transform any NeXT cube into your own computer by popping in an optical disk with your own OS, documents, and applications. Unfortunately, this first-generation Canon MO drive didn’t live up to the hype. It was slow and unreliable, which are bad qualities to have in a boot device. No other computers used the format—it was proprietary—so exchanging data without a network or an external disk drive was literally impossible. Even if you had the non-NeXT version of that Canon MO drive, it couldn’t read NeXT disks. NeXT quickly abandoned the MO drive and pivoted to floppies, CD-ROMs, and networked storage. The only legacy of that optical disk today is, of all things, Mac OS' "busy" cursor. Yes, that spinning rainbow beach ball was originally a spinning magneto-optical disk.

More impressive than magneto-optical disks was the Motorola 56001 Digital Signal Processor. A DSP endowed every NeXT computer with powerful 16-bit 44.1KHz sound playback and recording capabilities. Every app in NextStep had access to the DSP’s digital audio and MIDI music capability thanks to the included SoundKit and MusicKit frameworks. Sadly, the brochure is only paper, and can’t convey the difference between CD-quality digital sound and the 8-bit 22KHz that most PC sound cards were capable of at the time. The brochure also claims that the DSP can be used for all sorts of things, like emulating a fax modem entirely in software, or controlling a very impressive array of external devices. While there were DSP-specific add-ons like imaging boards and sound samplers, my reading of old NeXT newsgroups and modern NeXT forums indicates that most NeXT users never plugged anything into their DSP ports.

PostScript Brochure Pages — PostScript for both display and print.

Software also gets its due, with the Display PostScript engine billed as the next generation of “What You See Is What You Get.” By using PostScript for a device-independent display model, the same commands used to print were also used to create the computer’s display—a revolutionary idea at the time. NextStep’s window server could combine high-resolution raster images, vector graphics, and outline fonts to render a high-resolution display that far outclassed a Windows PC or Mac… as long as you were okay with grayscale. NeXT wasn’t the first to utilize a device-independent display—look up Sun’s NeWS for a contemporary competitor. But since Display PostScript was an official Adobe product, it gave NeXT serious graphical bonafides. DPS, like the MO drive, was an attempt to disrupt the status quo. But unlike the MO drive, DPS was more successful, even though it wasn’t exactly speedy and NeXT took a lot of heat for not initially supporting color. Speed improved over time and NeXT did announce color machines in late 1990. DPS was replaced by the PDF-based Quartz in Mac OS X, which carries on the legacy of a device-independent display layer.

Another familiar quote is “UNIX for mere mortals.” Other UNIX systems had GUIs, but NextStep was arguably the easiest one to live with on a daily basis. It had all the benefits of a multitasking, multithreaded, protected-memory environment with ease of use that rivaled a Macintosh. You didn’t have to use a command line to get your daily tasks done, but it was there just in case. Apple used the same exact sales pitch when OpenStep became Mac OS X, which appealed to a new wave of techies and developers who previously overlooked Macs.

The software story continues with several pages about NextStep's bundled applications. The parallels to Mac OS are noticeable, with today's Dictionary.app serving as the heir to NextStep’s Webster and Digital Library. Same goes for NextStep’s e-mail application, to which Mac OS’ Mail.app still bears a passing resemblance. It was the most advanced e-mail system you could buy in 1989, and Steve loved demoing NeXTmail and its advanced features. Combine that with WriteNow—a full-featured word processor—and you could be writing your dissertation minutes after setting up your NeXT.

Last in the brochure are pages discussing software development and NeXT’s third-party partnerships. NeXTstep’s application framework kits allowed developers to spin up custom applications in no time by using common code objects. Then, after you built the app, you created the UI in Interface Builder by dragging and dropping controls on to a window template. This was the most revolutionary part of NextStep, but it only got one page of copy! Mac OS and iOS still use this framework methodology, and other visual toolkits have copied NextStep’s philosophy with varying degrees of success.

NeXT Third Party Showcase — Third Parties Will Surely Come, Right?

The final page is NeXT’s closing argument, restating their thesis that they have created a new standard of computing. Endorsements from leading third-party developers project an air of legitimacy, as does retail sales support from BusinessLand—which was ultimately that company’s undoing. Lotus is making a spreadsheet! Adobe is porting Illustrator! FrameMaker will be there too! And it’s true that all these apps eventually shipped for the NeXT. But that's the problem: eventually. Jobs and NeXT were perpetually behind schedule. It was a classic example of Steve Jobs' hubris. He thought he could bring this into existence by sheer force of willpower, Green Lantern-style. He thought that once everyone saw it, they would agree and say "oh yes, this is brilliant!” The brochure concluded by saying the NeXT decade had already begun, which is just begging to disappoint

NeXT Computer Quick Setup Guide — The Quick Setup Guide

But that's in NeXT's future. We're pretending to be in NeXT's present. We're done thumbing through the brochure, and now it's time to set up our new cube. We won’t have to do it alone, because the Quick Setup card is here to help. An overhead photograph shows a complete NeXT computer system with each cable numbered in the order you’re supposed to connect them. It’s a nice picture, but as a step-by-step guide it’s a bit weak. There’s no flow to the layout, and that triggers my comic book page layout sensibilities. Your eyes ping-pong around the page instead of naturally flowing from left to right. Or you’ll follow the steps at the top and ask “where’s number four again?” because the numbers don’t stand out on the page. Despite everything Steve Jobs ever said about functional design, this is a case of aesthetics over practicality.

A Library of Documentation

Next comes a reminder that this box wasn't advertised as "unopened", just “complete.” Instead of the standard three-prong IEC power cord, there's some thin ethernet terminators and jumpers, and a laser safety data sheet. "Do not look directly into the laser with your remaining eye" indeed. The magneto-optical drive does have a laser in it, but this datasheet has the word "printer" on it, so it's probably from a NeXT laser printer's box. Maybe that's what I'll get at the next auction, no pun intended.

With the miscellany out of the way, we’re left with a pile of documentation. These books are less fancy than the brochure, but they’re still quality examples of late eighties documentation. As far as I can tell, these NextStep 1.0 manuals aren't anywhere online, so this might be the first time you've seen them. Maybe I'll get myself an overhead scanner for Christmas, so I can put them on archive.org without damaging their binding. All the books follow NeXT’s minimalist packaging style, featuring plain white covers, Helvetica Italic type, and a giant NeXT logo. Hey, when you’ve got a logo that good, you place that cube front and center.

First in the stack is the Registration, Warranty, and License booklet. Your introduction to NeXT documentation cheerfully reminds you to fill out your warranty card and make sure all your doodads and thingamabobs arrived safely in their boxes. If you fill out the registration card as intended, and can find a mailbox that goes to 1989, you can get a free NeXT t-shirt, which is an offer I wouldn’t have refused. Inside the license booklet are illustrations of the contents of the NeXT computer box, the NeXT accessory kit, and the MegaPixel display box. And yes, I can confirm that everything except for the power cord is in this kit. NeXT tried to get away with a mere 90-day warranty on the original NeXT computer and accessories. If you weren’t satisfied, a NeXT dealer or service provider could sell you a one-year extended warranty for $600 plus the reseller’s markup. Not including hard drive coverage, of course—that’s another $300 plus markup! And remember, all these prices are in 1989 dollars. I’m sure Steve Jobs thought that was a bargain. NeXT eventually realized that expecting people to accept a 90-day warranty on a ten grand computer package was pushing their luck. Newer models had warranties for a full year.

Batting second is the Getting Started booklet. If you skipped—or, more likely, lost—the Quick Start sheet, this guide helps you connect your NeXT computer and peripherals. It also introduces the basic concepts of the NextStep GUI, Workspace Manager, and the Laser Printer. The guide’s user tutorials cover the basics of using a graphical interface, which was still novel in 1989. If you were new to computers, this guide would get you comfortable with using your NeXT in about an hour.

A more advanced user might dive right into the thickest tome: the NeXT User’s Reference Manual. This 460-page book is admittedly pretty dry, but it's well-written for a computer manual, and exhaustively details included applications like the Workspace Manager, NeXTmail, and the WriteNow word processor. This book’s got your back when you need the steps for building a bootable optical disk, pruning the print queue, or finding forgotten files. In addition to NextStep there’s several chapters about the care and feeding of the NeXT computer and peripherals. Need to peek inside that ominous black cube to add some memory or change the clock battery? There’s a complete walkthrough for disassembling the cube, and port pinouts for the technically curious—like you!

If you were in charge of a network of NeXT computers, the Network and System Administration guide was up your alley. This manual guides you through setting up Netinfo, the directory service that NextStep used to locate other servers, manage user accounts, and enable network booting. NeXT developed Netinfo instead of licensing Sun’s Network Information Service, because Sun was, at the time, their bitter rival. NetInfo hung on until Mac OS 10.4, and this material might look familiar to you if you were a Mac network admin around the turn of the century.

Last but not least is one of the more interesting booklets: the Release Notes. Printed in November 1989, this is the last-minute stuff that missed the deadline for the Getting Started or User’s Reference manuals. NeXTstep 1.0 was famously late and a little rough around the edges, and I’m not surprised that there’s a nine page booklet full of uncomfortable little admissions. Here’s a few of the more humorous ones.

Initializing an optical disk appears to freeze the Workspace Manager. Don’t panic! The highlighted menu item means it’s busy, you see, and for some reason there was no dialog box with a progress bar. I couldn’t find that reason on record anywhere, but I’m sure there was one. So be patient.
A period on its own line in an email message is interpreted as the “end” of the email by NeXTmail. Anything after that gets ignored. Period, end of story, I guess.
If you print to a network printer and the job fails with an error, you have to abort the print job on both the client and server before anyone can print again.
Don’t choose an invalid startup device. Apparently 1.0 didn’t hide unavailable boot options, and you could easily put your NeXT in an unbootable state if you picked the wrong one. So don’t accidentally choose NetBoot when your machine isn’t connected to a network. The only way out is using a magic key command to enter the ROM monitor, and then typing in the code to boot from another device. Good luck.

If you happen to run into a problem not mentioned in this long list of limitations, NeXT helpfully provided two feedback forms at the end of the booklet. Simply mail or fax your bug report to Redwood, California and they’ll get right on it.

Stickers and Stuff

And now, the part you've all been waiting for, the reason why I spent way too much money on this box of stuff. Behold: a letter-sized sheet of NeXT logo stickers! With fifteen stickers across three different sizes, NeXT really wanted you to slap their logo on everything. Compare this to Apple, whose contemporary sticker sheet gave only gave you four stickers. I’m very fortunate that only one sticker’s been used from this sheet, and that it was one of the smaller ones. The previous owner apologized for the missing sticker, but I told him it was okay. Stickers are made for sticking, and I’m lucky that he chose one of the little ones.

NeXT Sticker Sheet — The NeXT Generation of Stickers

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Why did you spend so much money on those stickers when you can buy stickers from some rando on Redbubble?” Well, there’s some advantages to the genuine article. If you look closely at most of the NeXT logos on the web or on knockoff products, you’ll notice that they just swiped a flawed logo from Wikipedia. It’s got the wrong colors and a non-uniform gap separating the sides of the cube. Symmetrical means all sides have to be the same! These stickers are actual, 100% accurate NeXT logos, and that satisfies the fussy little designer in me. Amusingly, despite my fussing about Wikipedia having a slightly wrong version of the NeXT logo, I didn't think to check that they still had the slightly wrong version. On November 14, a few days before I recorded this episode, Wikipedia user DigitalIceAge extracted a clean version from a copy of the press kit on archive.org. Thank you, DigitalIceAge. Nice to know I'm not the only one who cares about that sort of detail.

But let’s say you’re okay with a mildly inaccurate NeXT logo. After all, there’s very few genuine NeXT stickers out there, and I recognize that most people aren’t as picky as I am. I don’t begrudge them their knockoffs, because the market abhors a vacuum. If Apple won’t supply NeXT merch, someone else will. But even if you don’t care about the accuracy of the logo, you might be wondering about the construction of these stickers. How do they compare to a knockoff? First, these stickers are solid spot-color inks based on vector artwork. The linework is sharp and the colors match the Pantone swatches selected by Paul Rand. Second, they’re clear, not white, so there’s no distracting borders. Third, they’re vinyl and not paper, which makes them significantly more weather resistant.

I’ll grant that a lot has improved in sticker printing technology over these past thirty-odd years. We’ve got magical direct-print inks that don’t need fussy flexography or sensitive silkscreening to make a durable, water-resistant design. Redbubble will happily sell you stuff printed on clear or white gloss vinyl. But the wildcard is fade resistance. If you’ve used one of the old rainbow Apple stickers, you know that they eventually fade under the sun’s unforgiving ultraviolet rays. These NeXT stickers would likely do the same even if they used fade-resistant inks, but that process usually takes years of outdoor abuse. Redbubble vinyl stickers are printed with UV-resistant inks, but I’ve yet to get one that’s lasted more than a year outdoors without fading significantly. Still, $280 buys a lot of knock-off stickers. When they inevitably fade, you can slap on a new one. Not so much with these genuine NeXT stickers—once they’re gone, they’re gone.

