Hack42 is a foundation that started in 2010. Their mission is to fascillitate common ground between creativity, technique and art in the form of a hackerspace. Hack42 exists of a computer museum, labs for electronics, handicraft, coding and manufacture, a lounge with bar, a lecture hall and much more. Simon used to work at Mediamatic as an electric engineer and took part in the making of Mediamatic magazines and CD-ROMs. As an interest and for work, he is now responsible for the computer museum in Hack42. Here you can find computers that trace back from 60's to the 90's.
Completing the experience
During our visit the computer museum was our main focus. We wanted to test the CD-ROMs Mediamatic published on the computers they originally ran on. At Mediamatic we tried to run the CD-ROMs on a iMAC G4 and on a emulator, but to see the CD-ROMs on the computer they are supposed to run on was a completely different experience. It turned out the cd-roms ran way too fast on the computers we tested them on, with the right computer, keyboard and mouse the experience was finally complete. Simon talking about the experience of Macintosh computer from 1994 -
Struggles with a simple button
Before we could see the CD-ROMs on the old mac we had to overcome one big obstacle…find the power button. After some time we checked every side of the computer and still hadn't found it. So Simon just showed us the power button at the left right corner of the keyboard. Apparently it is very hard for two young adults (21 and 25) to turn on a computer from 1995. After this, we continued our exploration into the CD-ROMs accompanied with the mechanical sound from the CD-ROM driver of the old computer. We captured this vintage experience with videos and photographs during our visit in Hack42.
The computer
The first Mediamatic CD-ROM (BlindRom v.o.9) was published in 1994, the computer we ran the CD-ROMs on is a Macintosh performa 5300 from 1995. It's a 100 MHz PowerPC 603e processor, with 8 or 16 MB of RAM, a 1.2 GB hard drive and a 4x CD-ROM drive in an attractive all-in-one case with a 15 inch shadow mask color monitor. So actually, it's just an old computer. Launched the 'Idea-ON>!' CD-ROM on Macintosh Performa 5300 - Kyra amazed by all the old computers -
Besides helping us running the CD-ROMs on the old computers, Simon also helped us finishing the emulator-package people can download to run the CD-ROMs on their own computer (we will post a blog about this very soon!).
