December Days 2021 #16: iFruit Salad
Dec. 16th, 2021 10:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
Throughout much of my university experience, I from advantage of my work study awards to do various things, like officiate intramural sports and play in university pep bands. One of the work study jobs I held during my career was as a circulation and front desk person at the School of Education's Institutional Resources and Instructional Support (IRIS) space. IRIS was much like any school library's institutional collection space, with books, videos, computers, and projectors available for students and faculty to borrow and use. (Here was also where I learned many of the tricks to compensate for my body suddenly deciding things were nice and warm and we should nap now. Still going to be a much longer time before anyone notices that my sleeping is not as good and restful as it should be.) The circulation system was something different than what I had experienced to this point (Follett, maybe?) so it was good experience working with some other kinds of circulation systems and a pretty decent idea of what it would be like to be a desk person in a school library. Which, to some degree, is about being loaded potential, ready to go, but also means that you can sometimes have to find acceptable ways of passing time when there are no projects or people coming into the space. So TVTropes started running my life, and someone set up an IRC relay for me so that I could stay in contact with my webcomic friends and otherwise I tried not to trip any browser blocks or circumvent too many port blocks, because I still like being employed and learning about how the spaces and its resources worked. Had it existed long enough, there would have been an awesome and potentially terrifying digitization project ahead of them, as they tried to make sure all of their VHS tape-based resources had either been rebought in DVD or had been hooked up to proper recorder software so as to make an acceptable copy to loan before most/all of the tapes degraded past the ability to play or the players broke beyond the ability to repair them. At that point, I might have still believed those resources were released on DVD or would be. Nowadays, I know better, but I also know that there are places that will keep using those materials from twenty to thirty years ago because they don't want to spend money on updated materials or because they believe everything created with a perspective of our times will teach critical race theory or some other forbidden ideology that deviates into the truth instead of parroting the lionized and distorted view of history that White Supremacists and secessionists want children to learn.
In addition to computers that could be loaned out, IRIS also had some computers in the space for use on various projects. One of the most common uses for the machines was to watch and edit video content, since most Windows machines didn't come with built-in software programs that let them do this. (Sure, Windows Movie Maker exists, but it's terrible compared to iMovie.) I didn't learn enough about the how or the why that people would use those resources in their classrooms, either as learners or as student instructors or practical experience placements, but I get the feeling that if I had been interested in them, I would have found some really interesting stories and resources, some that would seem really neat and forward-looking and some that I would question why they continued to exist. Not unlike the stories and resources in the shelves in my current profession, although I didn't know enough to make that connection then.
The computers for use in IRIS were the iMacs that came in the multiple colored versions. At the actual desk, we had the next generation of iMac (the snowball colored half-dome design that probably had a lot of jokes made about it being the iBoob), but the ones in the space were the ones that got the Pokémon jokes made about them instead and were used as a proxy of how Apple was far more concerned with aesthetics than with anything else in their products. While I was there at IRIS, we needed to upgrade the iMacs to meet more than the minimum system requirements for the version of OS X being installed. What that meant was some of the the computers were going to have their components transferred to others, so that the computers created would be the best equipped to handle OS X. I have always enjoyed opening up machines and seeing what they have inside and figuring out the best ways to create the desired results, but up until this point, my work in examining and modifying internals had been on machines with the same basic case designs and board/card layouts.
Cracking open the iMacs to create more robust iMacs made some of those complaints about aesthetic design being prioritized make a whole lot more sense. It was already the case that laptops had a higher-than average chance of being arranged to be a pain in the ass to anyone that wanted to upgrade any of the upgradable components inside, but the iMacs were the first time that I realized that idea could be applied to all-in-one machines as well. Because of the slanted and curved designs of the computers, the circuit boards themselves had been cut to the case, which sometimes meant components were stacked on top of each other very tightly, since things like RAM sticks and hard drives couldn't bend to the case design or the screen lean that was also part of the aesthetic (and possibly ergonomic) design of the computer. For someone with large hands and fingers and a variable dexterity score, the compactness of the components often resulted in a lot of scratched or bruised fingers trying to extract RAM chips and hard disk drives from the machines to be decommissioned and then even more scratched and bruised fingers trying to insert the extracted components back into the machines that would be upgraded. Some machines had hard drive swaps along with their RAM upgrades, so I had to learn which order to insert new components so that I didn't block access to the RAM by putting in the hard drive first.
After all of that hardware changing, quiet cursing, and the occasional loud ouch, about half of the machines that we had started with were ready to get themselves upgraded in the software department. Which was a long process by itself, since many of the drives in the iMac were CD drives still, even though most computers had jumped up from 700MB storage to the 4.3 GB single player / 8.7 GB dual layer DVDs as common storage units for files, games, and movies. (Game systems, except for the PS2, hadn't fully embraced the DVD yet, but the Xbox would, and that would eventually lead to Xboxes getting extremely awesome media player software called Xbox Media Center, which would eventually rename itself as Kodi when the software became available for more than Xboxes.) Having multiple CDs as installation media, though, made it possible to queue up machines for installation, such that when the lead machine finished with the current CD, the machine behind it in the queue got that CD to start/continue the process, and the discs would continue down the chain until there weren't any machines to join up. This took a significant amount of time to achieve, because while the computers were being upgraded, we were still offering service and checking out materials and answering phones and questions, so even if the installation took an hour for each disc, it was rarely the case where I could take the time to shift all the discs over one machine and continue the process at the exact point each of the discs finished.
