I still have a bag of FireWire 400 and 800 cables and a number of adapters, plus one external drive that has both USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 ports... only have used them once or twice in the past five years when helping someone offload data from an ancient Mac still in operation.
It seems those old Macs may still be in service in niche applications, most notably in audio processing chains at radio stations or recording studios.
I think it's interesting how long the service life of that gear has been. And as long as it's air-gapped, I don't see much reason why someone couldn't keep running some of those tools until they die.
A lot of the specialized software used for that is customized enough that the OS8/9 system UI doesn't bleed through in the actual editing software in use.
I even found an actively used Jazz drive a couple years ago!
> It seems those old Macs may still be in service in niche applications, most notably in audio processing chains at radio stations or recording studios.
Highly recommend looking at the tour of fat-boy slims recording studio for an example of this kind of airgapped system in active use for decades: https://youtu.be/qLjgXPDzeZo
(Though he uses an Atari ST, which is known for being a musical powerhouse)
It seems those old Macs may still be in service in niche applications, most notably in audio processing chains at radio stations or recording studios.
I think it's interesting how long the service life of that gear has been. And as long as it's air-gapped, I don't see much reason why someone couldn't keep running some of those tools until they die.
A lot of the specialized software used for that is customized enough that the OS8/9 system UI doesn't bleed through in the actual editing software in use.
I even found an actively used Jazz drive a couple years ago!