There’s three items of interest left in the accessory kit, and two of them are these magneto-optical disks. One is blank, the other is a system software disk for installing NextStep on a hard drive. I didn’t have MO disks of any kind in my collection until I bought these, and now I’ve got some of the most infamous. While NeXT’s MO disks may have missed the mark, the technology was still used for many years as a high-capacity archival format. The lesson here is that even the most promising tech can fall flat if circumstances are wrong.

Magneto-Optical Disks and Hex Tool — The Magneto-Optical Disks and the Hex Wrench

And last, but certainly not least, is a NeXT-branded hex driver. Odds are most users won’t have a hex driver to loosen the cube’s screws, and NeXT solved this problem by including one. Why they did that instead of using Phillips or Torx screws—well, I assume they had a reason, but like with the absence of a disk initialization progress bar, I haven't been able to find anyone willing to go on the record about it. Its handle is molded in the same angular fashion as the cube and MegaPixel display, with distinctive ribs and—ooh, fancy—a NeXT logo. It’s even got a ball-point at the end—not a pen, obviously, it's a little thingy that doesn't seem to have a technical name other than ‘ball-point.' These normally help hex drivers fit in tight spaces, but those clever engineers at NeXT figured out another use. Check the reference manual and you’ll see that you’re supposed to use the ball end to help pull the system board out of the case! Just snap the ball head’s groove into the conspicuous hole on the bracket and pull out the board. Sure, you can use your thumbs, but where’s the fun in that?

Now that we’re left with an empty box, one question remains: was this worth almost three hundred bucks? I could have bought an actual computer for that much money, but this is rarer and neater. Perhaps that’s flimsy post-hoc justification, but it’s nice to have something genuinely rare to call my own. None of this stuff is particularly useful on its own, except for the stickers and perhaps the hex driver. But something doesn’t have to be useful to be collectible—it can be appreciated in the context of its time. NeXT was on a mission to redefine computing, and in spite of its troubles and Steve Jobs’ flaws, the enduring legacy of NeXT in Mac OS and iOS proves that they got something right. These accessories and extras were expressions of that mission, and this box shines a seldom-seen light on that past. All that’s left is to find a NeXT cube and complete the set.

The Adobe and Pantone Color Apocalypse: Frequently Asked Questions

November 02, 2022 by Dan Vincent in podcast

Here in Userlandia, we’re brought to you in glorious ultra-color.

If you’ve been reading some parts of the internet lately, you might’ve seen a brouhaha over the quote-unquote “fact” that Pantone has “copyrighted colors.” They’re forcing Adobe to pay them oodles of money for color swatches, and Adobe said “no you.” Now users have to pay $15 a month just to use COLORS? Madame is outraged!

Well, it’s more complicated than that. The reality is that the world of color is difficult, even for those of us that see and feel it every day. Many working designers don’t know all the fiendish intricacies surrounding the tools of their trade. Your real questions are “how does this affect me” and “what can I do about it?” Or maybe you’re used to picking colors from all those swatch books in Photoshop and wondered why it’s such a big deal that they went away.

In the name of expedience I’m writing this in a question-and-answer format. Sit back, grab some popcorn, and be prepared for more than you wanted to know about the Pantone Matching System.

Q: Who am I and why should you care?

I got my start in the graphics industry back in the nineties. My high school had a graphic arts program, and that’s where I fell in love with computer graphics. I graduated from college in 2006 with a bachelor’s in art with a concentration in graphic design. During those years I also worked several jobs as a designer, prepress technician, and all-around computer toucher. In 2007 I was hired by a prepress workflow software company as an apps specialist, which is a fancy way of saying “you’re a quality assurance engineer, tech support person, and a hardware tech.” I then spent the next fifteen years developing software that solved printing problems for mom-and-pop shops, megacorporations, and the US Federal Government. I had to know about software, hardware, color, fonts, screening, process control… In short, my fingers have been in a lot of ink tins. I changed careers last year and I’m out of the graphics industry today, but I still help solve people’s PostScript problems. I’m still a graphic artist at heart.

Q: What is Pantone?

If you’re not in the print or advertising business, this might be the first you’ve heard of Pantone. Pantone’s sales pitch is about solving a specific but very real problem: consistently reproducing a particular color amongst a variety of media and substrates. If you’re the brand manager for Coca-Cola, you want Coke Red to be Coke Red regardless if it’s on a bottle, can, or wax cup. If you’re the printer that prints the labels for Coke bottles, you want a consistent way to measure and confirm the color of ink when you print it. If you’re an ink manufacturer making the inks used by that printer, you want to guarantee that every tin of Coke Red ink is the same color ink every time. Pantone’s ink-spertise is the binding factor between these groups.

Most companies don’t have Coca-Cola’s copious cache of coins to commission Pantone to develop a specific ink formulation for their brand colors. Most designers choose colors from one of Pantone’s many color libraries. This is the company’s bread and butter and why they’re so entrenched in various creative industries. If you’re a designer hired by a company to select a signature color, you’d crack open your Pantone Solid Coated book and choose from one of the many hues available. Might I suggest Pantone 185 C? It’s a classic, saturated red that’s guaranteed to catch your eye. Now that you’ve picked a color, you can tell anyone that utilizes Pantone’s system to match that color when designing a logo, printing a brochure, or silkscreening a T-shirt. Congratulations, you’re now a brand expert.

For decades Pantone’s primary business was selling swatch books to printers and designers, formulating inks, and licensing said formulas to ink manufacturers. Because there’s only so much growth in that market, Pantone leveraged their dominance in print to other markets. They soon expanded their color production expertise into plastics, fashion, makeup, and more. With PR stunts like “Color of the Year” Pantone continually tries to cement their brand as the canonical source for color. While I’d say they’re more mainstream now than two decades ago, I don’t think they’re on the tip of the general public’s tongue.

Q: Can you copyright a color?

The answer is no, you can’t. That’s a glib, reductive answer to the idea of colors as intellectual property, but it’s not wrong. What is color anyway? Think back to your middle-school science classes and you’ll recall that color comes from varying wavelengths of light. The mushy organic bits in our eyes are sensitive to those differing wavelengths across the visible spectrum. Since we can’t trust our lying eyes, humans invented color science to mathematically and scientifically measure what, exactly, is color. Since color science is math, the law in the United States is pretty clear: math can’t be copyrighted. You can’t like, own red, man.

However, you can copyright a book or database. Cookbooks are a perfect example. Recipes can’t be copyrighted, but if you wrote a fancy nerd cookbook with photos and recipes for “goblin cookies” and “magical roasted beast?” That’s a different story. Your new transformative work certainly qualifies for copyright protection. What’s eligible for copyright in a cookbook is the presentation, commentary, and organization applied to otherwise uncopyrightable recipes. Think of the Pantone Matching System as a cookbook for colors. Pantone has carefully organized their color recipes into specific groups, applied a distinct presentation, and designed an identifiable mechanical style with their fan-out guides. The same would go for an electronic database containing Pantone’s color formulas. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been involved with enough IP like this to know the general idea.

Q: I hear that UPS owns their own shade of brown. What does that mean?

UPS does not “own” their brown, in the sense that they don’t own the physical properties of said brown. What UPS does own is their trade dress. Colors can be used in specific trade dress, which falls under trademark law and all of its fun foibles. Again, I’m not a lawyer, so don’t take this as legal advice, but there’s a lot of misconceptions around what trade dress means for colors.

Sticking with our example of UPS, you can make brown paint that looks exactly like UPS brown, and sell it too! The catch is that you can’t sell it as UPS brown, and you better not have violated any patents to make it. I would also avoid selling that brown paint to someone else in the shipping industry or using it in your own shipping business. And even then, UPS might sue you for diluting their brand anyway. Whether they’d win would be up to the whims of judges and lawyers. Are you trading on UPS’ reputation by using that color in your trade dress? Other factors would certainly apply, like your logo, typeface, and so on. The point is that UPS or Coke don’t go around suing people for using brown or red, they sue them for infringing on trade dress. But that’s enough of that, let’s get on to the real issue at hand.

Q: So what happened between Pantone and Adobe? Why are we in the current situation?

Around February 2022 news circulated around the print industry that Adobe and Pantone’s licensing agreements were falling apart. This made color and graphics professionals understandably nervous. It’s a safe bet to say money was the cause: Pantone wanted more and/or Adobe wanted to pay less. Most Pantone libraries have already vanished from Creative Cloud, and soon they’ll all be gone. That doesn’t mean you can’t specify Pantone colors, but not having a built-in library certainly makes it more difficult. Of course, Adobe won’t be passing the savings along to you—they’re adding insult to injury by increasing Creative Cloud plan prices this year.

Q: Why were these libraries in these apps to begin with?

Convenience, mostly. Without a swatch library, referencing spot colors was a real pain. Remember that Pantone 185 C I talked about earlier? That’s a spot color—a special ink that exists outside your normal CMYK inks. The vast majority of Pantone’s colors are spot inks. Traditional printing presses use the four-color process of overlaying cyan, magenta, yellow, and black to produce many colors, just like your desktop printer—if you’ve still got one. But this process can’t produce many colors, especially weird ones like metallics, fluorescents, and opaque whites. Referencing spot colors without a library can be a real time sink. You’d have to dig out your Pantone Solid to Process book, type the color name, and then enter all the alternate color space values manually. Because if there’s one thing creative people like, it’s typing in numbers over and over again.

Eventually the early desktop publishing developers—Aldus, Quark, Adobe, and others—licensed libraries from Pantone and other companies to spare you that inconvenience. Now you just clicked on a color and you had a new swatch in a fraction of the time.

Q: Can I use these colors even if I’m not printing a spot color?

Absolutely! Nothing stopped you from selecting a swatch from the Pantone library and converting it to RGB or CMYK. Sometimes your material will run in media like a magazine where they’re not going to print unique spot colors on their interior pages. Even if your particular color doesn’t fit within a traditional CMYK or RGB color model, Pantone made a “close as possible” simulation and included that in the library. Which leads to…

Q: What’s actually in the color libraries used in apps like Photoshop?

The libraries aren’t just lists of color names. Each color has an alternate color space definition that must be included with the ink. In the olden days these were manually calculated CMYK or RGB values. Nowadays they’re LAB values, which I’ll address in a more technical way later. This alternate color space data is written into the PostScript, PDF, PSD, AI, TIFF, and other files written by these apps. When you send your files to a print shop or open them in another application, you’ll see a color preview instead of a mystery black separation. Part of licensing these libraries is to have Pantone-blessed color definitions instead of somebody’s guesses.

Q: Can I still use Pantone colors inside Adobe products?

You sure can! Nothing’s stopping you from scanning a Pantone book with a spectrophotometer, writing down the LAB values, and composing your own swatch library. Perhaps you’ll, uh, acquire a library from somewhere, wink wink. You can also import old swatch libraries from older versions of Creative Cloud. Heck, you could just make a new ink, call it “Pantone 185 C” and set its alternate color value to 100% cyan. The app doesn’t care what you name it, because as far as it’s concerned that’s just another ink. When you use the library to add a swatch, the applications are copying the alternate color space values and pasting them into the ink you create.

If you were using Pantone color books to pick colors to use in CMYK or RGB colorspaces and not actually creating spot inks, you could definitely explore alternate swatch books. Of course, Pantone would prefer that you shell out $15 per month or $90 per year for their Pantone Connect plugin, a piece of software that I wouldn’t want to use even if it was free. This bloated piece of junk tries to “add value,” when all you really want is a swatch palette.

Q: What if I wanted to make my own Pantone swatch libraries and distribute them? With blackjack and hookers?

You’d be playing with fire, that’s for sure. Pantone’s a litigious company. One of my previous employers never distributed a Pantone spot color library with our workflow software because Pantone demanded an incredibly high licensing fee. Even if we wanted to build a database ourselves, using our own labor and none of Pantone’s provided resources, we would have been sued for distributing it. This led to some of our more enterprising users creating a Pantone database using our format and distributing it amongst themselves. Pantone wasn’t going to roll up to an individual shop and sue them, but I’d expect a cease and desist if you’re posting them on a website.

I can think of many ways to make a non-infringing version of the database, but at the end of the day applications and renderers do some tricks when they detect Pantone names (or variations like PMS 185 C). Another issue that you’ll run into is differing opinions on what constitutes a color. Should your database have the LAB values, or preselected RGB or CMYK values?

Q: Why do people specify Pantone colors?

Something that goes unsaid in a lot of this discourse is that color is hard. There’s an entire industry built around the difficult task of correctly reproducing color, which doing consistently has been a problem for centuries. Computer monitors and printers have magnified the problem, yes, but it’s always been there. Pantone (and its parent, X-Rite, and its parent, Danaher) is one part of the color industrial complex. How do you organize colors, anyway? Names are hard, because you’ll run out of them very quickly and that’s not including language localization. Pantone’s solution to this conundrum was numbers. When you say “I want Pantone 185 C,” every person in the chain has a Pantone book with color chips and formula guides to get you the same hue, every time. At least, that’s the idea—it’s easier said than done.

Q: How is a Pantone ink made?

Painters make different colors by mixing different paints together, and mixing Pantone inks for printing works much in the same way. If you mix a certain amount of Cerulean Blue and Cadmium Yellow paint, you’ll make green paint! But the quality of that green can change depending on the ratio of blue to yellow, let alone if you mix in any Titanium White to lighten things up a bit. The classic Pantone Matching System works in the exact same way, except instead of an artist eyeballing the color, Pantone’s guides contain formulas for recreating the same color every time from a base set of inks. Bob Ross can paint almost any landscape from a palette of fourteen colors, and you can make any one of Solid Coated’s 2,000+ shades from a set of fifteen base inks. It’s amazing how close that is, really. That’s why Pantone persists, because printers needed an agreed-upon way to make the same color every time.

