Wherein I rummage through the graveyard of my old computers and try to cobble together a monster that will serve me in this modern age.
As much as I love computers, the constant insistence that they be upgraded every few years at a staggering cost leaving the husk of the previous, staggeringly expensive computer isn’t working for me any more.
The other issue is storage. I can’t bring myself to throw out old computers, but I can’t warehouse any more retired workhorses either. Eventually I would have to move into an airplane hangar.
It would be one thing if they had actually died through some mechanical or electronic failure, but they still work. They power up. Lights go on. They make sounds. Keyboard works. Mouse makes the pointer move around the screen. It still functions. It may be a little slower than when the machine was new, but it functions. I have at least half a dozen functioning computers lying around unplugged, collecting dust.
Right now I am typing this on a thirteen year old iMac with a gorgeous 27-inch display. The mechanical hard drive beneath that beautiful screen has seen some better days, and it stopped receiving updates when Apple designated it as “obsolete” in December of 2022. I dragged it out of obsolescence with a Linux operating system fed to it from an external solid state hard drive. It’s incredibly peppy and may stay that way for years to come.
I did the same with a 2012 Mac mini which I refer to as The Mac Minty, and I use that computer every day.
Sadly, Linux won’t run everything I need it to run. If there was a version of the Affinity Suite for Linux, I would never look back, but I have to maintain a few Macs old and new for some of the old stuff — my beloved Affinity Designer and Adobe’s Photoshop which both Tina and I use.
The thing that sticks in my craw is that Adobe’s software is a subscription service. It comes with a monthly bill. According to the internet, Adobe began its transition to a subscription model in 2011–2012. I don’t remember when I first signed up for Adobe’s subscription service, but it had to be around that time, and I opted to subscribe to Photoshop alone. It was only around ten bucks a month which seemed manageable.
Everything is a recurring monthly fee now. It’s the death of a thousand cuts.
And it was just Photoshop. I could rent other applications like Illustrator or InDesign à la carte or give Adobe a mortgage payment for the privilege of using the rest of their software library.
No, Tina would have her Photoshop on her modern mini, and if I needed to do something other than photo editing, I could use the Affinity suite or some of the old boxed software on one of the old machines.
Heavens to Murgatroyd! That’s it! Boxed software!
I still had my boxed software along with a number of Apple operating systems on disk. My mind started to race as to the possibilities of performing a fresh installation of an operating system and one of the Adobe Creative Suites on a fresh hard drive or, better yet, a new Solid State Drive. It wouldn’t be the latest and greatest that Adobe has to offer, but if Tina and I were to do an honest assessment of how we use their graphic design tools, we would be fine with a 20 year old version of Photoshop.
If forced, I could work with Photoshop 3.0 and Illustrator 7.0.
Sorry, I’m not going back to QuarkXpress. InDesign CS2 would be just fine.
After doing some research over which one of my old Macs would host this pipe dream, I found that a fresh install of Adobe’s software from the store bought disks may not be possible. The activation servers at Adobe are no longer active meaning that once the software was installed on a system, it had to be “blessed” by Adobe by entering the software’s serial number. Once the number was entered, Adobe was satisfied that you didn’t have a bootleg version of their product, and the software was launched.
Sounds like I had an expensive set of coasters.
This wasn’t the end of the line.
I have the Adobe CS4 suite of desktop publishing software on a 2009 Mac Pro. I went to check it out, and it works having been authorized by Adobe back when their activation servers were still up. The scary part was that I found that the software and the operating system that supported it were on a hard drive that was manufactured in 2010. That is ancient for a mechanical hard drive which is only rated for 5 to 7 years.
There wasn’t a moment to lose. If that old hard drive crapped out, I was going to be out of luck.
Fortunately, I have a number of copies of Carbon Copy Cloner stretching back to when it was still shareware. CCC does what the name says — makes a perfect bootable copy of Mac hard drives. I cloned the old hard drive onto a couple of much newer hard drives, and a plan developed.
I bought a PCIe or Peripheral Component Interconnect Express card which accepted an SSD and cloned the old hard drive on to it. The PCIe card plugs inside of the Mac Pro; the computer boots from the attached SSD and the old box is now a speed demon! It runs Adobe’s CS4 suite beautifully.
That Mac has 4 other hard drives (5 total) in it. Mainly for storage but one of the drives has a redundant installation of what I cloned to the SSD and an installation of El Capitan. I have a couple of old operating systems that run beautifully on that machine. I wouldn’t do online banking or anything that requires a secure browser, but it will run the vintage software I need.
This wasn’t the only computer I played around with over the weekend, but it was the easier of the two which I tore apart. More on that other machine next time.
Stay tuned for:
