The Denfield Hoard 3: Multimedia (2022)
Added 2025-10-20 04:04:00 +0000 UTCThis video announces the discovery of another local hoard of computers, making the "Denfield" title almost meaningless except for some magazines, CD-ROM caddies and software. It continues the Powerbook 500 series coverage with a Powerbook 540c found in the new hoard. Subtle Indiana Jones references continue from Part 2. I get depressed missing out on a Power Macintosh 6500 from this new hoard, so I talk about the first gen StyleWriter printer, which I got instead. Discovery of a Marathon 2 game CD-ROM foreshadows the next episode...
Comments
Great additional memories about the early StyleWriters. I was someone who refilled the cartridges and jumped on Palatino when it came out. Thanks for sharing those, Dante!
65scribe
2025-10-25 18:29:26 +0000 UTCThat’s true. The shortest Apple production run ever. Prototype 5300’s for the mission impossible movie running the unreleased Mac OS 7.5.4. The PowerBook XXXX nameplate is pretty cool.
65scribe
2025-10-25 14:35:33 +0000 UTCOMG, oh emm g(h)ee, eau de clarified butter! THIS IS WHERE MY MAC SAGA BEGAN! (A Classic II and a StyleWriter 1, not MacAddict or Denfield.) I was 17 in 1992. Pearl Jam were the future, I was a month from finishing high school, and gramma got me this very useful present for college. I was moving away from a used IIc and having to schlep to gramma's just to print on her ImageWriter II. This inkjet printer was mind-blowing to me. I'd wanted to print things at letter quality for so long. Who cared that each page took two minutes to print? I owned the printer and learned lots of tricks to keep it alive. Laser printers cost more than some photocopiers at the time, because they were photocopiers with PostScript brains instead of scanning. Kids these days may be shocked that these devices costs thousands of dollars three decades ago and often needed support contracts for repairs. Suddenly I had... even better than good enough! You could also print a lot faster at "fast" quality, but no one ever handed fast quality to a professor. While 200 DPI was NLQ (near letter quality), it seemed like a joke from one of those 24-pin dot-matrix fiends. The 360 DPI that Apple advertised was tempered by generic photocopy paper's thirst for liquid ink. It would sieve into fibers and ruin your facade of having photo-quality printing. By contrast, 300 DPI is actually LQ on a laser printer because that used solid ink -- you baked that on top, so you could print on nearly anything. I could probably make an entire video about the tricks we used on StyleWriters. Here are the ones I recall, thanks to the intense flashback this video has induced: - Once the StyleWriter II came out, I used its printer drivers instead. Printing was suddenly twice as fast. - Version 1 required that you hold down the physical option and start keys for a few seconds to clear the nozzle. The 2 had this as a software command. If you clicked the software button in the 2's print menu, you'd brick your 1. Yeah, we're talkin' POKE of death here. - I found a CDEV whose entire job was to gray out the 2's cleaning button, so you couldn't hit it accidentally. - In the beginning, we saved a bunch of money by injecting the ink using a squeeze bottle with a needle ($8 versus $25 for a new BC-01 or BC-02 cartridge). You had to be slow and patient when you injected, because you were filling a sponge from its vent hole, so the air had nowhere to go until you let up. - As time went on, Canon became "smarter" (meaner) about getting people to buy blades for their old razors. My guess is that they put some extra brains in the BC-02 cartridges so they could detect when the ink level rose after falling. If I research this topic, I'll wind up on a rant about emmerdification and open-source hardware. - As you mentioned, System 7 was not ready for real print spooling. Oh, how I envied this one part of a Wintel user's life. I learned to print class papers in shorter bursts while I wrote, so I could - You could run Adobe Type Manager (ATM) and print from the big catalog of PostScript fonts. Type 1? Type 3? Both! Two friends and I went in ten bucks each to buy an ATM license, mostly out of guilt. My Classic II wasn't on the internet, so I wasn't worried about phone-home license checks. - Once Windows 3.1 got more popular and especially with the advent of Win95, you had a flood of TrueType fonts. - We had tools to swap fonts in and out at boot time, because they would tie up RAM in applications. - In 1992, you printed in Palatino if you were hip. It proved that you could, it looked like a book, and it was easier on the eyes. I bought a brand new laser printer about five years ago for USD 134. I forget whether it's 600x600 or 1200x1200 DPI, but it's fast because it's black and white. It can use WiFi, but I don't trust that from an HP device. Instead I've wired it into the network. Perfect printing in seconds. We use it about twice a year, one of which is tax time. But hey, laser printer ink is photocopier ink, which is powder. Until you bake it on, it's recyclable. I learned to pour the powder back from Xerox catch buckets into near-empty bottles.
Dante Blando
2025-10-24 15:53:40 +0000 UTCQuestion: was the PowerBook XXXX a real model? - One of the VCF Midwest speakers mentioned that it was a prototype that actually did get made in a batch.
andre le-bone aparte
2025-10-20 07:30:51 +0000 UTC