Q: Okay, but I’ve seen Pantone colors written as hex values. Aren’t they the same thing?

You might’ve heard about RGB color, and maybe even CMYK color—these are the two most common color models. RGB adds colors together to create white, while CMYK subtracts them. I’m used to thinking in terms of bits, and hex values are one method of expressing those bits. 8-bit color means 256 different discrete values for a given primitive, with 0 for minimum and 255 for maximum. 255R 255G 255B is white, which is expressed in hex as FFFFFF. It can be none more white. Or can it?

Head back to your science class again and you’ll recall that the human brain perceives color by mixing the responses of various wavelengths of light. Visible light is only a tiny fraction of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but in terms of frequencies it’s still a lot for us to measure. That chunk of the spectrum spans over 350 terahertz, which means trillions of spectral colors for our peepers to peep. When you see a red rose or a green lime, your eyes are measuring the frequencies of light reflected by those objects. But like a sound wave can have multiple frequencies, so can a light wave. Our brains perceive colors that don’t exist in the sun’s light! That’s because these colors are the result of multiple frequencies mixed together. Purple’s the go-to example, because it’s a combination of reflected red and blue frequencies. Compare that to violet, which exists as a spectral wavelength. This is all wibbly-wobbly colory-wolory stuff, and I won’t bore you with the finer details. But suffice to say that some colors can be reproduced in some media while others can’t, and translating between multiple media is often difficult.

Even if I simplify things and say that we stay within the RGB color model, it doesn’t get easier from there. A device producing RGB color is bound by the spectral properties of its red, green, and blue primitives. Those properties define its “color space,” or the gamut of colors it’s capable of producing. Take red, for example. If you have a computer, a phone, and a tablet, you could ask each to produce 255 red, 0 green, 0 blue. Depending on the manufacturers of the screens and their physical properties, you may see three different reds! One could be dimmer, the other could look more orange-ish. Without knowing the actual spectral properties of these screens, 255 just means “maximum output.” Controlling and accounting for these differences is color management.

Needless to say that you can’t specify the hex value that you entered in for your website’s color in the logo for your printed business cards. Even if you just printed them on your inkjet printer, it must be translated to a CMYK color model, and if your RGB color is too bright, it may be out of the printer’s gamut, rendering it duller than what you’d expect. Color management is out-of-scope here, but this should be enough to give you an idea of why people like an idea of a known, defined library of colors.

Q: Okay, so how did they determine those hex values?

This is the last of the technical bits, I promise. RGB and CMYK values are device-dependent. That means their color rendering is a function of the device’s ability to create (or reflect) light. You can request 255 Red on Monitor A and get a very different result than the same number on monitor B. This has been a known problem for a long time, so the handsomest scientists at the International Commission on Illumination devised the CIELab color space to describe color in a device independent way. This is the foundation of modern production color management, with ICC profiles and rendering intents and all the rest. The LAB color space describes the human perception of color, and we can map the colors our devices produce inside this uniform color space. It’s not the only device-independent space, and it’s certainly not perfect, but it’s good enough for the vast majority of us to get our jobs done.

When you go into Photoshop and choose a Pantone Solid Coated color from the swatch library, it gets converted from a LAB value defined by Pantone into your destination RGB color space. Some color spaces are bigger than others, but Photoshop will try to render an RGB value as close as possible. For most users, that destination color space is sRGB, which is a fairly narrow gamut as far as RGB is concerned.

Pantone does have their Color Bridge guide with CMYK and RGB alternate values for their colors, but they have never documented what gamuts they use to determine those values, along with other relevant color management settings.

Q: Why would Pantone and Adobe do this now? Won’t it annoy a lot of their customers?

Sure will! In fact, both sides are counting on it. You know how cable companies and broadcast networks fight it out every few years over carriage rights? This is basically the same thing. Usually those are just brinkmanship efforts that get resolved with maybe a minor blackout. But this isn’t going that way. Pantone’s had their Connect software live for a while, and Adobe’s let licenses lapse before. If you depend on Pantone colors for your livelihood, you’re gonna be coughing up the cash.

Q: I used one of these colors in my files! What will happen to them?

Unfortunately, it depends on the file and the applications you use! Illustrator files, InDesign files, and PDF files have spot colors—Pantone or otherwise—defined as a unique ink with an alternate color space. You should be able to open them up and see whatever colors you had selected in the file’s swatch palette. You can copy and paste them into a custom library or from document to document. Sometime around… CS6, I think, Adobe introduced a feature called “Book Color” where in addition to the alternate color space they would write in proprietary info that referenced ACB files. Adobe apps prefer this “book color” stuff, which might also trigger a color replacement. The behavior differs depending on the application used.

Photoshop’s a trickier case. The PSD file format has alternate color space declarations for spots, but it’s mostly for the benefit of other applications. If your spot channel lacks alternate color space info, Photoshop used to be able to locate a suitable one in its library. If those libraries don’t exist, you’ll get a very passive-aggressive dialog box warning you that the Pantone libraries are no longer available, and then the dreaded black separation.

Q: Why hasn’t a competitor taken on Pantone?

There are competitors to Pantone, but they mostly exist outside the North American sphere of influence. In Japan there’s DIC and Toyo, and in Europe there’s HKS. There’s also up-and-comers like Spot Matching System. Maybe they could use this as an opportunity to break into the market. But there’s a lot of inertia that will keep Pantone in place in North America. Said inertia has helped and harmed Pantone in the past. Pantone tried creating a new color matching and ink formulation system back in 2007 with the ill-fated Goe system. Goe used fewer base inks to make a wider variety of colors, but its ink was just as proprietary as PMS. Goe failed for a variety of reasons, but the main one was a lack of clarity on the future of PMS. Printers didn’t want to stock two sets of inks, and if PMS wasn’t going away, there wasn’t much of an incentive to change. Before that there was Hexachrome, which was Pantone’s idea to get everyone to move to a six-color printing process of CMYK plus orange and green. This also failed spectacularly because Pantone tried to keep most of the “magic” for itself. Pantone ultimately revamped the existing PMS system via the Pantone+ update, which reorganized the color guide and addressed the formulation of the existing base fifteen inks to give them some of the benefits of Goe’s base inks.

Going back to the traditional Matching System, Pantone controls many patents and formulas regarding the base set of inks used to create their colors. Nothing is stopping an enterprising ink manufacturer from creating knock-off or “compatible” inks, so long as they’re not infringing on patents. After all, Megabloks are compatible with Lego bricks. But as much as people dislike Pantone, there is a level of trust in that name and the ink manufacturers that license it. Print and manufacturing is expensive, and people don’t want to risk trashing their product because a slightly cheaper ink didn’t match.

Q: What if I wanted to switch away from Adobe software? Are there alternatives?

Serif’s Affinity line of products still include Pantone libraries, but who’s to say that Pantone won’t turn the screws on them as well? QuarkXPress still supplies Pantone libraries, but you don’t want to use Quark.

Q: Why are people getting black separations when opening up PSDs?

Photoshop does write alternate color space info into PSD files, but ironically enough doesn’t read it in certain scenarios. In the past it would do a name-based lookup and pick the value from their library. Now that the library’s gone, instead of falling back to the file’s alternate color space it gives you the passive-aggressive dialog box instead. Adobe’s apps in general have gotten aggressive about overriding a file’s internal definition for an alternate color space, and this is the result. I haven’t fully explored all the ramifications yet, but suffice it to say that you can still replace the color in the alternate color space if you have to. Most print workflows and raster image processors will still use their own libraries if you give them one of your PSD files.

Q: Will Pantone lose marketshare because of this? Or Adobe, for that matter?

It’s hard to say. Pantone will absolutely lose mindshare amongst designers and artists who used those Pantone swatch libraries as quick shortcuts. Those same customers will also curse Adobe’s addiction to rent-seeking behavior. But for actual professionals whose livelihoods depend on these standards, they’ll continue to pay while gritting their teeth. For newbies entering the field, their first exposure to Pantone colors are usually in these digital products. I wonder if they really want to lose that.

Pantone should be careful, though, because Adobe knows all too well when a controlling licensor overreaches. Microsoft and Apple made the TrueType font standard in response to Adobe’s iron-grip control over Type 1 PostScript fonts. TrueType eventually morphed into OpenType, which is the standard for font binaries today. All the same conditions are there—font shapes aren’t copyrightable, but binaries are.

I would be surprised if Pantone gets much traction on their plugin outside people who must use it or lose work. It’s lousy software at a terrible price. Piracy of swatch books will rise, and Pantone will have no one to blame but themselves. Maybe this is the kick in the pants that the print industry needs to tell Pantone to pound sand. Or maybe it’ll just be accepted as another tax on the working designer. Either way, the only color Pantone and Adobe seem to care about is green.

A Visit to the Apple Mothership

October 10, 2022 by Dan Vincent in podcast

Here in Userlandia, be very quiet. We’re hunting dogcows.

Brands. Can’t live with ‘em, and in today's hellscape they don't let us live without ‘em. No one in technological society knows a life without Conglom-O relentlessly bombarding them with WE OWN YOU at every opportunity. Our collective wills are assailed every day by these corporate giants, so it’s no surprise that instead of rejecting the marketing, we embrace it. We love that logo stamping on our human faces forever, and happily ask for more, because we love Big Branding. How else can we convince ourselves that a trip to Atlanta is incomplete without a visit to the World of Coca-Cola, or that the Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard is a must-see Vermont landmark? Maybe it’s the decades of pop-culture contamination talking, but I find something comforting about the self-serving fictions that companies tell you during a factory tour.

Our story begins back in April, when I was on vacation in San Francisco. It was my first time back in the bay area since the pandemic started, and when planning the trip I realized I had some spare time left over. What could I do to fill a morning before flying back to Boston? Why, I could finally visit Apple’s worldwide HQ in Cupertino, California! It wasn’t that far of a drive from where I was staying, and I could easily make it back to the airport in time for my 3 PM flight. Sounds like a perfect way to cap off a trip.

Apple’s called Cupertino their home since 1977, when they opened their first corporate offices on Stevens Creek Boulevard. As Apple’s profits grew, so did their need for real estate. By 1985 they’d occupied so many buildings along De Anza Boulevard that they could’ve asked it to be renamed Apple Boulevard if they thought they could get away with it. Some buildings like Mariani 1 were built from scratch, while others were leased for quick move-ins. Instead of a beautiful orchard, Apple found themselves working in a patchwork campus with little to unify the company, and Steve Jobs thought Apple could do better. In a Wired oral history, John Sculley told the story of SuperSite, Steve Jobs' plan to bring everyone in Apple together under one roof. Steve dreamed of a campus that was more like a theme park than a headquarters, complete with ridiculous gimmicks like a bona-fide electrified six-car monorail.

Unfortunately for Steve, SuperSite was one of his many grandiose ideas that wouldn’t come to pass thanks to his forced departure in 1985. But even after his exit, there was still a desire to unify Apple’s workspace. Sculley devised a new, less ostentatious plan for a central Apple campus and found the perfect site. Right across the street from their then-current HQ at Mariani 1 was De Anza Park, the former site of Four-Phase Systems. Apple bought the land from Motorola, bulldozed the property, and constructed six new buildings arranged in a ring. With a quad-like grassy field inside the ring, it felt more collegiate than corporate. Completed in 1993, Apple christened the new site Infinite Loop and gave everyone who moved in an office of their own.

Unfortunately for Sculley, the road to bankruptcy is paved with good intentions. Thanks to Apple’s ever-growing head count, they kept many of the buildings that the Loop was supposed to replace. These real estate assets quickly became liabilities, though, when Apple's bright future began to dim. Burdened by failing strategies, incompetent management, and bad product, Apple needed radical intervention just to stay alive. That’s when Gil Amelio made the fateful decision to buy NeXT on Christmas 1996 and use their technology to build the future of the company. And while buying NeXT gave Apple a superlative software stack, it also came with another important asset: NeXT’s executive staff. People like Jon Rubinstein and Avie Tevanian spent the rest of 1997 methodically slashing budgets, cutting anything and everything to stave off bankruptcy. Hundreds of employees were laid off, dozens of projects were cancelled, and the Mac lineup was streamlined.

Apple’s radical downsizing left them with a lot of empty buildings they could barely afford. With leases expiring one by one, employees of all ranks consolidated inside Infinite Loop. Gil Amelio gave up his fancy office at Cupertino City Center and moved back into Infinite Loop just in time for Steve Jobs to launch a boardroom coup and kick him out entirely. Jobs settled into an office on the fourth floor of One Infinite Loop after assuming the role of interim CEO in September 1997. His initial reaction to Infinite Loop was about what you’d expect—he didn’t build it, ergo he didn’t like it. But his opinion changed during Apple’s increasingly successful comeback tour. Although it’s now in the shadow of Apple’s new spaceshippy headquarters that landed to the east, Infinite Loop still has significance both to Apple itself and to people like me who survived the beleaguered era.

