[sdiy] Elektor Formant Re: Test / Sequencer / Arduino

[Rick Jansen]

On 26/03/2015 17:02, Rick Jansen wrote:
> On 25/03/2015 11:37, Rick Jansen wrote:
>> Now I need to bring back to life the Formant, which has been sitting there, unused for
>> about 10 years. Hope the elco's are all still keeping their liquids!
>
> Well, cabinet 1 is still operational.

The Formant in cabinet 2 is still fully functional as well. +15.02V ,-14.79V, +4.8V, alright.

To revive my old sequencer project I needed my old designs, that I appear to have touched 
last in 1995, in MacDraw II on a Mac with System 9. That posed a bit of a challenge this 
weekend. I still have a few old Macs, but none of the PPC ones have been used the past 10 
years. The LC475: battery empty, but with proper vulcan grips it came back to life. Not 
the SCSI hard disk though. Next! Old Quadra. All it does is blink a red LED on the 
motherboard, spin the ventilators a few seconds, then halt. Next! Cube G4, that nice 
looking plexiglass one, that I cannot throw away.. Nope. Old 7600/132. Ah, that one still 
works, to my big relief. Last used in 2005.

No MacDraw on that machine though. But, I had still had a copy in an archive. Now, how to 
get that to the machine.. All it has is an old diskette drive and an ethernet port. Oh, 
and AppleTalk. Transferred MacDraw via a web server, unpacked, and: YES! it works.

Not the old MacDraw documents though. "Disk error -39 opening a file". After a while I 
guessed they were missing their "resource fork". Apparently I copied them off the old 
system 9 machine with a simple copy, or via FTP or so. In those days binary and ASCII file 
transfers were worlds apart. And you may lose the resource fork, containing extra bits 
like fonts or anything else an application likes to store there. So, I created a new empty 
MacDraw document, and copied the resources from there into my old design files (ResEdit), 
and: IT WORKED! All that needed fixing was the actual drawing size.

I must be one of the last human beings alive that used MacDraw, now. And I realise: I 
still miss MacDraw. I have EaszyDraw, and a few others, but it is not even close to good 
old easy-to-use MacDraw.

If anyone here still has MacDraw documents that needs saving (print on paper / conversion 
to PICT file) this is your (probably) last chance, while this Mac is still alive.

Isn't it a pity that beloved machines don't get older than 10 years or so? Everything made 
of plastic or electronics breaks eventually...

rick