Feeling called out and personally attacked by this #GlobalTalk print job…

Are there any known PDF viewers for Mac OS 8/9 that are NOT Adobe Acrobat?

#MARCHintosh

Sent this year's #MARCHintosh print job off to all the LaserWriters and StyleWriters that I could find on #GlobalTalk. ImageWriters, your turn's tomorrow 😎

Nine meetings scheduled for today, it's one of _those_ days 🤯

Got some more #GlobalTalk print jobs, from @nprofile1q... and @nprofile1q... and a mystery sender!

So, I don't have a ton of time for #MARCHintosh this year, compared to previous years - the day job is keeping me pretty busy and I've been kind of burned out in the evenings. But there are a few small things I have planned:

1. Now that my Amiga 500 is up and running, I want to try looking into various Mac-on-Amiga emulation options, see if maybe I can even get the A500 on GlobalTalk haha. Also I wonder if any native AppleTalk stacks exist for Amiga, that would be even crazier.
2. I'm going to build a CatMac! With the spare SE motherboard I have laying around, and now that I have a 3D printer, I've got all the bits and pieces needed to make one. Just have to make a visit to Dad's workshop so I can solder in all the heat-set inserts. If it works well, I'll swap it out with the SE I currently have sitting on the Tower of Power now - and the original SE will likely end up going into my living room as a display piece.
3. Replacing the PSU fan in my 6500, which is noisy. I've been dreading this because the plastic is so brittle and I've damaged the case more and more each time I open it…so hopefully I can do it with minimal damage.

My #MARCHintosh 2026 calling card has been dropped to every #GlobalTalk share I can see that lets me connect and has a public drop box 😁 (and if you haven't gotten it yet, don't worry, I'll check for new shares periodically during the event - there's also a copy on my public share in the MARCHintosh goodies folder)

This was a fun one to build, I did it using THINK C over the course of a couple weekends. It would have been a _lot_ easier in Director, REALBasic, HyperCard - or even MacPython - but part of the fun for me is learning C and the Macintosh Toolbox, writing code the way it was done back in the day, a little closer to the hardware.

I wanted to make sure it could run on both new and old operating systems - and it will work on anything from System 6.0 up to Mac OS 9.2.2. However if you run it on an older System version it'll still pop a dialog with a greeting, you just won't get the “multimedia experience”. The reason for that is because it requires the Sound Manager, and trying to call that API on older System versions causes a bomb.

A couple other tricks I learned:
- how to figure out if Color QuickDraw is available and return a B&W PICT resource if it's not
- how to print! Yes this calling card will happily print a copy of itself to your chosen printer. Although it might not look correct, I had to re-align the text to the correct page width based on my printer, your mileage may vary.

(fun fact: that wasn't the original intent - I also found a copy of my 1993 Xmas Wish List in my floppy archive, I wanted to store that in a styled text resource and print that instead as an easter egg, but ran out of time)

Yep - that's a real picture of me, circa 1993, with the family Macintosh IIfx and Personal LaserWriter NTR. I've posted it here a couple of times before. And that kid's voice you hear when clicking on a particular hotspot? That's my real voice too - from 1993 - recorded at a computer camp using a Farallon MacRecorder. I extracted it from a HyperCard stack that I found on one of the disks I archived last year.

#RetroComputing #RetroProgramming #VintageMac