While Infinite Loop isn’t a public Apple theme park, there’s still two reasons for Apple enthusiasts to visit, even if one technically doesn’t exist anymore. The first is Apple Store Infinite Loop, which used to be Apple’s company store. Many large faceless corporations have a company store selling tchotchkes of middling utility—apparel, sports gear, office supplies, and such. My personal favorite is Boeing’s at their factory in Everett, Washington. Where else can you buy a 747 t-shirt and an easy chair made out of an engine cowling? Some day I’ll work up the courage to spend three grand on that chair—some day.

The Apple Company Store of the nineties bore little resemblance to a modern Apple retail store. It was very much like other company stores selling branded merch to employees and visitors. You could get an Apple logo on pretty much anything from telephones to teddy bears to tote bags. The Company Store served this role until 2015 when it was closed, gutted, and rebuilt as a modern Apple retail experience. Even though Apple Infinite Loop might not look different from the Apple Store at your local mall, it still owes some of its soul to the old Company Store thanks to specially branded merchandise that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you ever wanted a pen that perfectly matched the color of your MacBook Air, or a coffee mug or steel water bottle with an Apple logo, you're in luck. I picked up one of the canvas sketchbooks—in classic beige, of course. Thirty bucks for a half inch of smooth 60-to-80 pound 8x10 paper is a wildly overpriced alternative to a ten-dollar spiral bound drawing pad, but… eh, Apple tax, what're you gonna do. Meanwhile, the other side of the wall had the real cool stuff: T-shirts! Infinite Loop’s Apple apparel appeals to maniacal Macintosh mavens, with designs evoking eras long past. There’s a couple modern designs, like the "Mind Blown" emoji, but by and large these shirts look like they came straight from the nineties. Apple and the T-shirt are inseparable—there’s even a whole book chronicling the history of Apple-related T-shirts. I don't normally talk about clothing, but hey—it’s from Apple, it's soft, and you wear it. Good enough, let’s go.

A quick note: My own photos of the shirts had some issues, rendering them unusable for this segment, apparently. Please forgive me, 9to5mac, for, uh, borrowing yours.

Icons, Pirates, Cupertino Script, Hello

Logo Infinite Loop, CUPERT1NO, 1 Infinite Loop Rainbow, Zipped Lips

Logo Infinite Loop. A large Apple logo along with Infinite Loop in white Apple Garamond Italic. This is a classic Apple shirt design and a must have, especially in black.
1 Infinite Loop Cupertino Rainbow. More Apple Garamond Italic, but each line of text is a different color of Apple’s rainbow, along with a smaller Apple logo. If Logo Infinite Loop’s big Apple logo is too much, this is your alternative.
CUPERT1NO. The letters of the word Cupertino are arranged in a grid of white uppercase Apple Garamond. A gray numeral 1 replaces the letter I, which matches the gray “Infinite Loop” text below. Neat design, yes, but as someone who's actually designed shirts in his day, I think it'd look better on a poster.
Mind Blown Emoji. You can do better than an emoji. Skip it.
Hello. The latest version of the Macintosh’s Hello script as seen in the M1 iMac’s introduction. If you like subtle shirts, this is your pick. Mac fans will nod in approval, everyone else will just think you’re friendly.
Cupertino Script. The word “Cupertino” written in the same script as Hello. Same vibes as Hello, but even stealthier.
Pirates. An homage to the famous pirate flag that once flew above Apple HQ. The white variant has an emoji-style Jolly Roger flag, while the black version has a big skull and crossbones print on the chest. The eyepatch is a rainbow Apple logo, and printed on the inside neck is the famous Jobs quote “It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.” The black version is a must have for any classic Apple fan.
Icons. A grid of Susan Kare’s legendary classic Mac OS icon designs are printed all over this shirt. There’s a spray can, stopwatch, command key, Apple logo, happy Mac, and even a bomb. A perfect match for the Classic Mac OS nerd, though the all over print is a very loud design. Whether or not Susan Kare is actually getting royalties for Icons, Pirates, or Hello, she deserves them.

While picking out these shirts, I was assisted by one of Apple’s retail employees. His name was Philippe, and we had a good time chatting about my visit to IL-1 and the various T-shirt designs. Folks like me who come by for a bit of the unique merch and seeing where it all happens aren’t uncommon, and Phil was a pro about it. He had stories about how he got into tech—his dad worked down the road at Sun Microsystems and he grew up surrounded by computers. We had a great talk about my time in the graphics industry and about this very blog, site, podcast—whatever. Hi, Phil! Thanks for listening! After paying for three T-shirts and a sketchbook, my time at the store was done. Now I was ready for the other reason I came to Infinite Loop.

Searching for Clarus

Clarus in the Garden — Clarus roams the garden.
Photo: George Sakkestad, Cupertino Courrier

A small park lives at the corner of Infinite Loop 1 and 6. It’s somewhat larger than the other green spaces around the Infinite Loop buildings, with a concrete walkway and some trees dotting the interior. There’s not much to see there, save for those trees. Probably most people who head to the Apple Infinite Loop store walk right by this little patch of greenery without knowing its significance. But for longtime Apple employees and diehard fans who suffered through the bad old days, this otherwise unassuming park means just a little bit more.

Yes, this field is the former home of the famous—or maybe infamous—Icon Garden. As the legend goes, the government of Cupertino asked Apple to contribute to the beautification of their fair city. When Infinite Loop opened in 1993, Apple honored the city’s request by installing twelve foot tall sculptures of pixelated icons from Mac OS and MacPaint. Whether or not larger-than-life versions of icons like a paint bucket, the stopwatch, and Clarus the Dogcow count as art is open for debate, but it was good enough for the city of Cupertino. Thus, the Icon Garden was born. During its five years of existence the Garden was a place of pilgrimage for Apple acolytes—their way of paying homage to the whimsy that made them fall in love with a computer in the first place. This was when I was a teenager, so I only knew of the Garden through the pages of Mac magazines and Apple fansites. Taking a trip to Silicon Valley was out of the question, so I had to make do with an online QuickTime VR tour.

But change was in the air with Steve Jobs’ return to Apple, and no dogcow was sacred. Employees arrived at Infinite Loop one morning in May of 1998 to find all the Icons missing from the Garden. Various theories and explanations as to why Clarus and company went AWOL emerged over the years. One Apple spokesperson said they were removed for cleaning, which was just a deflection. Another answer is from former Apple employee David Schlesinger, who said he cornered Steve at a company party and demanded an answer. Schlesinger posted the following in a Quora answer back in 2015:

“[Steve] admitted he’d had it done, he found them too pixellated, and that they were at that point sitting in a warehouse in Santa Clara.”

That’s a cromulent answer, but I think we should look at it from Steve's perspective. When Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were at the 2007 All Things Digital conference, the subject of righting the good ship Apple came up. Steve’s response is one found on many SEO content farm famous quotation pages today.

“And, you know, one of the things I did when I got back to Apple 10 years ago was I gave the museum to Stanford and all the papers and all the old machines and kind of cleared out the cobwebs and said, let’s stop looking backwards here. It’s all about what happens tomorrow. Because you can’t look back and say, well, gosh, you know, I wish I hadn’t have gotten fired, I wish I was there, I wish this, I wish that. It doesn’t matter. And so let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.”

While this referred to Steve shipping off Apple’s in-house library and museum to Stanford, which happened in November 1997, it’s the same mentality that deemed the Icon Garden an anchor rather than an inspiration. I can’t fault Steve here, because Apple in that beleaguered era had a lot of problems, and one of them was an unwillingness to make a break with the past. Killing the past was the right thing to do, because Apple’s habit of navel-gazing often turned into abyss-gazing. The company was dying, and it desperately needed to rid itself of bad habits and dead weight. Mistakes like Copland, QuickDraw GX, and OpenDoc were in the past, and if Apple was to succeed, it needed to focus on the future. If that also meant putting away nostalgic memories of happier times, then so be it. With the museum shipped off and the Icon Garden dismantled, Apple set about inventing the future by designing new products to attract more than just the diehards.

And though wild dogcows no longer roam the fields of Cupertino, there have been recent sightings of this endangered species. Yes, Clarus returns in Mac OS Ventura’s page setup dialog box, where she does backflips in sync with your sheet orientation just like in the good old days. New iMacs proudly say hello in Susan Kare script as rainbows shine over Apple once more. Maybe Apple has found the right balance to honor their past without repeating its mistakes. Or maybe it's just a cynical tug at the heartstrings of people like me, diagnosed with a terminal case of retro brain.

Having paid tribute to an empty field, I hopped in my rental car and took a quick drive around the loop before I left. That’s when I noticed a fun little easter egg. Even though Steve had the icons dragged into the metaphorical trash, some pixelated parts of the past still persist. Each building is identified by a large numeral set in the classic Chicago font used everywhere in the Mac’s interface all those years ago. So although they weren’t technically part of the Garden, these links to Apple's visual past still remain at Infinite Loop. After completing my drive around the Loop, I set a course for across town. I had one more Apple destination to visit before returning to the airport: Apple Park.

The spaceship awaited.

And One Ring-Shaped Building Binds Them

After a short drive down Stevens Creek Boulevard and a left onto North Tantau Drive, I arrived at the Apple Park Visitor Center. With its tall glass walls and a wooden slat roof, you’d be forgiven for thinking “wait a minute, that sounds like an Apple Store.” Congratulations—you’re right! If you’ve been to one of Apple’s flagship stores like Fifth Avenue, then you have an idea of the Visitor Center’s vibe. Unlike Infinite Loop the public isn’t allowed anywhere near the starship, so we have to settle for a shuttlecraft instead.

The majority of the Visitor Center’s floor space is dedicated to the usual tables lined with Macs, iPhones, and iPads. One wall of the store is dedicated to Apple merch, but the selection is different than Infinite Loop’s. Coffee cups and sketchbooks are out, and baby onesies, tote bags, and flash cards are in. The flash cards were amazing, and I regret not having taken a photo of them. They had a set of them permanently mounted to the wall, arranged like a flower so you could see all the individual cards. Unfortunately, they didn't have any sets for sale that day. On the other side of the wall was a selection of T-shirts, three of which—Mind Blown emoji, Hello, and Cupertino script—are carryovers from Infinite Loop. Apple Park’s location specific design is a color or monochrome ring resembling an aerial view of the spaceship with the words “Apple Park” written below.

Apple Park T-shirt collection — The T-Shirt Collection at Apple Park.

Forget about that boring Ring design though, because Apple Park is lucky enough to get two absolutely classic Apple shirt designs with Rainbow Streak and Apple Garamond Rainbow. It’s tough to choose between an Apple logo blazing a rainbow across your chest or the classic rainbow Apple lettering—so I bought them both. Odds are you’ll be buying multiple shirts too. It’s hard to say which store has the better shirt selection. Ignoring the three overlapping designs, Apple Park has two absolute killers in Rainbow Streak and Apple Garamond Rainbow. Infinite Loop has two designs that are equally excellent but have more niche appeal: Pirates and Icons. Despite the awesomeness of Rainbow Streak and Apple Garamond Rainbow, I think the nod has to go to Infinite Loop because its location-branded shirts are better than Apple Park’s. Look at it this way—the Ring and emoji shirts are things I expect employees to wear. The One Infinite Loop shirts are far better souvenirs.

Mixed in with the various bits of merch on the wall is a small tribute to iconic Apple designs. Some photos of the Industrial Design Group’s greatest hits are arranged like plaques in a sports Hall of Fame. Superstars like the iPod and iMac G4 are there, of course, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that they've also got journeyman players like the original Pro Mouse and the clear subwoofer from the Harmon-Kardon Sound Sticks. Following these portraits leads you to Caffe Macs Apple Park, where you could take a break for a slice of pizza or a cup of coffee.

Apple Design Plaques — We’re waiting on the veteran’s committee to add a plaque for the cinema display.

After perusing the cafe, I climbed some nearby stairs to visit the center’s other big attraction: the observation deck. Some tables and chairs give the hungry Caffe Macs customers a place to sit back, enjoy their coffee or pizza, and take in a scenic overlook. Both the Steve Jobs Theater and the southeast quadrant of the spaceship are visible from this vantage point. It’s not exactly a sweeping vista that rivals the majesty of Yosemite, but it would be a nice place to watch the hustle and bustle around an Apple Event.

As I took in the view of a meticulously manicured monument to Silicon Valley megalomania, an Apple employee came over to talk to me. I don’t quite remember her name—I’m pretty sure it was Stephanie—and she offered to snap a photo of me in front of the spaceship. I accepted and we got to chatting about my quick tour of both Apple campuses. Steph and I wound up having a great conversation about growing up with Commodore 64s. Having what amounts to an Apple Park Ranger on hand is a nice touch.

A View of The Spaceship — A Close Encounter of the Apple Kind.

Having seen and done everything I could at the Visitor’s Center, I hopped in the car and headed towards SFO to catch my flight back to Boston. Was it worth all the time and expense to visit the house that the Steves built? I certainly wouldn’t have planned a whole trip around it—flying from Boston to San Francisco just to buy a T-shirt and visit a patch of grass is well outside my budget. But I enjoy visiting San Francisco and the bay area. I’ve hiked amongst the redwoods, I’ve stood at the base of El Capitan, and I’ve listened to the waves in Monterey. Every time I go, I try to do something different, and this time Apple came up on the list.

