Monthly Archives: June 2025

A blast from the past

I got around to imaging the hard drive from my Apple IIGS this morning. The drive, a 4.3-GB Seagate Barracuda 4LP (purchased used 20 or so years ago to replace the smaller drive I had been using), was hooked up to an Adaptec AVA-2902 on an old Pentium III motherboard I saved from a computer that was otherwise scrapped. The image found its way onto an SD card, which I read into my computer. With a bit of slicing and dicing with CiderPress, I had the image booting into the IIGS emulation in MAME. I then started poking around to see what kind of stuff I still had in there.

Back in the early ’90s, I was the newsletter editor for the Apple user group (both Apple II and Macintosh) in Las Vegas. My IIGS was actually a IIe at the time, but fairly well equipped with a 10-MHz accelerator, a 40-MB SCSI hard drive, a mouse, and a whopping 1 MB of RAM. This ran a desktop-publishing program called PublishIt! fairly well. It’s what I used to produce the newsletter. I’d paste up the articles and columns and render them to a PostScript file that I’d take into school to print. I was attending UNLV at the time; I’d dial in, upload the file, and send it to the laser printer in the computer lab. I’d pick up the printout, take it to one of the local OfficeMax-type stores, and have them produce a few dozen copies to mail out to the members.

Today, I pulled up the last newsletter I produced, dated March 1993. I loaded it into PublishIt! on an emulated IIGS in MAME, rendered it to PostScript (had to make sure “LaserPrep” was included), and shut down the emulator. I extracted the file from the disk image with CiderPress and converted it from PostScript to PDF with Ghostscript. This is the result:

https://alfter.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/snafug-newsletter-9303.pdf

The disk image was also put onto a BlueSCSI, from which my IIGS (I still have it) can boot. The BlueSCSI is smaller and lighter than the hard drive, and getting data on and off it is as simple as pulling the MicroSD card and manipulating the image files in CiderPress.

Keep your Windows 10 system on Windows 10: block the Windows 11 upgrade

Just a quick reminder to myself that I can look up as I roll back the handful of Windows 11 installations I have to Windows 10 (for the small handful of purposes that I need to keep any sort of Windows around at all). Save the following to a file named win11block.reg and import it into the registry to keep Windows Update from trying to put Windows 11 on your Windows 10 system:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate]
"ProductVersion"="Windows 10"
"TargetReleaseVersion"=dword:00000001
"TargetReleaseVersionInfo"="22H2"