recently i was doing Old Computer, Apple Macintosh kind, which I have never really delved behind the scenes of, though as a kid I certainly had the occasional encounter with HyperCard/KidPix/Macromedia Director/Hold Command+Option To Rebuild Desktop. it’s maybe the topic of a longer form infodumping blog post if I can be bothered. It’s tangentially related to software archiving.
Certain eras of old Macs ran on PowerPC CPUs which is an architecture I have zero familiarity with, and I was surprised how useful Raymond Chen’s 14 part primer on the thing was, despite it being written in the context of its short-lived history as an option for running Windows NT. It explained all the idiosyncrasies and idioms I was seeing thus far and set me up for understanding the rest