Touring Infinite Loop also provided a bit of closure for one of my life’s many “what-ifs.” There’s a branching timeline where I could have been an Apple Genius. After I was laid off from a print shop job in January 2007, I spent a few months looking for new employment. In March I saw that Apple was hiring new Geniuses for their new store at the Holyoke Mall. That’s back when the Genius Bar was still something special, so I tossed my résumé into the mix. A few days later one of Apple’s many recruiters reached out for an interview.

It was one of the better interviews I had at the time. Aside from the usual job interview stuff, Apple put prospective Geniuses through a long, forty question test to determine their technical aptitude. I aced the test, even getting five of the six reasons for why a Mac Pro would have no video when four was sufficient. Both the technical and social sides of the interview went well, and then at the end, the recruiter said "One more thing…” No matter how advanced the skills of a potential employee, Apple sent all new technical hires on a two-week all expenses paid trip to Cupertino to instill the values of truth, justice, and the Jobsian way. At that time of my life I’d never been to San Francisco, and a two-week Apple boot camp sounded like a great opportunity. There was only one problem: the Holyoke Apple Store wouldn’t open until July, which was months away. My bank account was getting pretty thin, I had rent to pay, and I wasn’t sure if I could hold out until then.

Wing View of SFO — Until we meet again, SFO.

While talking to Apple I also had an interview with what would eventually be my next employer. It was a job that was available right away and they would cover my relocation expenses so I could move to the Boston area. I said no to Apple, which was the right thing to do at the time. But whenever you make a choice, there’s always that nagging wonder that never goes away. What would my life have been like if I’d taken that two week trip to Cupertino? Maybe I would have been an Apple Store superstar, or maybe I would have turned into yet another jaded Apple employee. In the words of Little Texas, there’s no way to know what might have been. Life’s about making decisions, and you have to live with them—good or bad. Things worked out all right in the end, and now I can put those nagging thoughts out of my mind for good.

If you find yourself in the Cupertino area, stop by Infinite Loop. Technology is the way it is today because of the people that walked its paths, and it’s worth the trip if you’re like me and care about the mythology of personal computing. Or you can buy all the exclusive merch and lord it over your friends. No judgment on that front, because I’m a consumer whore too (and how!). Just make sure to leave a treat for Clarus on your way out.

Oh… one more thing.

With all the time I spent talking about the unique T-shirts offered at these stores, I should at least give an honest review of them as shirts. I admit to being slightly embarrassed over the amount of money I spent on what amounts to wearable corporate advertising—but only slightly. Apple’s obeying the laws of band shirt pricing at $40 apiece, so make sure you’re happy with the fit and style before spending the bills. Or just use the 14 day return policy—that’s what it’s for! I saved one shirt—Infinite Loop Rainbow—to open up at home and document what exactly that $40 gets you.

The Box

Neatly folded and wrapped

Logo Infinite Loop

It won’t surprise you to learn that Apple shirts come packaged just like any other Apple accessory: in a plain white box with a varnished Apple logo. A protective plastic wrap covers the shirt itself, which is easily disposed of in the recycling. No manufacturer’s tag is present, but the shirts are made in China, just like Apple’s computers. The design is silkscreened onto a 100% lightweight cotton shirt, so set your durability expectations accordingly. I’d characterize the fit as athletic or slim, though I’m not sure how differently they cut the larger sizes versus the smaller ones. No size chart was available, and with no demo shirts to try on, you’re flying a little blind if you’re an inbetweener like me. I normally wear medium sized men’s T-shirts, and I’d characterize the fit as “exact.” There’s not much wiggle room, and the sleeves are a bit short. A large would be just so slightly too big, but with this style of fabric you’re better off going a size up if you’re unsure. I was allowed to buy a shirt, try it on, and return it if the fit wasn’t right, so I advise you to do the same if you’re an inbetweener.

Are these shirts worth forty clams? …Eh. The reality is no, they’re not—they’re probably the worst value of anything you can buy at the two stores. And unlike with band shirts, you don’t have the excuse that the extra margin goes to support the group. Even Nintendo doesn’t charge that much at their World Store in Rockefeller Center for a Samus Aran shirt, and they’re one step below Apple on the “we love our margins” chart. This is crass consumerism at its finest. But as bad of a value as they are… they’re infinitely cool. You’re paying for the excellence of the designs, not the shirt they’re printed on. Of course, if you think these are expensive, look how much a vintage Apple Garamond Rrainbow letter shirt goes for on eBay—buying new is actually cheaper. Just pick the one design you really like, make sure it fits, and take good care of it. Whether the money is worth it is between you, your bank account, and how much you love a rainbow Apple.

The 2022 Vintage Computer Festival Midwest Report

September 21, 2022 by Dan Vincent in podcast

Here in Userlandia, my Windows color scheme is Portillo’s Hot Dog.

Skyline Wing View Chicago — Hello, Chicago!

Hey everyone, I’m back from the 2022 Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, and I’ve got a mostly off-the-cuff podcast to discuss the ups and downs of the experience. VCF Midwest took place on the weekend of September 10-11 in Elmhurst, Illinois; a Chicago suburb just south of O’Hare Airport. After much prodding by my Chicagoland friend Mark, I booked a flight from Boston to Chicago to get my fill of retro served with a pickle, tomato, and sport peppers.

Despite the words “Vintage Computer Festival,' VCF Midwest isn’t actually related to VCF East or VCF West. Those two are put on by the Vintage Computer Federation, while VCF Midwest is a product of a separate group: Chicago Classic Computing. The two groups are friends that support each others’ events and have no desire to wage trademark war unlike, say, Comic Con International going after shows with “Comic Con” in their name. This is the seventeenth event under the VCF Midwest banner, but its origins stretch back beyond that to various Chicagoland user groups and exhibition orgs in the nineties.

The first thing I noticed about VCF Midwest is that it operates differently than other events. Most conventions I attend require some kind of admission fee at the door—VCF Midwest does not. Most conventions I table at require some kind of table fee—VCF Midwest does not. The show is funded entirely by cash donations, T-shirt sales, auction revenue, and its garage sale. We’ll get to what each of those means in a bit, but this revenue model makes VCF Midwest very much free as in beer. By foregoing any kind of fees or charges, the show tries to uphold the early microcomputer era’s ideals of openness and community.

Mark and I arrived early on Saturday morning—if you consider fifteen minutes before opening time early—and found a nearly full parking lot. Arriving early is important if you’re interested in buying stuff, because the vendor tables will have the most stock at that time. We also had a trunkful of items to donate to the auction, garage sale, and free pile, so we needed to unload the car ahead of prime browsing time. The event takes place at Elmhurst’s Clarion Inn and Waterford Banquet, a run-of-the-mill hotel with attached conference space. When entering the front door you’re greeted with the auction pile, check-in desk, and the vendor’s hallway. A large exhibition hall is divided into four rooms, three of which host the various exhibit tables and a fourth dedicated dedicated to panels.

VCF Midwest 2022 Hallway — A very busy opening hour.

After unloading the car and walking around the halls, my impression of the show was a feeling of organized chaos. After years of growth the venue seems to struggle with the number of people that show up on a Saturday. VCF Midwest’s website says over two thousand people showed up over the weekend, and I believe it. People crowding around vendor tables clashed with people streaming in and out of exhibit halls, and navigating the traffic was sometimes tricky. These jams were partially relieved by opening up the movable barriers and creating shortcuts inside the halls. People could cut across from room to room instead of having to exit and navigate the vendor hallway, which helped relieve those bottlenecks. As far as I know there wasn’t a printed schedule or information booklet—not even half-folded xerox copies. Thankfully cellular data was working well and we could check the schedule and exhibit list online.

Sometimes the distinction between exhibitor and vendor gets pretty blurry. Of course VIP guests would sell their branded merch, but I was a bit surprised to see museum-style exhibitions next to a table covered in boxes of random hardware and software. Speaking of that, let’s talk about the various exhibitors and all the neat stuff on the floor.

Exhibits

The exhibition hall was divided into three rooms: “Mostly Micros,” “Youtubers and More,” and “Big Iron.” One brand that had a lot of representation was Silicon Graphics. SGI machines were prominent in two of the three rooms, and seeing an Indigo and Onyx in person was a mesmerizing experience. Some were from System Source while others from Anthony Bolan, and their applications ranged from Maya demos to the requisite Nintendo 64 development kit. A few were running Irix desktops with productivity software and games. Even oddballs like the Tezro were on display. It’s been fifteen years since I’ve touched an Octane, and I still regret not taking it with me when it was retired. These SGI enthusiast groups are frequent guests to VCF Midwest, so if you want to see real SGI gear in person, you’ll want to make the trip.

SGI Fuel Workstation

SGI Tezro and Personal Iris

SGI Indy and Indigo

SGI Octane and O2

Even more SGI

An Intel-based SGI

Meridian Telephony — A Meridian PBX System

A complete office PBX phone system with a Windows NT Telephony server anchored the Big Iron room along with the minicomputers and terminals. Two exhibitors, Dial 1 for IT and The Phone Company & More set up a switched phone network complete with real phones and fax machines. It was connected to the publicly switched telephone network too, so you could dial in with any phone and speak to someone right at the table. This phone setup was the most Rube Goldbergian contraption in the entire hall.

Along with old phones were plenty of old televisions! You might remember from my VCF East report that there’s enthusiast groups keeping old cable TV equipment alive, and one of them was at VCF Midwest. Behind the Screens had two tables chock full of your favorite ‘90s cable TV time wasters. On one side was a Weather Channel broadcasting setup with a Macintosh TV tuned to the forecast. Given that my Macintosh TV is currently inoperable, it was nice to see one working in the flesh. I talked with the fellow behind the table and clued him in to the fact that his Sony remote control could also control the Mac TV. His mind sufficiently blown, he thanked me for the tip and we talked about restoring one of the coolest flawed Macs. Next to their Weather Channel equipment was a Prevue Guide setup running on an Amiga, which was the real hidden gem of the show. The slow scroll of TV listings stopped me dead in my tracks. I haven’t seen a scrolling guide in almost twenty years, yet I felt like I was immediately transported back to my parents’ living room in a Ratatouille-like trance. Other attendees also fell under its spell—I guess that Saturday afternoon “What the Hell is on TV?” vibe is a universal one.

A2000 running Prevue Guide — An Amiga 2000 hosting Prevue Guide.

Another great opportunity is experiencing computers and software that may have passed you by, and VCF Midwest had plenty of exhibits to fill in your blanks. Jeff Fetta had two tables full of Sinclair products, like various Spectrum and ZX computers. Another table run by Chris Ellmore had more British computers, including Acorn products. Japanese PCs were well represented, with multiple Sharp X68000s, NEC PC-88s, and a Casio Loopy MySeal. It’s a console… computer… thing? Danielle Herbert AKA thegirlgeek had it running some JRPGs I’ve never heard of with some very cute graphics.

The Sinclair Exhibit

Sinclair QL

Sinclair Documents and Artifacts

Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Though Commodore had the most representation of the eight-bit brands, other popular systems of the eighties got their due as well. CoCoFest consumed a whole corner of one room with the largest collection of Tandy computers I’ve seen in one place. Atari users were represented by the funnily named SCAT, or the Suburban Chicago Atarians group. Add the aforementioned British micros and you’ll have hands-on with most of the major players of the eighties.

Sharp X68000

NEC PC-88

Casio MySeal

While there were plenty of IBM compatible computers spread across the floor, Big Blue got a lot of love from Joshua Conboy’s Warped! The end cap of the Mostly Micros room was a celebration of everything OS/2, with boxes, memorabilia, and a PS/2 running OS/2 Warp. Featuring games and productivity software, the display challenged you to experience a “better Windows than Windows.” I gave SimCity 2000 a run, only to find it unplayable because the mouse sensitivity was cranked to the maximum. I poked and prodded everywhere, frantically right-clicking through OS/2’s endless settings windows to find its version of Control Panel. After five minutes of flailing I finally discovered the mouse settings, adjusted the sensitivity, and was ready to go. I tabbed back into SimCity 2000 to build a quick town and, well, it’s SimCity 2000 all right. Other than OS/2 styled menus it plays exactly the same as the other versions. But OS/2 users had one big advantage over their Classic Mac or Windows 3.1 counterparts: if the game crashed, it wouldn’t bring the rest of the computer down with it.

Warped! The Information Superhighway Not Traveled

Boxed OS/2 Software

OS/2 Warp in Action

OS/2 Magazines

And, of course, the VIPs had exhibits as well. These were personalities like Clint Basinger (LGR), David Murray (8-Bit Guy), and Ken (Computer Clan). Adrian Black from Adrian’s Digital Basement didn’t have a table, but he was roaming the floor talking to people. Mark told him the tale of a Mac Classic he resuscitated thanks to Adrian’s video about the reset line under the sound chip, much to Adrian’s amusement. These were some of the busiest tables at the show, and not just because of the celebrities. Each table had computers or items featured in their videos, which attracted lots of attention on their own. Ken’s NeXT cube got a lot of love, as did Clint’s eMachines iMac knockoff. If you’d never heard of their channels, you’d think they were just like any other exhibitor at the show—and that’s a good thing! But not all exhibitors are there just to show stuff off. Some were there to make some cash, and that’s where vendors come in.

