Category: Kev’s Blog

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Apple’s product design and attention to detail (the 1st gen Mac Pro)

There’s no mistaking Apple is second to none when it comes to product design. Their attention to detail can be seen throughout the design of their products, both inside and out. Sir Jony Ive was knighted for his service to the design industry in 2012.

Some details are surprising when you see them first hand, and the lengths that Apple goes to. Take for example the unique design of the case for the Power Mac G5 and first generation Mac Pro. It’s uniquely recognizable and even could be described as iconic. The design of the perforated ‘cheese grater’ grill is more than just aesthetics, it provides an essential purpose in the design of the cooling of the machine, allowing air to be pulled through the front grill in a number of distinctly controllable cooling zones through the case and allowing exhaust to exit the rear of the case.

At the rear is something interesting though, and maybe even overlooked. Power cords commonly called ‘kettle cords’ have been used to supply power to PC desktop cases for years, but what’s interesting about the power cord for the Mac Pro is that the plastic is molded with a flange that allows it to fit flush to the back of the case when inserted. A minor detail, but a perfect example of the lengths Apple goes to.

Here’s the cord/plug,

showing the surrounding flange at the back of the plug molding:

 

 

 

 

The plug inserted,

fitting flush to the back of the case:

Simple details, but details like this leave a lasting impression.

 

 

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Installing Windows 98 on Virtualbox on MacOS

My attempt to install Windows 95 on Virtualbox on my Mac Pro didn’t turn out too well as by the time the installation completed it refused to boot with the error:

"While initializing device IOS. Windows Protection Error"

What on earth Windows 98 was doing back then initializing iOS devices is interesting, but beside the point 🙂 This error is described in this KB article but I’m not sure updating the BIOS in my Quantum hard disk is really applicable in this case. More likely the issue is related to VT-x virtualization  (I can’t find the option to turn off VT-x support on my VirtualBox install), or other posts suggest this is most likely to do with host CPUs faster than 2.1GHz, and my Mac Pro has dual 2.8 Xeons.

Moving on then, next up, installing Windows 98. There’s a great post here that describes VM specific settings compatible for installing 98 – I went with 1GB RAM and a virtual 10GB disk and followed the other suggested settings.

I booted the VM from a floppy disk image (the same I downloaded for my 95 installation attempt, from here), partitioned and formatted the virtual disk, and then ran ‘setup’ from the CD:

Welcome to Windows 98 Setup: “the software that makes your computer more powerful, reliable, manageable, and entertaining”.

I’m glad 98 made my computer “more entertaining”.

 

“Sit back and relax” …

 

 

 

 

“Windows 98 supports new, cutting edge technologies” …

 

 

 

 

I remember using this ‘active desktop’ feature in 98, where you could have web content pinned to your desktop. An interesting IE feature that was discontinued from Vista onwards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s alive! Welcome to Windows 98. Given that VirtualBox does not have any supported/provided Guest Additions for WIndows 98 (or 95 for that matter), running under VirtualBox is incredibly slow and sluggish. However for nostalgia’s sake, if there’s something you want to play around with to re-live just how awesome Windows 98 was (?), then it’s definitely doable in VirtualBox, but not a great experience.

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Adding an extra 16GB to my 2008 Mac Pro

I while back I wrote about my eBay purchase of a 2008 Mac Pro. Since it only came with 4GB, I purchased an additional 16GB from a vendor on eBay to bump it up to 20GB.

The 2008 Mac Pro (and I think more recent models up to but not including the current trashcan design) has two slide out trays that each take 4 sticks of 800 MHz DDR2 EEC DIMMs, up to a max of 64GB. Here’s the inside layout – the modular and easy access to every part of the insides of the machine still amazes me – it’s clear Apple put just as much thought and effort into designing the inside of the Mac Pro as they did the iconic outside. When’s the last time you opened a PC desktop case and were taken back by clean and logical layout of the inside (inside of seeing a rat’s nest of multicolored cables stuffed inside a box):

  • top left: optical drives
  • underneath: 4x 3.5″ slide out drive bays (no cables to attach to the drives – just slide out the tray, screw in the drive to the tray, then slide it back in to attach it)
  • center right: 4x PCI-e slots for graphics cards etc (two PCIe x4 slots and two PCIe 2.0 x16 slots)
  • lower left: fans
  • lower center: the 2x Xeon 2.8GHz quad core cpus
  • lower right: the two slide out RAM trays

 

Sliding out the two trays, here’s the original 4 x 1GB DIMMs spread across the two memory boards – looks like there was the original stock 2x 1GB, and then another 2x 1GBs added:

 

 

Here’s the new 4x 4GB sticks ready to insert – note the hefty heatsinks:

 

 

 

 

And here’s the newly inserted DIMMS along with the original 4. I’m not sure if this is the optimal arrangement as I’ve read you’re supposed to stripe them across the two boards in pairs, so I’ll do a bit more reading and work out if I need to re-arrange them:

 

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Installing Windows 95 on VirtualBox on MacOS

Looking through a stack of CDs and DVDs on the shelf on my desk, amongst many other things I still have install CDs for Windows 95 and Windows 98. I wondered (as you do, well, maybe not everyone does) what it would be like to install 95 again from scratch so created a new VM in VirtualBox and off I went. If you’ve come across any of my posts before you might remember I’ve installed all sorts of OSes under VirtualBox before, because, well why not? OS/2 and AROS probably the most interesting.

The steps in this blog are very useful for a guide. Windows 95 install CDs were apparently not bootable, and I don’t remember having boot floppies. If I did I probably don’t have them anymore. I download a Windows 95 boot disk floppy .img from here, and attached it to the floppy drive in the VirtualBox config for this machine.

After booting to an a: prompt, attempted ‘format c:’ but got a ‘invalid drive specification’ error. Seems I needed to partition my blank attached virtual disk first, so from the a: prompt, ran fdisk:

entered ‘y’ for large disk support, and then selected option 1 for ‘Create a DOS partition’ and then ‘Create Primary DOS partition’. Next, formated it:

format c:

then change to R: (the attached CD Drive)

and then

setup

Next, Windows 95 setup was telling me that my newly created and formatted disk was reporting an incorrect size, so started a Scandisk:

After this completed it still gave the same error, so I skipped this step:

Unfortunately at this point the install fails, and says the issue must be fixed before it will continue.

Possibly my 20GB attached virtual disk is not supported (too large), so reading around, it looks like a 2GB install disk is a supported size, so I was about to delete the 20GB disk and started again, but quitting the Scandisk before it completes with an error puts you back in the installer, and off it goes:

Some of the info screens during the install are rather interesting, promoting Window 95’s ‘high performance’:

“High-quality multimedia performance will dazzle you” – who wrote this stuff?

Who remembers dial-up MSN?

And then it fails ‘insufficient memory’ when booting up which is odd because I set the VM up with 1GB:

From post here and others, this seems this might be to do with having too much RAM configured for the VM, and in particular 1GB or more.

I decreased it to 512MB, then got:

This error on booting Windows 95 under VirtualBox seems related to VT-x virtualization. I can’t find the option to turn off VT-x support on my VirtualBox install, and other posts seem like this is to do with host CPUs faster than 2.1GHz, and my Mac Pro has dual 2.8 Xeons. Maybe this is as far as I’m going to get with 95. Next up, trying 98 :-0

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