It took me a rather long time to switch from Mac OS 8.6, with which I was perfectly happy, to OS 10.2; of course, having vowed, upon one traumatic system upgrade, never to do another such thing again, that meant I didn’t upgrade until I bought a new system. But I upgraded, and aside from the delights of the built in apache server, all the goodies of open source software, and a system that allowed software to crash gracefully without bringing the system down with it (Netscape 3.75, I am NOT thinking of you), there was another pleasurable discovery: I didn’t have to use AppleTalk any more.
Now, it may just have been me on whom the AppleTalk gods frowned, but I found AppleTalk an unmitigated nuisance. I had a Lexmark printer cabled to the G3 with one of those split cables – pre USB, it all was, back when no self-respecting company ever produced any such thing as a Mac driver for its own products, so it was all third party patchwork. And the printer needed AppleTalk – or didn’t need AppleTalk, I think I’ve repressed the memory – and if I dared change that setting then I’d be half an hour getting the chooser to recognize the printer again. It interfered with printing, it interfered with the internet settings, and in general, it interfered with user satisfaction.
Why the peroration? Because I have spent the evening trying to transfer my old mail archives from the G3 to my latest system (running 10.4), via a cross-wired cable, with all the file-sharing functions, invoking that curs-ed AppleTalk, and it will not work. I couldn’t remember how to work OS 8.6, though I did succeed in finding the archives. It took me two Babylon5 episodes to get the computers to recognize each other, and then they decided they were using incompatible profiles. So I’ve gone back to USB-and-pray, because the computer has no USB port of its own, the USB port is on a PC card, and the USB-PC card destabilizes a system that works very well. It’s not even responding to Venusian curses and bits of the Verdi Requiem – “Confutatis, maledictis”.
Oh the picture? An accident with the camera, one of those with some artistic merit. Seemed to suit.