The YouTuber Corner

Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh

NeXT Cube

eMachines eOne

Vendors, Auction, and Sales

Most of the pure vendors were lined up along the main hallway. The majority were people selling various old computers, hardware, and software. Some, like Bonus Life, are vintage resellers that fix machines to sell them at a markup. Others are collectors that are looking to divest themselves of pieces they don’t need anymore. Rounding out the selection are local groups like the Wisconsin Computer Club and the remnants of FreeGeek Chicago.

My favorite vendor that I couldn’t afford to buy anything from was MacEffects. They make the clear transparent Macintosh SE case that you’ve seen floating around. Clear Mac and Apple II cases were in stock, but they one upped themselves with their color cases. The Mac was available in red, green, and blue translucent acrylic, but the real star was the gloss black Apple II case. Unfortunately, gloss black plastic has a huge drawback: it shows every single fingerprint and a feather could scratch it. But for those few moments that you take it out of the box, it’ll be the coolest looking Apple II in the world. Take that, Bell & Howell!

Another favorite was the BlueSCSI team. It’s the hottest hard drive emulator in town, and you could buy your BlueSCSI either as a kit or preassembled. I bought preassembled external and internal versions, and they’ll be perfect for my various SCSI computers. Meeting the team in person further cemented my appreciation for the project, as their infectious enthusiasm comes through at every opportunity. I believe this is their first time tabling at a show, if my vague memories of Twitter are correct. The Commodore-centric group DDI had a full range of MagicCarts for various computers for sale, which allows you to load disk images without much fuss, or create custom ROMs. Seeing old machines and modern hardware working in harmony is the most exciting part of this scene, which is a big reason to go to this show. TexElec’s booth was showing off the Commander X16, which is a new 6502-based microcomputer. Think of it like a modern successor to the Commodore 64. Working examples were showing off games, and as of this writing I don’t know when it will be released. Still, they’ve clearly made a lot of progress.

In addition to actual vendors, the show also had what it dubbed “the garage sale” and “the free pile.” The free pile is exactly what you’d expect: anything there is up for grabs. Make sure to follow the ground rules—no uncool inkjet printers, you should give an item when you take an item, and don’t leave stuff behind when the show ends. Tons of cool stuff flowed through the free table, like a Dutch copy of ClarisWorks, various monitors, busted computers, a box full of webcams, and a pile of round mousepads. Stuff kept showing up as the days went on, so we were constantly checking it for new things. I nabbed a copy of PageMaker 3.0 for the Mac and Norton Utilities for Windows 95. The latter will probably be more useful, but that PageMaker came on 800K floppies which are pretty rare these days. I donated a Linux-based Sharp Zaurus PDA to the free table, and I hope whoever took it makes good use of the parts.

This Sun Server was a standout at the garage sale.

What about the garage sale? When visitors donate an item to the auction, it gets “graded,” which is a fancy term for “we decide if it’s interesting enough to generate a lot of bids.” Stuff that doesn’t make the cut gets tagged with a price and put on the garage sale table. I donated a set of new in box Packard Bell CRT monitor speakers to the garage sale. Mark donated some computers, NAS devices, and other doodads, some of which wound up in the auction. A minifridge-sized Sun server was the standout item, and yes, someone did buy it. Dozens of computers, monitors, accessories, and more moved through the garage sale during the weekend, generating much-needed money to fill the show’s coffers.

Items that do make the grade end up in the Saturday evening auction. Although head honcho Jason Timmons isn’t an actual auctioneer, he played the role so well that I thought he stayed at the Holiday Inn and not the Clarion Inn. Items ranged from voltmeters and oscilloscopes all the way up to an Amiga 2000, with many Macs, PCs, and doodads from every era of computing up for grabs. That A2000 wound up selling for over $500, making it the highest grossing item. A Mac Performa 640 with a DOS Compatibility card netted over $400, while a C64 kit with monitor and extras went for over $300. A particularly grody NeXT Cube, covered in mold and maybe a little bit of rust, went for over $300.

After several items came and went, something caught my attention. This offering was listed on the auction site as “NeXTCube documentation set (complete),” but that belied its true significance. We’re not talking about a pile of manuals here—this was a 100% complete original NeXT computer accessories box. Before the bids started, they opened up the box and displayed the manuals, warranty cards, disks, and more, but they saved the best for last: a sheet of NeXT stickers. They’re just like Apple stickers, but NeXT! “God Damnit,” I muttered, because I knew I had to have them.

My Winning Bid Card

The NeXT Accessory Kit

NeXT Stickers

The Mud Cube

The bidding started at fifty bucks and went up in ten dollar increments. I kept raising my hand as the price went up. Eighty dollars. One hundred dollars. One hundred and fifty dollars. It kept going on as one person kept bidding against me. Someone even pulled the whole “wait for going twice and then bid” trick. Such tactics wouldn’t deter me, though, and I was eventually victorious at the cost of $270. I’m planning on doing a separate post or maybe even a video about the accessory kit. I don’t normally buy things at auctions, but the money directly benefited the show and the odds of finding this again is astronomically low. And yes, those stickers will be stuck on things and given away to other NeXT fans in my orbit.

Panels of Fun

How about the talks and panels? Can’t have a convention without those. The show had one large panel hall, and it was booked solid on Saturday. Another sign of growing pains is that the Saturday afternoon YouTuber panel was so full that we couldn’t get in after returning from lunch. Thankfully the panels were recorded, so I can eventually watch the YouTuber panel… on YouTube. Other panels weren’t as difficult to attend, as the Apple Lisa documentary and Vintage Mac Collecting panels were both held later in the evening. Unlike most small conventions, the audiovisual setup for all the events in the main hall was excellent. Bad AV is an easy trap for small shows to fall into, and the technically minded volunteers nailed it. We’ll see how the recordings come out, but I’m sure they’ll be fine.

Dave Greelish hosted a panel about the Apple Lisa documentary he’s working on. You might think it was a screening of the film, and that’s an honest mistake to make. The panel was about the process of writing and directing a celebratory film about the Apple Lisa. Dave played several clips from interviews he conducted for the film as well as some teaser footage. He even got time with John Sculley, which surprised me. After Dave’s panel was the vintage Mac collecting panel, hosted by Ron from Ron’s Computer Vids and Steve from Mac84. Though its content was targeted towards those entering the scene, it was still a fun time for experts like myself. Slideshow graphics were suitably rainbow colored as the duo covered the earliest Macs up to the end of the beige era.

My award for “panel that surprised me the most” goes to Bill Degnan from the Kennet Classic Computer Museum. “What does it take to start an indie computer museum?” is a very valid question that I didn’t think to ask. I’m unlikely to start my own museum of course, but the answers were fascinating. How do you attract people who are just walking by? How do you keep kids entertained? How do you keep your artifacts from crumbling to dust? Bill matter-of-factly addressed a bunch of concerns and pitfalls that would trap unsuspecting newbies. Even if you’re not going to open your own museum you’ll still enjoy this peek behind the curtain.

Stuff!

I came home with plenty of things. Here they are, in some particular order.

A Japanese parallel card. By itself, it’s merely an ordinary Enhanced Parallel Port. I bet it’ll work just fine in any PC. What makes it special is the box! This was an auction item that came at the very end of bidding, and it wasn’t getting much love. I bid ten bucks and adopted it for my collection.
A complete-in-box Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball for the Super Nintendo. There was little console representation at this show, but some random vendor happened to be selling this copy of Griffey for ten bucks. He wasn’t at his table, so I left a note and a ten dollar bill under his water bottle saying that I bought it. When I say complete in box, I mean it—the exclusive baseball card is there too.
Two BlueSCSI. As mentioned earlier, I bought an internal and external BlueSCSI.
IBM Model M Keyboard with built-in TrackPoint. Desktop keyboards with built-in TrackPoints are rare finds, and I bought this one for $60 from someone wandering around the show. I’ll talk more about him later.
Free Copies of PageMaker 3.0 for Mac and Norton Utilities for Windows 95. Thank you, free table.
A floppy drive for the Toshiba 460CDT. This was from Mark’s collection, since he didn’t have that model of laptop and thought it needed a home with my Toshibas.
A Tangerine iBook. Another gift from Mark, since he had a spare in his collection. Fair enough, since I gave him a new old stock Jaz drive!
The NeXT accessory kit. Stickers! A hex driver! Magneto-optical disks! This will get proper coverage in a future post. Maybe even a video!

Too Much of a Good Thing

I really enjoyed my time at VCF Midwest. Conventions are fun! It’s great to be around like-minded people, and the variety on display means there’s something for everyone to enjoy. But as the hours went on and Saturday turned into Sunday, I couldn’t shake the feeling that VCF Midwest’s greatest strength—its freewheeling, anything-goes vibe—is also its greatest weakness.

From my selfish attendee point of view, I loved not having to pay an admission fee. But from a sustainability point of view I can’t see that surviving in the long term. If the show gets big enough and the current venue can’t host it, I don’t think they’ll have a choice. The show sustains itself on various kinds of donations, but the downside of donations is that they’re not predictable. Without public knowledge of the show’s finances, I can’t say if charging admission would actually net them more money. A way to keep admissions free would be selling stuff like booster packages. People love being “platinum sponsors” and will pay for the privilege.

Sunday Morning Hall B — Things were much quieter on Sunday morning.

If you’re hungry and don’t want to wait in line, Fry the Coop had delicious spicy chicken sandwiches.

Speaking of the venue, I’d rank it as “fine.” It’s exactly what you expect—no more, no less. I’d rank this Clarion in middle of the pack. If you’ve done a convention at a small suburban hotel, you know exactly the decor, amenities, and facilities available. It’s a thrifty, sensible pick in terms of space, but the number of attendees exposed some weaknesses. Lunch was an issue on Saturday, as the hotel’s cafe was hopelessly swamped by the crowd. It’s designed to serve average hotel visitors, not thousands of people. We wanted to support the venue, but waiting in line a for half an hour wasn’t in the cards. There’s nothing to eat within walking distance, so going out for lunch requires a car, or maybe a call for delivery. A great idea would be to get the venue to partner with a food truck to split some revenue.

When it comes to vendors and exhibitors, I think the show is doing all right. The variety of exhibits is excellent, and that’s largely thanks to the breadth and depth of the community’s expertise. But the experience could be improved by a better organization of actual “exhibitors” versus people looking to sell stuff, sort of like how comic cons separate out “artists” versus “vendors.” I realize they’re working within space constraints of the venue, but ideally people selling random stuff shouldn’t be intermingled with people showing off a collection or a proper exhibit.

Adjacent to vendors is the protocol and organization of the free pile. The ground rules were largely adhered to during the show, but the corner of the hallway that these tables were relegated to wasn’t sufficient for the amount of people and items around it. If the show gets bigger, this won’t work going forward. Some staff observing and tending to the area would’ve been nice. Also, it’s not cool to take stuff off the table with the intent to resell it. I mean, you can, but that’s not the spirit of the free pile.

When it comes to vendor etiquette, the freewheeling chaos had its pros and cons. One pro is that there were plenty of people willing to make deals, but Mark commented that everything was more expensive in general. Retro and vintage computing is in the midst of a bubble, and prices are outstripping inflation by quite a bit. One vendor didn’t even put prices on the product, as when I inquired about a few computers his response was “How much are you offering?” He was the exception, but most people tend to negotiate down from sticker price. Making customers name prices isn’t the way I would do business.

One reason events charge for tables is so they can vet and control who’s selling stuff at the show. Unofficial buying and selling goes on at shows of all sizes, but the spirit of VCF Midwest is that if you’re not an official vendor, the stuff you want to unload should go into the auction or garage sale. One person didn’t get the memo, though. When the show was opening up in the morning, someone was wheeling in a tub of keyboards. I assumed he was one of the official exhibitors unloading his stuff in to set up. He offered to sell me a keyboard at a low price in exchange for watching his stuff, and I took him up on it—that’s how I got the Model M. But after he finished bringing in his computers, he said he was looking for some space to set up, and eventually just started walking around the show with his items in tow. I told him that he should put his computers into the garage sale, but he demurred, saying he needed the money. I don’t have a problem selling stuff to make money, but there’s a social contract with this particular show. If you don’t have a table, put your stuff in the garage sale. It’s the right thing to do in the absence of a consignment room.

The Show Must go On

I don’t want to leave you with a negative impression of the show—I had an excellent time. The overall atmosphere is welcoming and enthusiastic. The problems I mentioned earlier are really just growing pains, and I have full confidence that Jason and his crew will address said pains. Everyone wants the to succeed, and the new people coming into the fold are making the community more vibrant. A successful event means more people get a chance to share their love for computing, and that’s what the goal should be.

A small piece of home: Nashua Disks

Nashua 8 Inch Disk Info

If you’re asking yourself “Should I go to VCF Midwest?” I would say yes, yes you should! I had a great time hanging out with people I knew and making some new friends. Sure, it’s nice seeing a particular computer for the first time, but talking to the person who brought it is nicer. Don’t forget to bring some contributions for the auction and the free pile, too. I only hope that it’s able to cope with its growth in a sustainable fashion. I don’t envy Jason and the organizers’ predicament. YouTubers and podcasters posting trip reports only increase the demand. Unfortunately most of that demand gets funneled into Saturday, as Sunday was noticeably less busy. Having some more events on Sunday might even things out a bit. I’m sure I’ll be back there next year, and I hope to see you there too. I look forward to what the VCF Midwest crew will do to make the show even more entertaining.

