The (almost) 10-year old 27" Thunderbolt display finally died.

Well, it didn't really die.

The Thunderbolt connector had gotten impossibly flaky. If I looked at it wrong, the monitor glitched or disonnected.

It was dead enough that I wasn't going to deal with it.

It involved this morass of adapters …

See {filename}/blog/2014/03/2014_03_20-shiny_new_macbook_pro.rst

At the time (2014), the 8Gb machine was way more than adequate for all my needs as a writer.

Enter bloat.

Mac OS Catalina has essentially filled this machine to the breaking point. Six short years is the lifespan. Things (generally) work, but …

A handy CNET review site: http://reviews.cnet.com/macfixit/

First, I'm a pack-rat; I worry about deleting something valuable. Specifically, I worry about orphaned files because the application software is no longer supported or the media is obsolete.

For example, my resume is a Hypercard stack. Really. Hypercard is an OS 9 application, and future OS X's won't support …

Years and years ago I started using Delphi internet services. They had a complicated dialup arrangement through Sprintnet and Tymenet to a farm of VAX servers in the Boston area, part of Northeast Education and Research (NEAR) net. This was Delphi internet, character-mode, 9600 baud. I used Mac classic and …

Mac #1 was a 1986 128K Mac, later upgraded to 1M Mac Plus, with external everything. Eventually a 70Mb SCSI hard drive. Bundled up with another just like it, it sold on eBay for shipping + a few bucks. I kept it running until 2001, when I finally shut it off …