The project did get finished on time, and the new machines were still very useful to IRIS visitors while I was still there, but these machines would eventually run into two things that would impede their continued progress. The first was that Apple would eventually release OS X 10.4, which wouldn't officially install on the flavored iMacs. This was the first exposure I had to the practice of excluding still-working machines from upgrades they might have been able to take just fine. The second was that IRIS closed down, and so all of those machines went through property disposition, having served for as long as they could for their community, before being relegated. But they had a good run while they lasted, and, for as much as I curse and complain about those iMac designs (I was always worried that the G4 half-domes had a weak point along the articulation of their monitor arm that I was going to discover any day by accident) and their less than stellar positioning of components, the machines themselves seemed poised and ready to continue being of good service for years after they got their final upgrades.
Having had to extract and install components from those iMacs into others of the same type gives me much more of an appreciation for the desktop rectangle box, and how the most difficult parts of those things is usually cable management and making sure everything can stretch to the places that it needs to. Unsurprisingly, those kinds of aesthetically-designed All-In-One cases gave way to other designs, eventually moving back toward the idea of the All-In-One design that took cues from the best part of luggable design - a much bigger screen than the luggables had and detaching the keyboard and mouse so they could connect by USB. I don't know how difficult it is to open up and upgrade the components of the All-In-Ones of our current era, having not had the opportunity to open one up and try. Some of that is because of the bad experiences I had with the iMacs, some of it is because I don't want to be limited to a specific screen size and resolution for the computers that I had. These computers have their uses, it just happens to be that this All-In-One idea isn't one that fits my use cases. There will be some other designs, usually based on Systems on a Chip, that I will embrace a lot more, when they come into existence later on.
- CPU: PowerPC 750 @ 333 MHz
- Memory: 64 MB, target 96 or 128 MB
- Graphics: ATI Rage Pro Turbo with 6 MB of VRAM, max resolution 1024x768
- Sound: Internal Speaker, plus 3.5" jack ports for headphones
- Inputs/Peripherals: Keyboard (USB 1.1), Mouse (USB 1.1), 100MB Ethernet
- Storage: 6.0 GB hard disk drive, CD-ROM Optical Media Drive (possibly? DVD-ROM Optical Media Drive)
- OS: Mac OS 9. Target OS: Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther"
Throughout much of my university experience, I from advantage of my work study awards to do various things, like officiate intramural sports and play in university pep bands. One of the work study jobs I held during my career was as a circulation and front desk person at the School of Education's Institutional Resources and Instructional Support (IRIS) space. IRIS was much like any school library's institutional collection space, with books, videos, computers, and projectors available for students and faculty to borrow and use. (Here was also where I learned many of the tricks to compensate for my body suddenly deciding things were nice and warm and we should nap now. Still going to be a much longer time before anyone notices that my sleeping is not as good and restful as it should be.) The circulation system was something different than what I had experienced to this point (Follett, maybe?) so it was good experience working with some other kinds of circulation systems and a pretty decent idea of what it would be like to be a desk person in a school library. Which, to some degree, is about being loaded potential, ready to go, but also means that you can sometimes have to find acceptable ways of passing time when there are no projects or people coming into the space. So TVTropes started running my life, and someone set up an IRC relay for me so that I could stay in contact with my webcomic friends and otherwise I tried not to trip any browser blocks or circumvent too many port blocks, because I still like being employed and learning about how the spaces and its resources worked. Had it existed long enough, there would have been an awesome and potentially terrifying digitization project ahead of them, as they tried to make sure all of their VHS tape-based resources had either been rebought in DVD or had been hooked up to proper recorder software so as to make an acceptable copy to loan before most/all of the tapes degraded past the ability to play or the players broke beyond the ability to repair them. At that point, I might have still believed those resources were released on DVD or would be. Nowadays, I know better, but I also know that there are places that will keep using those materials from twenty to thirty years ago because they don't want to spend money on updated materials or because they believe everything created with a perspective of our times will teach critical race theory or some other forbidden ideology that deviates into the truth instead of parroting the lionized and distorted view of history that White Supremacists and secessionists want children to learn.