The Compaq ProLinea 4/33 - Computers of Significant History, Part 3

August 23, 2022 by Dan Vincent in podcast

Here in Userlandia, I think I’m a clone now.

Welcome back to Computers of Significant History, an analysis of the history of computing in terms of how it affected the life of one writer/podcaster. In previous episodes, we looked at two pivotal computers from 1983, when I was a baby. Now let's jump forward to 1993, when I was in grade school. The unpredictable and chaotic market for personal computers had settled into a respectable groove. IBM compatibles were number one in home and business computers, with the Macintosh plodding slowly behind them. High powered RISC workstations from Sun, Silicon Graphics, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard had completely overtaken the high end of the market. Commodore was in a death spiral, and Atari had already crashed and burned. Acorn hadn't dropped out of the desktop market just yet, but was finding more success in licensing their ARM architecture for portable devices. Other companies had switched to making their own IBM PC clones… if they hadn't given up on computers entirely. If you wanted to replace your aging Eighties machine, you could get an IBM compatible, or you could get a Mac, or you could sit back and not complain because there were starving children in other countries who didn't have any computers at all.

Jack Welch, recurring guest on the hit TV show *30 Rock.* Boo this man.
Attribution: Hamilton83, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As I mentioned a few episodes back, my family kept a Commodore 64 as our primary computer until nineteen ninety-seven. Actually replacing the old Commodore was difficult from a financial standpoint despite its growing obsolescence. True, that old C64 was becoming more obsolete every day, but two thousand dollars—in early nineties money—was a tough ask for a working-class family like mine, because General Electric CEO and cartoonish supervillain Jack Welch was busy destroying tens of thousands of lives in his ruthless quest for efficiency and profit. Not that I'm bitter. Jack started his professional life in my hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, but fond nostalgia didn't stop him from lopping off various parts of the city's industrial apparatus and selling them to the highest bidder. First to go was GE’s electric transformer factory, which was raided, closed, and left to rot. Next in line was the defense business, sold to Martin Marietta for three billion dollars. Only GE's plastics division—which, by pure coincidence, is where Welch got his start—was spared. My father was one of thousands laid off from their well-paying blue collar industrial jobs at "the GE.” My dad joined GE straight out of high school, and 25 years later it was all he knew. He had to scrounge for work, and my mom had to start a career too. My oldest brother was a freshman in college, and tuition was priority number one. Big-ticket items like a new computer were way down the list.

When mom and dad can’t open their wallets, enterprising teens look for alternatives. Sometime in the spring of 1997 I rescued an IBM PS/2 Model 30/286 from my middle school’s e-waste pile. My tech teacher discreetly permitted this misappropriation of school property, telling me it was better that I took it than it wind up on the scrap pile. With two whole megabytes of RAM and a whopping great 10MHz 286, that machine could run Windows 3.1… technically. And, technically, you can still listen to music on a hand-cranked gramophone. Running MS-DOS in 1997 wasn’t much of an improvement over the C64 status quo, but there was one thing I could do with the PS/2 that I couldn’t with the Commodore: I could dial into bulletin boards. But those tales are best saved for another day, and perhaps another episode.

The PS/2 and the C64 were uneasy roommates until October 1997, when my uncle made a surprise visit. In the back of his Ford Taurus was none other than his Compaq ProLinea 4/33 with Super VGA monitor and Panasonic color dot matrix printer. He had recently bought a shiny new Pentium II minitower, you see, and the Compaq needed a new home. I was thrilled—I finally had a computer that could run modern software! I didn’t have to stay late after school anymore to write papers in a real word processor. More importantly, the internal 28.8K modem was twelve times faster than the 2400 bits per second slowpoke I’d been using over the summer. I handed the Commodore and PS/2 their eviction notices and installed the Compaq in its rightful spot on the downstairs computer desk.

Next up was a thorough inspection of this new-to-me PC. The ProLinea's exterior was… well, it was an exterior. While Compaq had their own stable of design cues, they’re all in service of maintaining the PC status quo. Sure, there are horizontal air vents and an integrated floppy drive, but Compaq’s desktops don’t stand out from the crowd of Dell, Gateway, and AST. Say what you will about IBM, but at least they have a distinct sense of industrial design. You’re more likely to notice the ProLinea’s height, or lack thereof—it was significantly thinner than the average PC clone. An embossed 4/33 case badge proudly announced an Intel 33MHz 486DX inside, but there’s more to a computer than the CPU. How much RAM and hard drive space did it have? What about its graphics and sound capabilities? None of that can be gleaned from the exterior, and the only way to know was to crack open the case.

Compaq ProLinea Exterior Front — The ProLinea’s exterior. A well-worn example seen on RecycledGoods.com.

If you're like me—and, let's face it, if you're reading this you probably are—then you would have done what I did: after a few days of using my new computer, I opened it up to see what was inside. Undoing three screws and sliding the cover off was all it took to gain entry. Compaq utilized several tricks to minimize exterior footprint and maximize internal volume. Floppy drives were stacked on top of each other, the power supply occupied the space behind them, and the hard drive stole space above the motherboard. Beside the hard drive is a riser card, which shaved height off the case by changing the orientation of the expansion slots. Three standard 16 bit ISA slots lived on side A of the riser, and one decidedly non-standard half-height ISA slot for Compaq’s proprietary modems lived on side B. One of the full-height slots was populated with a US Robotics 28.8K modem, which was decent for the time. Four SIMMs of 4MB each lived in four slots for a total of 16 megs of memory. A 240MB Quantum hard drive left the PS/2’s 20 meg drive in the dust.

ProLinea slots and ports — The slots and ports on the ProLinea.

These were sensible specifications for the affordable 486’s golden age of 1992 or ‘93. Aside from a faster CPU, most 486-based computers had two major advancements over their 386 predecessors: an external SRAM cache and VESA local bus graphics. Unfortunately, there’s no level 2 cache in the ProLinea, which puts a bit of a damper on the 486’s performance. Was this lowering the barrier of entry, or artificial segmentation to push people towards a pricier mid-range Deskpro/I? You decide. At least Compaq included local bus graphics by integrating a Tseng Labs ET4000/W32 graphics chip and 1MB of dedicated graphics memory to the motherboard. Windows performance was more important than ever in 1993, and the W32 variant included Windows graphics acceleration without sacrificing performance in DOS. A lack of cache hurts Excel, but a wimpy graphics processor hurts every application.

But at the time I got this computer, none of that mattered. Cache or no cache, a 33MHz 486 couldn’t hang with a 233MHz Pentium II. Still, it was rare for most PCs to live through the 90s without getting upgrades to extend their lives, and my ProLinea was no exception. I was constantly tinkering with it from the day my uncle gave it to me until its retirement in 2002. After surveying what I had, I prioritized two specific upgrades: a sound card and a CD-ROM drive. Compaq didn’t include any onboard sound in the ProLinea except for the buzzy internal PC speaker. Since the hand-cranked gramophones weren't compatible, you had two choices for better sound: buy an optional sound card or spend even more money on a Deskpro/I with integrated sound I’m sure Compaq would have preferred the latter.

As a broke teenager, my goal was to get some form of sound card and CD-ROM drive without spending a lot of money. In those days, eBay was still just a startup—I’d never heard of it—so that meant a trip to our local used computer store: ReCompute. Located on First Street in beautiful downtown Pittsfield, ReCompute bought and sold all kinds of old computers and parts. The clerk recommended a double-speed Creative Labs CD-ROM drive which connected to—you guessed it—a Creative Labs SoundBlaster. Sound cards back in the day often had ports to connect a CD-ROM drive and companies like Creative sold “multimedia upgrade kits” combining a sound card, CD-ROM, cheap speakers, and software. Sometimes you'd get lucky and get a nice Encyclopedia and a copy of Sam & Max Hit the Road, other times it'd just be a clump of shovelware to inflate that dollars of value sticker.

Creative Labs 2X CD-ROM Drive

SoundBlaster Pro 2.0

Before ATAPI, installing a CD-ROM drive into a PC required either a SCSI adapter or a proprietary interface card. There were some sound cards that had cut-down SCSI controllers, but SCSI is overkill for attaching a single CD-ROM drive. If you're selling low-cost upgrade kits, though, every penny matters, so a costly SCSI controller doesn’t make much sense. Luckily, Creative had a margin-padding solution at the ready. Panasonic, the company actually building Creative-branded drives, had their own proprietary CD-ROM interface. It was cheaper than SCSI, used familiar 40 pin ATA cables, and took up minimal board space. Panasonic’s interface lacked SCSI's messy complexity like terminators, so it was simple to install too. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that Panasonic’s interface was compatible with ATA, even though they used the same cables. The downside to proprietary is that without a matching card—in this case, a SoundBlaster Pro 2.0—the drive might as well be a doorstop. I don’t remember the cost—it couldn’t have been much, honestly—but it was enough that I had to borrow a few dollars from one of my brothers to close the sale.

Then again, you get what you pay for—even if, to 15-year-old me, that was a major investment—and my wonderful bargain of a Creative Combo turned out to be on the unreliable side. It got exasperating, having to fix the speaker jack again and again and again and again. Fortunately, after a rather frustrating year audio-wise, I had both a new 16-bit ESS sound card with wavetable synthesis and a faster 24X ATAPI CD-ROM drive—thank you, birthday and Christmas presents. The 28.8K modem gave way to 56K, which eventually gave way to an ethernet card to connect to a cable modem. Yes, these were all very sensible upgrades, but they’re like adding suspension parts to a car: they’re helpful for handling, but they won’t give the car more power. The ProLinea needed more power, and this brings us to the most momentous upgrade of them all: a Kingston TurboChip.

Kingston’s Air Force ad for the TurboChip.

Based on a 133MHz AMD Am5x86, the TurboChip was a drop-in upgrade CPU that was four times faster than my 33MHz 486. Although it ran at 133MHz, its architecture is derived from a 486 so its level of performance is similar a 75MHz Pentium. At a cost of $100 in 1999, the TurboChip was considerably less money than a new computer. Even though upgrade processors are never as good as a new system, it still gave the ProLinea a much needed boost. A 33MHz 486 barely met the minimum requirements for Office 97 and Internet Explorer 4.0, let alone IE 5.0. The TurboChip breathed new life into the sputtering ProLinea, improving performance in those apps and opening doors to new ones. Somehow this computer managed to play a video of the South Park movie, which I'm sure I obtained legally even if I don't remember precisely how. Such a feat would've been impossible without the upgrades. Where the TurboChip wasn’t as helpful was in gaming. Even a speedy 486 couldn’t keep up with the superior floating point performance of a Pentium. Games like Quake were a choppy mess, but I wasn’t missing that much since I could, uh, borrow my brother’s PlayStation.

TigerDirect ad for another Am5x86-based accelerator. AMD sold these processors to companies like Evergreen, PNY, Kingston, and Trinity Works.

But no matter how many upgrades I stuffed into the ProLinea, time was catching up to the aging PC. No further CPU upgrades were available, and that proprietary motherboard layout with the riser card meant I couldn’t swap in a new board without impractical modifications. The hard drive was slow and cramped and the BIOS complained loudly about drives larger than 500MB. I couldn’t fight reality anymore—I needed a whole new computer. Millions of people across America were facing the same conundrum, and wouldn’t you know it, companies like Compaq were right there waiting to give them a hand. They ranked number one in marketshare from 1994 to 2000, and only disappeared from the chart after merging with HP. But they wouldn’t have achieved that market dominance without the ProLinea. How’d they manage that, anyway? Would you believe… boardroom backstabbing?

…Of course you would.

The Clone Wars

With years of hindsight, it’s easy to say that Compaq would dominate the PC clone world. After all, they started the fire by building the first commercially successful IBM compatible computer that could withstand legal challenges from Big Blue. But that’s the thing about cloning—once you’ve proven it can be done, someone’s going to copy your copy. Compaq handled competition the best way it could: by becoming a leader. Soon it was IBM against Compaq and the horde of cloners fighting for control of the Intel-based MS-DOS ecosystem. Compaq took the performance crown by shipping the first 80386 PC in 1986, showing that IBM was no longer in control of their own platform.

One reason Compaq beat IBM to the punch was that they were iterating on an already proven design. The Deskpro 386 didn’t have fancy new slots and it wasn’t inventing new video standards. IBM, on the other hand, was hard at work on what they believed would be the true next generation of PCs. Announced in April 1987—seven months after Compaq announced the Deskpro 386—IBM’s Personal System/2 was a declaration that Big Blue was still the leader in personal computing. The PS/2 wasn’t just a new PC AT—it was an actual next generation PC platform. It introduced standards that lasted for decades, like VGA graphics and their eponymous keyboard and mouse ports. With such a show of engineering force, IBM was sure that all of those copycat cloners would fall in behind the might of Big Blue. How else could they stay “IBM compatible?”

