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Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found
- userbinator 2y agoHow many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to boot after the OS was trashed? In the DOS/Windows world, you'd insert the boot floppy you made and boot from that in order to undo changes that prevented the main system from booting, but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago> but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable. Depending on your machines, we may have looped back to that point in the form of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40914761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40914761 - 20MB in one file is all it takes to carry around a UEFI bootable Linux system on every USB drive you own.
- easygenes 2y ago[flagged]
- easygenes 2y agoWhy in the world am I getting downvoted for this? For the Claude summary? I also checked the repository manually, and agree with the summary. One of the prime use cases for LLMs is summarization.
- userbinator 2y agoNo one cares. If I wanted to know what an LLM thinks, I'd ask it myself.
- throw-qqqqq 2y agoDidn’t downvote you, but I don’t see any value in posting a copy/paste from Claude. You’re not saving me any meaningful time or doing something I couldn’t. It is not worth a post IMO
- easygenes 2y agoThe main point of the post is to say that it is getting maintained in a fork now, to some degree. It's still a very rudimentary implementation though.
- throw-qqqqq 2y agoThis summary was much better (shorter and to the point) than Claude’s ;)
- lmm 2y agoI feel the same way about people who post a link to/paragraph from Wikipedia, but people don't reflexively downvote those.
- Etheryte 2y agoPlease don't litter HN with LLM generated slop. The value of HN lies in the human discussion, everyone here is capable of asking an LLM about it.
- lproven 2y agoYour comment should not be flagged. It is useful info. I wrote the Reg article and I submitted the link, and I didn't know about the update project. However, I do agree with the other commenters -- do not paste LLM bot output. Your own summary was better.
- i80and 2y agoIt would be extremely cool if this weren't the case, but current LLMs are just very bad at summarization. As evidenced by the slop you posted being a bad summary!
- jillyboel 2y agoMaybe you should ask an LLM?
- magic_hamster 2y agoYou're not providing any value in pasting output from an LLM. You're just adding noise to your signal.
- vishnugupta 2y agoYeah the first thing I did after a fresh windows install was to create boot disk, and have 2-3 copies just in case because floppy disks were notoriously unreliable.
- bartvk 2y agoOh wow yes, you made me remember I didn't much like that. Money was tight as a teenager and it always hurt a little to "spend" floppy disks on multiple copies.
- the_third_wave 2y agoThat's what all those commercial demo disks were for, or AOL disks for those in regions where that was a thing.
- technothrasher 2y agoA little bit earlier, but I remember dumpster diving behind a big company in the early 80's and finding a couple boxes of probably about 200 blank floppies. Couldn't believe my score! I pretty quickly found out about half of them were bad, which was probably why they were in the dumpster. But still there were plenty of discs for Apple II games copied from all my friends.
- donnachangstein 2y agoPretty sure Packard Bell and Compaq had recovery partitions long before Apple "borrowed" the idea.
- reaperducer 2y ago[flagged]
- ryandrake 2y agoYou don't have to do anything on HN. It's a message board, not Nature, and he's not defending his PhD thesis.
- donnachangstein 2y agoYou're right, I should just lie and insist it's the truth like most people here, then double down when questioned. Unfortunately my time machine is out of plutonium at the moment, so I'm unable to verify these obscure, useless facts from 33 years ago.
- freedomben 2y agoYou should really upgrade to a Mr Fusion
- userbinator 2y agoIBM too.
- GeekyBear 2y agoAn equivalent feature would need to boot a hidden backup version of Windows 3.1.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago> How many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to boot after the OS was trashed? Every Acorn Archimedes computer, since the entire OS (not just a rescue system, a full, graphical OS) booted in a couple of seconds entirely from ROM. It's the only computer I know of with a fully featured graphical OS that was fully functional without any kind of disk.
- bmacho 2y agoEvery popular OS has live boot, including Windows now. Linux has had it since the very beginning
- atombender 2y agoArchimedes came out in 1987, though. And Linux has never booted a full GUI OS from ROM built into the computer. Parent is not talking about CD-ROM.
- LeoPanthera 2y agoYes. But from a disk.
- bmacho 2y agoAh you mean the OS is in the ROM, soldered to the motherboard, maybe not even writeable. Sure, I don't know about that, maybe your example is the only one
- chongli 2y agoBooting from ROM was pretty common back in the day. A lot of machines from the "golden age of micros" (late 1970s - early 1980s) would boot right up into a BASIC prompt. A full graphical interface was something else though! That's really cool!
