I bought an iMac G4 the other day ; you ’ll get to meet her presently in Think Retro , but she ’s just fantastic ; I ’ve wanted to own one from the second I get wind them . This column ’s not about her , though .
Even though the chap I buy it from had cautiously — responsibly!—erased his personal datafrom it , the first matter I wanted to do , of course , was instal a clean-living OS . I could n’t find any Tiger establish discs , but I knew I ’d create magnetic disc images of at least some installers and lay in them safely on my Drobo . I could n’t combust the image to a videodisk , but that might be because the bar of vacuous DVDs I unearthed is many year old and so may be degraded .
I expend ages trying to come up with a compounding of drives and cable that would allow me prep the installer and then boot the iMac from it ; I have a FireWire 400 hard phonograph record ( commend , PowerPC Macs have to be boot over FireWire , not USB ) but not a FireWire 400 to 400 cable . ( This is why you should never throw a cable system away , Phin ! )
My eventual solution was to swap out the SSD in my 2008 MacBook Pro for a unornamented 2.5 - inch strong disc I found , reboot it intoFireWire target disc mode , then get in touch it up to my Mac mini over FireWire 800 , practice Disk Utility to mend the 10.4 installer CD image to that driving , then using a FireWire 400 to 800 cablegram ( howdid I have one of those but not a 400 to 400 ? ) , relate the MacBook Pro to the iMac G4 and boot from there . Phew .
The OS install well , andjustas the iMac restarted I remembered I would shortly see a thing I ’d completely forgotten about : the welcome flick you used to get after you ’d installed a bracing written matter of Mac OS X.
( One for the pedants : I do unquestionably think of “ Mac OS X ” there , because although Apple dropped the Mac when relate to its desktop OS , it was n’t until after they ’d abandoned the tradition of the welcome movie . )
you’re able to see the moving picture I then attend above . A quick trawl net around YouTube and you could find the other welcome movies from OS X ’s early day . Here ’s the one that you father all the way to Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar , splendiferous in its Aqua glory :
And then with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther hail a slicker , sharp welcome video , with its thumping soundtrack by Röyksopp :
Finally — and in widescreen!—came the dizzying roller - coaster - in - distance that was the welcome video for Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 :
( Of course , if you happen to have a Mac hunt down these versions of OS X , you could fag out these welcome movies for yourself;we showed you hownearly a tenner ago . )
I eff that a lot of mass found these unstoppable movies irritating — techs especially , setting up fleets of Macs — but I appear back at them lovingly . It ’s not just that that pulsing Aqua blob was so very raw and unexpected after the categoric atomic number 78 of OS 9 , prognosticate an experience that was even a littleunsettlinglyunlike what you ’d been using before , or that they made the process of setting up your newfangled Mac just a little bit more of an event .
No , the thing that I especially love about these movies is that they say “ welcome , ” and that they say it in many different languages and script . Where I live in the UK , you’re able to go days without ever find out anything other than English or Roman text , but back then world language seemed even more alien , and I ’d get a little thrill as I started name them — before quickly getting out of my depth .
see different words and dissimilar composition system underlined not just that the Mac could take this polyglot approach in its footstep but thateveryonewas welcome . This was n’t just a computer for “ the rest of us , ” it was a computerfor all of us . Under Tim Cook ’s stewardship , Apple has commence to make its commitment to equality even more overt , but it ’s been a part of Apple for a long time — as these motion picture , whose very existence I ’d forgotten , have reminded me .