IBM’s grand plan for regaining control of the PC platform came in the form of Micro Channel Architecture. While Compaq beat IBM to shipping a 386 PC, they did so by using the same 16-bit AT bus—better known as ISA… or eye-sah… however it’s pronounced—found in every other PC clone. Of course, the Industry Standard Architecture wasn't industry standard because it was particularly good. It was industry standard because IBM's Boca Raton dev team decided to publish the specs for anyone to read and copy, royalty-free. The explosive popularity of IBM’s PC and PC AT combined with a royalty-free bus created a fertile field for all kinds of add-in cards. Its open nature also meant a cloner could include ISA slots on a motherboard. But ISA had its limits. With a maximum width of 16 bits and sensitive clock timing, ISA was too slow to take full advantage of the 386. Plus, Installing ISA cards required arcane rituals like setting jumpers or DIP switches to configure memory addresses and interrupt requests—and woe betide you if those settings were hard-wired.

Micro Channel Slots. Attribution: Appaloosa, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1986, shipping a machine with the ISA bus was a smart choice despite its limitations. 32-bit memory could be put on SIMMs or proprietary memory boards and avoid the worst of ISA’s speed penalties while keeping ISA slots free for peripheral cards. Even if a 32-bit bus was available, most peripherals of the era wouldn’t saturate it. For the time being, keeping compatibility with existing cards was the winning move for Compaq. But that wouldn’t always be true—ISA needed to be replaced some day. IBM decided that day was April 2, 1987—the PS/2’s launch—and the boys from Boca thought they had a winner. MCA slots had advanced features like plug-and-play software configuration, 32-bit bus width, and more megahertz for more throughput. But all these benefits came with a catch: MCA used a completely different connector than ISA, breaking compatibility with existing cards. That wouldn’t have been so bad if IBM had included an ISA slot or two in MCA PCs, but MCA was an all-or-nothing proposition. Software configuration required system-specific disks that you’d better not lose, unlike the literal plug-and-play found in NuBus on the Mac or Zorro on the Amiga. But the most aggravating thing of all was that IBM patented Micro Channel. After all, MCA took a lot of research and development, and that didn’t come for free. They thought everybody would line up to integrate this next-generation bus and wouldn’t mind paying for the privilege.

Various Types of ISA Cards — 8-bit ISA, 16-bit ISA, and 32-bit EISA cards.
Attribution: Nightflyer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It wasn’t long before IBM’s grand plan collapsed under the weight of their hubris. Compaq and the other cloners weren’t willing to give IBM a chunk of money for every machine they built. Instead, Compaq led a group of eight other companies in designing their own 32-bit expansion slot called the Enhanced Industry Standard Architecture, or EISA. Or “Eee-sah.” Still not sure how that’s pronounced. Backwards compatible and royalty free, EISA meant that no one needed to license Micro Channel, and MCA slots never went mainstream. Then again, EISA never went mainstream either; it was mostly found in workstations and servers. Most PCs would have to wait until the arrival of PCI to finally kill ISA dead.

While Compaq was a market leader, they weren’t without their faults. Truthfully, they weren’t that different from Apple in terms of how they pitched and priced their products. Compaq’s main clientele were businesses, power users, and professionals who demanded powerful machines that cost less than IBM’s. Other cloners, like AST, Dell, and Zenith were all competing with Compaq in that same market, but they were more popular in mid-range segments where they were constantly undercutting each other. If you’re too thrifty for a name brand, white-label PCs from places like Bob's House of Genuine Computer Parts, wink wink, or Mad Macy’s Mail Order Motherboards were always an option. Buyer beware, though—most of these small fry lacked the kind of warranty or support that you’d get from a brand name company.

Everything changed when Packard Bell and Gateway 2000 attacked. These upstarts were building computers with specs that could trade blows with the more prestigious companies while selling at white-label prices. Gateway was a mail-order operation, while Packard Bell attacked the growing big-box retail segment. Dell, AST, and other cloners responded by lowering prices and building cheaper PCs. Compaq didn’t, and their balance sheet suffered accordingly. Boardroom battles erupted in 1991 between chairman Ben Rosen and CEO Rod Canion. Rosen wanted Compaq to aggressively pursue the home and entry-level markets, while Canion wanted to stay the course. He was one of Compaq’s founders, and the company had amazing success under his leadership. Compaq was still making money hand-over-fist, so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

Compaq's corporate reckoning came on October 23, 1991, halfway through that year's Fall COMDEX. Faced with the company's first quarterly loss, Rod Canion had to take serious action. The next day he laid off over 1,400 employees and then presented an eighteen month plan to attack the entry level market. For most companies this would have been a sensible turnaround plan. But what Canion didn’t know was that Rosen had dispatched a team to Las Vegas to covertly attend COMDEX and do a little recon. That secret team put together an alternate plan that could bring a low-cost PC to market by the summer of 1992—half the time of Canion’s proposal. With his new strategy in place, Rosen and the board fired Canion on October 25th, 1991—the final day of COMDEX.

Compaq ProLinea 3/25ZS — The ultra-slim ProLinea 3/25ZS as seen in a Compaq brochure.

Compaq’s COO Eckhard Pfeiffer was promoted to CEO and the company poured everything it had into building a new low-cost product line. Announced on June 15, 1992, Compaq’s new ProLinea range of personal computers arrived a month ahead of schedule and with much fanfare for the press. Tech company press releases can get pretty schlocky, and Compaq’s were no exception. A nameless Compaq executive really thought they hit the jackpot with “the Goldilocks strategy” of offering papa, mama, and baby computers. That’s not subtext, it’s actual text! I don’t like this analogy for a variety of reasons, mainly because it’s creatively bankrupt and condescending. I’m sure the nameless executive thought this was their most brilliant idea, even though they fundamentally misunderstood both the setup and moral of Goldilocks and The Three Bears.

Still, you gotta work with what they give you. If the existing Deskpro/M was Papa Bear, the new Deskpro/I was Mama Bear and the ProLinea was Baby Bear. Starting at $899, the tiny two-slot ProLinea 3/25ZS was a warning to other low-cost makers that Compaq was ready for war—price war. Joining the compact ZS series was a bigger three-slot ProLinea S desktop with a 5 1/4” drive bay and options for more powerful processors. If either of those weren’t enough for you, the Deskpro/I and /M were there to satisfy all your power user needs. It was up to you to determine which machine was Just Right… and then eat its porridge and sleep in its bed? My opinion of fairy-tale-based marketing strategies aside, these machines were an immediate hit. Compaq didn’t let off the gas, either—a year later in 1993 they simplified the lineup by retiring the 386 CPUs and ditching the undersized ZS model, so that was goodbye to one of the baby bears. The S model was now the standard ProLinea, featuring CPUs ranging from a 25MHz 486SX to a 66MHz 486DX2. 4 megabytes of RAM came standard, and hard drive sizes ranged from 120 to 340 MB. In addition to all the standard specs, Compaq had a long options list of modems, storage, networking, and multimedia.

Compaq Advertisement, 1993 — A Compaq Ad from 1993 featuring the new ProLinea and Deskpro families.

How much did my uncle pay for his sensible mid-range computer in 1993? I hit the books and found several reviews of the ProLinea 4/33. My old standby of PC/Computing reviewed the 1992 models, which had plenty of useful information, but for accuracy’s sake I needed a 1993 review. PC Magazine’s September 1993 value PC roundup had just what I needed. Roundup reviews like these are a fun relic of the electronics press—a time long past when budgets were big enough that editors could write a bunch of checks to review ten computers at once. PC Magazine staff writer Oliver Rist was generally positive on the ProLinea, citing its competitive performance at a low price along with Compaq’s above-average service and support. His only knock was against the video chipset, which doesn’t really square with the results in the benchmark charts. The ProLinea is right in the middle of the pack for the Graphics WinMark scores, with only a few outliers completely destroying the rest of the competition.

PC Mag’s ProLinea came with 8 megs of RAM, a 240MB hard drive, dual floppies, and a monitor for the cool cost of $2300. That was still a decent chunk of change for a computer, but a year earlier a powerful Compaq Deskpro with a 33MHZ 486DX cost nearly three times as much. Now ordinary people could buy Windows PCs that could run multiple applications simultaneously with an.... acceptable level of performance! Until the machine crashed or froze, of course, because we're still talking about Windows 3.1. Still, you could do a lot worse in 1993 than these PCs.

ProLinea and Deskpro Family

Benchmark Scores

The ProLinea was step one in Compaq’s multi-point plan for world domination. If the new game was being number one in marketshare, then so be it, they would be number one. First, Compaq changed their sales strategies by adding new channels in addition to their traditional dealer network. The most obvious move was creating a new factory direct sales operation to compete head-to-head with Gateway and Dell. Next, they needed to counter Packard Bell in the growing big box retail segment. Stores like Circuit City, Nobody Beats the Wiz, and even Sears were pushing computers as they became cheaper and more mainstream. Apple Performas and IBM PS/1s were already in stores, and Compaq joined the fray with the Presario in 1993. Originally an all-in-one model, the Presario name grew to represent Compaq’s entry-level retail brand. For a while the same desktops and towers were labeled as ProLinea or Presario depending on whether they were sold in dealer or retail channels, but by the end of 1996, Compaq realized that was silly and condensed everything under the Presario label.

Think about famous computer names—ThinkPad, Macintosh, Vaio. All of those brands conjure up something specific, something emotional. ThinkPad is a black-and-red machine that means business and reliability. Macintosh means style, ease of use, and “it just works.” Vaio evokes cutting-edge hi-fi design and multimedia prowess. When I hear Presario, I think of nondescript beige boxes that were no different than a dozen other PCs. Far more important than the Presario's B-list name was its A-list marketing strategy, though. Compaq’s aggressive marketing combined with just the right level of hardware for the average user meant that millions of people connected to the web for the first time thanks to a Compaq computer. Presario had enough recognition to get some eulogies when HP retired the Compaq and Presario names in 2013. The ProLinea, though... as far as I can tell, nobody cared enough to write an article, or even a press release, about the retirement of Compaq's first entry-level computer brand.

Beige to the Future

I moved on from the trusty ProLinea in the year 2000 when I bought a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion with a 600MHz Pentium III, using my salary as a supermarket cashier. My dad kept the Compaq as his own personal machine, but even his tolerance for slow computers had a limit. He replaced it in October 2002 with a Compaq Presario from Staples—something in the 5000 series that had a white case with transparent gray plastic. What happened to the ProLinea after that? I have no idea. I was off to college at the time, and my younger sister wasn’t far behind. With the last of their children ready to leave the nest, my parents cleaned out the detritus generated by three sons and a daughter. Maybe it went to some e-waste pile, or maybe it was picked up by someone who cared about old technology. Hopefully it was the latter.

Unlike the move from the Commodore to the Compaq, my next PC wasn’t as much of a quantum leap. It still ran Windows, it still connected to the internet, and it still played games—it just did them all faster and with more bells and whistles. By the late 90s most traces of personality were beaten out of most PCs, leaving the workstation makers and Steve Jobs’ resurgent Apple as the only real purveyors of character. I suppose that’s the nature of many mass-market products—a Sony Walkman was a novel idea, and then the portable tape player market slowly grew stale as manufacturers built disposable items at the lowest possible cost. To their credit, Sony kept at it until the bitter end, and they still manage to put a bit of character in everything they make.

Uncle Bill — A portrait of the author’s uncle as a younger man.

So why does this boring bland basic beige box—which didn’t stick out from the crowd at all—still have a place in my heart? It’s because it was from my uncle, of course. As a microbiologist, he was deeply involved with science and technology. He saw my growing love of computers and tech and wanted to help me towards a career in that field. Yes, he knew I would spend just as much time playing games or surfing online than using it for schoolwork. But that’s OK—just having an environment to explore was enough. The world was growing more connected by the day, and you could get on board, or be left behind.

It’s hard not to look at the millions of Wintel machines shipped during the nineties and ask “where’s the character?” After all, they looked the same, used the same processors, and ran the same operating systems. Few manufacturers innovated and many ended up chasing trends, Compaq included. But the mistake I made was not recognizing that even the most neutral of computers is colored by its user. Every vintage PC I’ve picked up has some story to tell. A machine with bone-stock hardware can have the wildest software lurking on its hard drive. An unassuming beige box can conceal massive modifications. There was nothing unique or special about this particular computer—at least, not until I hot-rodded it with a bunch of upgrades. It didn’t really matter that it was a Compaq—the role could have been played by a Gateway, Packard Bell, or even a Zeos and the show would have gone on. I would’ve upgraded and stretched out any PC I owned, because it’s my nature.

I’ve grumbled quite a bit in various episodes about what we’ve lost from the golden age of microcomputing. I can’t help it; middle-age nostalgia is brain poison, and it’ll infect you if it hasn’t already. But as I’ve gotten back into serious computer history research, my old man yells at cloud instincts have given way to a more pleasant sense of wonder. By itself, a computer is just a steel box with some sand inside of it. Whether it’s a common Compaq or a colossal Cray, a computer can’t do anything without a person behind it. That was true in the eighties during the golden age, it was true in the nineties, and it’s still true today.

So even though Windows was kinda crashy and software never quite worked the way it was supposed to, things in the nineties were a Hell of a lot easier to use than they were in the eighties—and more reliable to boot. Maybe the lack of platform diversity was worse for us nerds, but it was better for society for us to settle down a bit and not introduce mutually incompatible computers every couple of years. All of the criticisms of machines like the ProLinea, and the Presarios that replaced, it were correct. Without this army of beige PCs heralded by Compaq, maybe the world wide web wouldn’t have taken off like it did. Maybe I’ve been a little too hard on beige. But at the end of the day, we all want something that gets out of our way and lets us be who we are. What’s more beige than that?