Relive the glory days

One night at college years ago, I stayed up into the wee hours typing an extremely important end-of-term paper that had to be turned in the next morning.

I was working on an ancient Mac — likely a Mac Plus or another machine of similar vintage — that saved my work to a floppy.

Trouble is, Microsoft Word also had to be loaded via floppy, so working on the machine was a constant dance of swapping floppies in and out to load Word, work on the paper, then swap disks to save your work, load up Word again and so on.

Of course, being young and stupid, I didn’t think to save my work until the very end, when all of a sudden the Mac froze and the dreaded system error dialog box appeared.

Every Mac user dreaded this error message. The machine would completely freeze, and the only way to recover was to reboot the Mac, which meant losing all your work.

I still remember clearly the utter disbelief at seeing this message, and the cold, creeping fury of realizing that many hours of work were irretrievably lost.

I thought of pulling a Shoestring (a popular British TV show at the time about a former computer technician who turns private eye after smashing all the computers at work), but sadly resigned myself to retyping the whole darn thing. It took all night, not least because I paused every 15 minutes or so to make sure I diligently saved my work. Each disk swap was its own mini ordeal.

This is my abiding memory of old Mac systems: sudden, unexplained freezes that cost you hours of work! It happened a lot and I definitely don’t miss it.

If you have any desire to relive those fun days of unrecoverable computer freezes, you can do so easier than ever, thanks to an online Mac emulator that runs every major release of Mac OS from the 1980s onward.

There’s some fun stuff you can do, like playing classic games like SimCity and Lemmings. But the real fun is seeing how incredibly familiar, yet completely different, the old systems are.

Also in today’s newsletter:

• A clever new video from director Spike Jonze highlights the new AirPods 4, courtesy of a dancing Pedro Pascal. It’s definitely worth a watch — I liked the T-shirt effects!

• The front-facing selfie cameras on the iPhone 17 lineup are rumored to be getting a long-awaited upgrade.

• The new M4 Mac mini is currently selling for its lowest price to date on Amazon. This is the best price/performance deal in all computing.

• The new iPad mini is also seeing a big price cut, which makes this small but powerful tablet a lot less pricey.

• We hands-on review the latest budget noise-canceling headphones from EarFun and find they’re massive value.

— Leander Kahney, EIC.

^{A message from the Cult of Mac Deals team}

^{A message from the Cult of Mac Deals team}

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