R.I.P., Julia

[Don't worry, this is not a sad post. Well, unless you're fond of computers.]

Last night when I came home my daughter Morgann sadly told me the computer she has been using seemed to have died. I checked it and indeed, the VERY LOUD clicking noises coming from the hard drive when trying to boot seemed to confirm the diagnosis that the machine was no more. So ends the long and storied life of The Little iMac That Could.

"Julia" (named after Julia Child by Les because she's the computer serving as the kitchen kiosk) started life as a machine for testing the Mac UI on a product we were working on at a now long-defunct startup company. When the company dot-bombed in September of 2001, the employees each got some of the computers in lieu of vacation pay. I kept an HP server, a Dell server and what was then known as "Spruce", the little classic iMac:

Isn't it cute?

Since it was a pretty slow machine even then and because OS/9 was as buggy as anything ever excreted from Redmond the machine quickly was assigned to the kids' playroom, where it and an obsolete PC were abused by three little ones (about six, four and four at the time). During the early 2000s children's software CDs often played on both Windows 95/98/Me and Macintosh OS/9, so the kids could play their games on either machine, deftly changing between one-button and two-button mice and different keyboard layouts as only four and six year olds can.

But living in the "kid zone" is rough on any machine. Children's software is worse than most about splattering conflicting drivers around on the hard drive, so I would periodically have to restore the iMac using the system restore CD. And of course little kids are little kids. So first the original iMac keyboard went, and we replaced it with a normal PC USB keyboard. Then the one-button mouse died, and got replaced by a normal two-button USB mouse. Then the CD drive got tired of foreign objects being inserted into its tiny little slot (no tray on these iMacs) and started becoming flaky, although it continued to work for some time to come.

About three years later we swapped out the iMac for an obsolete-but-less-so PC (actually, the kids have three such machines in their playroom now, one for each of them - Les bought two of them for $19 each on eBay, and the third is that now-ancient HP server I mentioned above) and the iMac went to live in the pile of surplus computer equipment all nerds seem to accrete over time ("The island of misfit toys"). And there it sat for quite some time.

Then on a whim in 2005 or so I decided we needed a kitchen kiosk and decided to resurrect the iMac. Since I am no fan of OS/9 and because I am a contrarian kinda guy, I put Linux on it. First Yellow Dog, and later Xubuntu. And thus was "Julia" born. She didn't have sound that worked (I never could figure that out), and of course Flash and other multimedia didn't work, either. And she was slowwwwww. But she quickly went from this weird thing I did just to have a conversation piece to being an essential part of the kitchen, around where much of our home life revolves. Need to look up a recipe or a drink mix? There was Julia! Need to settle an argument over some trivial piece of information? Julia and Google to the rescue! And when Morgann moved in with us last October, since Julia was the only machine upstairs to have an Internet connection (we still don't let the kids on the 'net), it became her machine.

Somewhere in the past few years Julia really started becoming erratic. First, Yellow Dog stopped working on it, so I ended up installing the PowerPC port of Xubuntu. Then the internal CD drive completely stopped working, probably due to the number of times I had to fish various foreign articles out of it with a paper clip while it was still in the playroom. That caused a problem when an Xubuntu update caused the machine to not boot any more. Panic! Was Julia finally dead? No! After a lot of researching and hacking around, I figured out a way to boot her off of an external Firewire CD drive using the following simple sequence:

1) Boot into Open Firmware by holding down Command+Option+O+F keys
(Note: This also required figuring out what was the replacement for the Command and Option keys on a Macintosh keyboard, since that had died long ago, remember? It turned out to be Alt-Windows-O-F on a PC keyboard.)

2) Enter the following Open Firmware commands:

devalias cd /pci@f4000000/firewire/node/sbp-2/disk@
bye

The Linux boot loader grub would then recognize the Firewire drive as a valid bootable CD-ROM and we were going yet again! I was actually able to resurrect her one more time using the above mechanism, and Julia ran happily for more than a year and a half on Xubuntu. Long and valiant service from any machine, if you ask me.

But I don't think I am going to save her from this hard drive failure, and frankly, while I could replace the hard drive, I just don't know if I am up to the effort. Especially since Morgann's machine is supposed to be getting shipped up from Texas any day now so she'll be happy. But I will miss having a kitchen kiosk and I do believe that ecological niche will be filled again one of these days by something with a similar nice small footprint. Perhaps it will be that Asus Eee I've been lusting for! :o)

So long, Julia. You will be missed!