- MarkusWandel 2y agoNot from the very beginning. The earliest live boot CD I remember is "DemoLinux". Back then that was still a major hack. Now Fedora, at least, boots into live mode to run the installer from the full GUI.
- ekianjo 2y agoThe Amiga could. The OS was in ROM.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoKickstart was in ROM (except for the A1000, where you loaded it from floppy). Workbench loaded from secondary storage.
- lproven 2y agoThis is not true, as I explained in detail upthread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378500 It never was true. I own one of the things.
- ekianjo 2y agoComing back to the parent claim. You could never trash the Amiga OS because as long as you had workbenchs disks you could reboot the OS just fine and the ROMs were always safe.
- lproven 2y agoYou're still missing the point. Almost all 1980s computers booted the OS from floppy. If they had a hard disk at all, then if you trashed the OS on the hard disk, you could reinstall from floppy. This was true of Amigas, Unix machines, Commodore 900 series, and all IBM PC-compatibles whatever they were running: PC DOS, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, Windows, OS/2. You can't boot an Amiga into a full usable OS without at least 1 floppy disk, which means a floppy drive to read that disk. Same for any PC compatible. Same for any Unix machine. The point being that you could boot an Acorn RISC OS computer into the full unrestricted multitasking GUI, with networking, without any disks. Without even having a floppy drive, or a hard disk, or _any disk drives of any kind_. You could physically remove the drives and configure the machine to know it had none fitted, and it would boot and run apps from its built-in ROM drive. You can do that on an Atari ST as well, with a lot of errors you need to cancel, but there was no multitasking and no network access so the result could not do much. No way to load apps, no way to attach to a machine to load any. On an Acorn Archimedes with no drives, you could boot, run the text editor, write a letter, open the paint or line-art apps, draw pictures, open the music editor, write a tune, save all those files onto a fileserver, print them out, and then cleanly shut down. No hard disk. No floppies. No floppy drive. Entire OS and GUI and core apps, in ROM.
- gus_massa 2y ago> in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable. In that era, virus made all your floppies bootable for you.
- glimshe 2y agoHow many computers in 2025 allow you to use your external USB keyboard numpad as arrows? Not an Apple, at least not without convoluted system-level configurations or third-party software. Apple gets many things right but can still be infuriating on the simple stuff.
- Aaargh20318 2y agoWhy would you expect it to do that? There is nothing on the keys to suggest they should have that feature and the actual arrow keys are about 5cm away.
- bornfreddy 2y agoNot sure how it is in Mac world, but in PC world the numeric keys have arrows (8 is up, 2 is down, 4 left, 6 right), and you can activate them by pressing NumLock. It has been this way since at least 90s. Never used them myself, but I guess if you are used to them and they no longer work it can be infuriating. E.g. like VSCode removing Insert key functionality (always inserts, never overrides the text).
- Sunspark 2y agoI am typing this on a 1987 Apple keyboard on a PC and this numpad functionality works. What I don't know is, is it because of Windows, or because of the ADB to USB adapter? The numpad keys do have their own scan codes separate from that of the main rows.
- flomo 2y agoBack in 1987, Apple sold a PC compatibility card, and the Extended Keyboard was designed to work with that. So I assume it always sent the correct scan codes.
- Aaargh20318 2y agoThere are no arrow on the numeric island an Apple keyboard, nor is there a numlock key. There is a 'clear' key on the numeric island in the location where a PC would have a numlock key (it has the function of the 'AC' key on a calculator and functions as such in the calculator app).
- timewizard 2y ago> but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell) The files still had to be in the correct sectors. Hence the use of the SYS command to perform this.
- muppetman 2y agoI love people like this who are so dedicated to understanding things from our past. Really, it makes no difference to the world if this is every fully understood or not. But it's their passion, and it shows. And I think that's wonderful.
- mmooss 2y agoThat old MacOS UI looks so appealing. I want to use it and I don't care that it's low-res, black and white. I love that they created what seems like a texture in the window titlebars, I assume to give them physical-like presence and to encourage grabbing them. I don't want to use my computer's UI; it's just necessary and slightly annoying in its aesthetics and cognitive load.
- labster 2y agoI feel the same way. I have an original iPhone that I still use as a music player, and the old UI still looks insanely great compared to the flat, gray expanse we find ourselves in today. System 7 was pretty solid design work as well. Imagine what our desktops would look like if they had gotten Copeland running.
- larusso 2y agoUTM (the Virtualization and Emulation software for Mac) has a system9 image on their gallery which is easy to install. It also looks great.
- reaperducer 2y agoBut to do anything more interesting than boot up, it quickly becomes cumbersome and non functional. I'd love to use OS9 in UTM daily, but it's really just a tech demo.
