but it seems a little unusual to me for someone interested in "retrocomputing" to be frightened of learning gruesome technical details about how computers "in general" work....Really, this is an easy one. One could type the recipe up to do it in about twenty minutes. But if what you really want is for someone else to put together a .dmg with a drag-and-drop package that prevents you from having to type *anything* at a terminal prompt, well... that seems a little greedy. It probably wouldn't make you happy anyway because going the "terminal" route you'd still have to learn how to use those terminal-window programs.
Since when does being interested in vintage Macs require a degree in computer programming? I'm not frightened, just have no interest in it. There are many folks on these forums who maintain their vintage equipment, but have no interest in learning to program for them, but rather using them. To that end, I can take apart and re-assemble and maintain the hard ware with the best of them. We all have our strengths and that's where the beauty of a community comes together. Also, I'm not demanding anyone write a program for me. I'm looking for solutions. There's nothing "greedy" about it. Don't take this the wrong way, but what seems easy to you, is rocket science for some. I suspect there are things you would not be able to do in 20 minutes that others could as well. There's some arrogance behind that statement which fails to acknowledge the limits of others. And for the record, I don't need a self installing program. That's a condescending assumption. What I am hoping for is "try this application and that application and install them in such & such way", something helpful for the novice. Also, the whole point of using a Mac was to never touch a command line interface. So yeah, I'm a Mac user and care not for UNIX. But OS X has turned the Mac into a UNIX box and now we must learn to live with it. But you keep saying I have to learn to use terminal-window programs ... why? I already told you I use MacTerminal. It is 100% a Mac GUI program. While it is essentially an interface like OS X Terminal, the two could not be more different to use. Also, there were plenty of e-mail-type programs written for the 128/512K which mask the terminal interface for the user. All the user did was start the program, type the message and it got sent through the BBS system and likewise received relies. The Mac made computers friendly. Unix makes them dirty again. Good for the Apple II guys and expanding the Mac platform, bad for those of us who grew up with it and never had to learn that stuff. Seriously why?
To do any expanding of the funcationalilty of the 128k like you describe you are going to have to do real programming ( Pascal, C or assembler ).
You couldn't be more wrong. I've done plenty with the 128K and modern computers using only what was written for it and finding clever ways to interact with OS X. I have absolutely no interest in programming for the 128K. Also, as Gorgonops deduced this is a OS X-side Unix solution not a 128K-side machine language, though it every well could be done that way ... why?
