Dabney Mac Poetry

In the Dabney House lounge there was an old Macintosh Plus named Lil Lenin that served as a poetry machine. People typed random stuff into a text file whenever they felt particularly inspired. Before living in the lounge, Lil Lenin lived in the Dabney computer lab for a while.

During the renovations, Lil Lenin lived in Mod 8, the multipurpose trailer.

Sometime during the spring 2006 term, Lil Lenin died. It has been converted into a lamp. In case you want to perform this modification yourself, here are the steps:

• Open up the case.
• Remove all the electronics, being careful not to shock yourself on the high-voltage capacitors on the analog board. Discard or keep for devious purposes. Leave the CRT in place.
• Carefully break the back off of the CRT.
• Acquire a floor lamp. Shorten the tube somehow.
• Drill a hole in the top of the Mac that is the correct size for the tube.
• Stick lamp in hole. Anchor bottom of tube somehow.

Here is the poetry from the Mac as of December 31, 2005. There will be no more updates, as there is no more Poetry Mac.

(Unrelatedly, I made a mouse/pointing device for this computer, which you can read about here.)

[top] Poetry

Most of the poetry was not written by me. You may find some parts offensive or incomprehensible or both.

• Poetry 6/3/2005 converted to UTF-8 and wrapped to 80 characters per line
• Poetry 6/3/2005 converted to UTF-8
• Poetry 6/3/2005 completely unmodified, complete with CR-only newlines.
• Poetry 6/12/2005
• Poetry 6/12/2005 wrapped to 80 characters per line
• Poetry 12/31/2005 converted to UTF-8 and wrapped to 80 characters per line
• Poetry 12/31/2005 converted to UTF-8
• Poetry 12/31/2005 unmodified

(There is no separate UTF-8 version of the June 12 file because that file contains only plain-ASCII characters.)

There is also an MP3 version (9.3MB, 32Kbps) of the poetry (June 3 version only) being read by Fred, the default voice under the MacinTalk 3 text-to-speech software that ships with System 7.

The 6/12/2005 version is completely different from the 6/3/2005 version. On June 3, 2005, the poetry file exceeded TeachText's 32000-character limit. (Dunno what happened to the other 768 characters...) Thus, the 6/12/2005 version is starting from a blank file. The 12/31/2005 version is an update of the 6/12/2005 version and contains much of the same stuff.

If you're just looking at this in your browser, you probably want the wrapped UTF-8 versions. The choice of 80 characters per line is rather artificial, since TeachText, the text editor in Mac OS 6, has only one font, which is proportional.

I converted to UTF-8 by running the text through iconv and then replacing the escape (ASCII 0x1B) characters with U+25AF (WHITE VERTICAL RECTANGLE), since escapes look like rectangles in TeachText. This looks right in Firefox on Mac OS X, although the rectangles are a little narrow. I also converted the Macintosh CR-only newlines to line feeds.

There is a nice formatting test around line 407 of the non-wrapped 6/3/2005 file. In TeachText, you see a line of boxes and = signs, a rectangle composed of four rows of four boxes, and a large hollow rectangle.

[top] History

When I came to Caltech in 2003, Lil Lenin was in the Dabney computer lab. At some point during the 2003-2004 school year, its disk filled up and it was turned off and put on a shelf.

Sometime in 2005, I became one of the comptrollers (i.e. sysadmins) of Dabney House. Shortly thereafter, I noticed the inertness of Lil Lenin and decided to do something about it.

I couldn't find the original mouse that had been plugged into the machine the year before. Jeremy, my former roommate, who knows this sort of thing for some ungodly reason, confirmed my suspicion that the Mac Plus mouse was a nonstandard beast that wasn't compatible with anything. After further research, I decided that it would be pretty easy to make my own mouse, which turned out to be true.

It was pretty easy to free a bunch of space on the boot disk by deleting unnecessary programs such as Disk First Aid (you can't check the boot disk), Apple HD SC Setup (no hard drive), and various other things.

I set up Lil Lenin in the Dabney lounge on top of the piano. Originally, I did this simply to show off my exciting new mouse. However, the lounge seemed like a better place for a poetry machine than the computer lab, so I left it there.

Ode to a Squid is the last poem written in the Dabney computer lab. The line of asterisks on line 444 of the 6/12/2005 file was the first thing to be typed after the machine was placed in the lounge.