- larusso 2y agoAh ok. I also only booted it up and checked old memories but nothing more. I did a simple network setup and wanted to know if the internet works (well with the security restrictions it has)
- danhau 2y agoI will forever miss skeuomorphism.
- hilbert42 2y agoEvery time I hear mention of Connor and Connor Peripherals Inc. I get the shivers. Not this has much to do with Apple's hidden recovery partition other than Connor drives are mentioned here. Never have I experienced worse drives than those made by Connor Peripherals Inc. I've had them fail on many occasions—they'd fail if so much as to look at them. I recall one instance where I'd spent hours setting up my computer and all was OK only to drop a small manual onto the table from a few inches height. The next thing that happened was the OS chucked an 'Abort, Retry or Ignore' message. Drive was completely dead.
- supermatou 2y agoSame here. Thirty years later, I'm still reeling from the loss of an inestimable trove of software created between the late Seventies and the early Nineties (many now-defunct operating systems, extremely rare programs and so on). All that on a 800MB Conner drive, which I had installed as a secondary (non-boot) drive in my system. The drive died on me with absolutely no warning signs, something that was unusual even for that period of time - it simply disappeared from the OS/BIOS, less that a year after I bought it.
- hilbert42 2y ago"The drive died on me with absolutely no warning signs,…" Except for the drive killed by the dropped manual, that's essentially what happened to the others—about a dozen or so. They just stopped working, either they wouldn't start on boot or they'd just become inaccessible during operation. I wasn't alone, others I know had the same issues. They were an unmitigated disaster, it beats me how they ever made it to market. (All were replaced under warranty with other brands.) BTW, I never lost any data as I used Tandberg QIC tape streamers for backups. Incidentally, the drive killed by the manual was only 20MB. If I recall correctly the largest Connor drive I used was only 40MB. Did you ever attempt to recover the data from that drive by way of a data recovery service or such?
- blincoln 2y agoDo you still have the drive? You might be able to recover the content. The level of difficulty might be anything from "plug it into an adapter and make an image with dd" to "find a working drive of the same type and start swapping parts other than the platters" though.
- Kwpolska 2y agoI'm not a classic Mac OS expert, but the way it works seems extremely convoluted and un-Apple-like. Instead of copying the mini system folder to the desktop and asking the user to copy the files to the real system folder, couldn't they just automatically copy the files to the system folder?
- donatj 2y agoI remember using these CD caddy Performas in elementary school when they were relatively new and being somewhat confused by the why, as we had a tray loading audio CD player in our living room at the time.
- reaperducer 2y agoIt was to keep the CD-ROMS from getting scratched.
- crazygringo 2y agoIt was a misguided idea, and was quickly abandoned because obviously a CD-ROM is just as likely to be scratched when moving it from jewel box to caddy, as when moving it from jewel box into tray. The reason it was supposed to be more protective was that the industry expected everybody to buy a separate caddy for each CD-ROM they owned, so each CD would only ever be transferred once, and thus be scratched less. But caddies were expensive so obviously nobody ever did that (I'm not sure it even ever occurred to most people), and manufacturers quickly switched to trays.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI remember an old rackmount computer at my first job, where you had a row of switches on the front, and you'd have to clock in the boot sequence, each time. It was actually before my time (but not by much).
- larusso 2y agoFunny I watched a video from „this does not compute“ where he worked on a rare Apple prototype. The drive had the very same issue and he fixed it the same way. https://youtu.be/OM64l8tZSwY?si=WhEtsVPpcI21YmLn https://youtu.be/OM64l8tZSwY?si=WhEtsVPpcI21YmLn
- ixtli 2y agoAbsolutely incredible long read. I adore people who commit themselves to archival works like this.
- bijant 2y agoIf I were a Paul Allen-tier billionaire, I’d endow university chairs in ‘Computer Archaeology’ specifically for people doing this kind of meticulous digging. It’s fantastic work, clarifying how operating systems evolved—though arguably just a bit more practical than crawling around ancient Greek ruins searching for fragments of the past.
- blincoln 2y agoI definitely support the author's "make an image of the hard drive as soon as you buy vintage hardware". There have been some amazing finds that way, especially game prototypes. Often, the data has been marked deleted and every time the system is used, it's more likely to be overwritten. It's also a good idea because old drives could stop working at any time, and unless someone else has shared an image from the same device, there may not be a good way to use it again without copying that drive image to a newer replacement.
- yborg 2y agoMac A/UX systems from that era created an 'Eschatology' partition for autorecovery. I always liked the name.