In addition to computers that could be loaned out, IRIS also had some computers in the space for use on various projects. One of the most common uses for the machines was to watch and edit video content, since most Windows machines didn't come with built-in software programs that let them do this. (Sure, Windows Movie Maker exists, but it's terrible compared to iMovie.) I didn't learn enough about the how or the why that people would use those resources in their classrooms, either as learners or as student instructors or practical experience placements, but I get the feeling that if I had been interested in them, I would have found some really interesting stories and resources, some that would seem really neat and forward-looking and some that I would question why they continued to exist. Not unlike the stories and resources in the shelves in my current profession, although I didn't know enough to make that connection then.
The computers for use in IRIS were the iMacs that came in the multiple colored versions. At the actual desk, we had the next generation of iMac (the snowball colored half-dome design that probably had a lot of jokes made about it being the iBoob), but the ones in the space were the ones that got the Pokémon jokes made about them instead and were used as a proxy of how Apple was far more concerned with aesthetics than with anything else in their products. While I was there at IRIS, we needed to upgrade the iMacs to meet more than the minimum system requirements for the version of OS X being installed. What that meant was some of the the computers were going to have their components transferred to others, so that the computers created would be the best equipped to handle OS X. I have always enjoyed opening up machines and seeing what they have inside and figuring out the best ways to create the desired results, but up until this point, my work in examining and modifying internals had been on machines with the same basic case designs and board/card layouts.
Cracking open the iMacs to create more robust iMacs made some of those complaints about aesthetic design being prioritized make a whole lot more sense. It was already the case that laptops had a higher-than average chance of being arranged to be a pain in the ass to anyone that wanted to upgrade any of the upgradable components inside, but the iMacs were the first time that I realized that idea could be applied to all-in-one machines as well. Because of the slanted and curved designs of the computers, the circuit boards themselves had been cut to the case, which sometimes meant components were stacked on top of each other very tightly, since things like RAM sticks and hard drives couldn't bend to the case design or the screen lean that was also part of the aesthetic (and possibly ergonomic) design of the computer. For someone with large hands and fingers and a variable dexterity score, the compactness of the components often resulted in a lot of scratched or bruised fingers trying to extract RAM chips and hard disk drives from the machines to be decommissioned and then even more scratched and bruised fingers trying to insert the extracted components back into the machines that would be upgraded. Some machines had hard drive swaps along with their RAM upgrades, so I had to learn which order to insert new components so that I didn't block access to the RAM by putting in the hard drive first.
After all of that hardware changing, quiet cursing, and the occasional loud ouch, about half of the machines that we had started with were ready to get themselves upgraded in the software department. Which was a long process by itself, since many of the drives in the iMac were CD drives still, even though most computers had jumped up from 700MB storage to the 4.3 GB single player / 8.7 GB dual layer DVDs as common storage units for files, games, and movies. (Game systems, except for the PS2, hadn't fully embraced the DVD yet, but the Xbox would, and that would eventually lead to Xboxes getting extremely awesome media player software called Xbox Media Center, which would eventually rename itself as Kodi when the software became available for more than Xboxes.) Having multiple CDs as installation media, though, made it possible to queue up machines for installation, such that when the lead machine finished with the current CD, the machine behind it in the queue got that CD to start/continue the process, and the discs would continue down the chain until there weren't any machines to join up. This took a significant amount of time to achieve, because while the computers were being upgraded, we were still offering service and checking out materials and answering phones and questions, so even if the installation took an hour for each disc, it was rarely the case where I could take the time to shift all the discs over one machine and continue the process at the exact point each of the discs finished.
The project did get finished on time, and the new machines were still very useful to IRIS visitors while I was still there, but these machines would eventually run into two things that would impede their continued progress. The first was that Apple would eventually release OS X 10.4, which wouldn't officially install on the flavored iMacs. This was the first exposure I had to the practice of excluding still-working machines from upgrades they might have been able to take just fine. The second was that IRIS closed down, and so all of those machines went through property disposition, having served for as long as they could for their community, before being relegated. But they had a good run while they lasted, and, for as much as I curse and complain about those iMac designs (I was always worried that the G4 half-domes had a weak point along the articulation of their monitor arm that I was going to discover any day by accident) and their less than stellar positioning of components, the machines themselves seemed poised and ready to continue being of good service for years after they got their final upgrades.
Having had to extract and install components from those iMacs into others of the same type gives me much more of an appreciation for the desktop rectangle box, and how the most difficult parts of those things is usually cable management and making sure everything can stretch to the places that it needs to. Unsurprisingly, those kinds of aesthetically-designed All-In-One cases gave way to other designs, eventually moving back toward the idea of the All-In-One design that took cues from the best part of luggable design - a much bigger screen than the luggables had and detaching the keyboard and mouse so they could connect by USB. I don't know how difficult it is to open up and upgrade the components of the All-In-Ones of our current era, having not had the opportunity to open one up and try. Some of that is because of the bad experiences I had with the iMacs, some of it is because I don't want to be limited to a specific screen size and resolution for the computers that I had. These computers have their uses, it just happens to be that this All-In-One idea isn't one that fits my use cases. There will be some other designs, usually based on Systems on a Chip, that I will embrace a lot more, when they come into existence later on.
