So, for those of you tuning in late, back in 1991 I wrote this program called XDaliClock, which is a clone of a similar program that I had on my Mac in 1984. I sold that machine in like, 1987, and I'd been halfheartedly trying to find another ever since, because I wanted a machine that was still capable of running the original Dali Clock. Well, back in April, cyantist bought me one! And tonight, I finally got around to getting the original Dali Clock running on it. That means that I now have a dedicated Dali Clock Appliance, made of the absolute wimpiest computer capable of generating that effect.

Even the original Palm Pilot (on which XDaliClock also runs) is a way beefier computer that the original Macintosh is: the screens are almost the same resolution, but the Pilot's CPU is at least 4x faster (maybe more?) and it had 1 or 2 megabytes of RAM. The Mac had 128K. K.

No, my office isn't crowded, why?

This was quite a production. I had files that purportedly contained the Dali Clock executable, that had been floating around in my home directory for a decade, and I needed to find a way to get those files onto the Mac.

The problems standing in the way of this:

• 128K Macs didn't have ethernet (ha!) or SCSI (are you joking?)
• I think they might be able to run AppleTalk over the serial port, but I don't have the drivers for that -- so I'd have to find them, and install them, which is something of a chicken-and-egg problem.
• 128K Macs can only read 400K single-sided floppies.
• No floppy drive manufactured in the last 6+ years can read or write 400K disks. (Or the 800k double sided variant.) Apparently modern disks are made of different material and are written with a different magnetic field strength, so it's a hardware issue, not software.
• No Mac that does have a disk drive that can write 400K disks also has ethernet.
• For that matter, no Mac manufactured in the last 3 (?) years comes with a floppy drive at all!

So, here's how I did it. Barry loaned me a Mac Classic II that he had lying around (it's toaster shaped, but has a hard drive! Oh, BTW, you could get a hard drive for the original Macintosh: it plugged into the serial port.) I used the Classic II to format a modern floppy disk. I tracked down a USB floppy drive. I downloaded the files used an iMac, and wrote them to that floppy. (The iMac can read disks formatted on the Classic II but not vice versa.) I got the files onto the Classic II's hard disk that way.

Then I had to figure out how to unpack the files, because there were several layers of decade-obsolescent packager formats wrapped around them, the trickiest of which was PackIt (which apparently only Jurassic versions of Stuffit Expander can read: versions which only run on Jurassic Macs...)

Finally, I formatted a 400K disk on the 128K Mac (a disk that came with it, i.e., a disk manufactured in 1984) and copied the files from the Classic II's HD to that. And, success!

The original (Steve Capps) version of Dali Clock only works on the 128K Mac: it crashes the Classic after one second. However, in 1987, Ephraim Vishniac disassembled the original clock binary and hacked it to work on (then-) modern Macs. So (for the sake of completeness) I was able to get his version working on the Classic II (OS7.) Sadly, that version does not work on OS9 or OSX, though surprisingly, it doesn't crash OS9. It seems to be assuming a 1-bit display, so you just get some static at the top of the screen.