The adventure began with a visit to my parents’ basement to rescue my first Mac from a non-life of quiet, damp darkness and being used as a litter box for mice. After some mild cussing and digging through a box of parts, I left my parents’ place armed with the LCII, the monitor that went with it, a chunky 1990s Apple keyboard, two mice (the electronic kind, not the fuzzies that so kindly left their excrement behind) and a Color StyleWriter 4100 with a power brick.

At home, a pair of busy weeks followed with the kids arguing a lot in the evenings, so the only restoration I was able to accomplish was cleaning off the mouse droppings, vacuuming the keyboard and chasing a few recalcitrant spiders out of the computer case. Finally a free day presented itself and I re-assembled all of the pieces carefully, discovered I’d forgotten to dig for the cable that connects the printer to the computer, shrugged and hit the ‘power’ button on the computer and monitor. Hope surged as the monitor flickered to life and the screen slowly painted the familiar gray background of pre-System 8 machines. And the dreaded unhappy Mac face popped up in the middle of my screen.

Next step, frantic search through a bunch of boxes and file folders for that old system boot disk I know I made yea these many years ago. No dice. Without a boot disk and after multiple attempts to re-boot, it seemed that the LCII was just not going to boot up.

I gave the project a rest for a few days, then poked around on eBay to see what I could find. Lo and behold, a seller had a fully functioning Quadra 630 available with System 7.5 and Word 6 for Mac installed and an ethernet card installed. I threw up my hands in celebration and clicked ‘bid’. An hour later, I’d secured the machine for about $60 including shipping across the country and I flipped off my laptop feeling very accomplished.

A week later, the Quadra arrived and I unpacked and set it up immediately, attaching it to the working LC monitor and waited eagerly to see what happened when I hit the power switch on the keyboard. Huzzah! Happy Mac Face! Now all I had to do was start popping floppies into the drive to check on the status of my ancient papers. Shortly I found most of my files safely intact on the backup disks and I saved them down to both floppy and the hard drive in Rich Text Format in anticipation of emailing them to myself and opening them on my PC. In the meantime, I also took a walk down memory lane, opening up files I haven’t clapped eyes on since at least 1998 when I stopped using my Mac 520c laptop.

The kids interrupted at this point and I stepped away from my desk for a few hours. When I came back to it, I clipped my ethernet cable from the cable modem into the ethernet port on the back of the Quadra and waited expectantly for something to happen. Apparently every computer customer service brain cell I used to have for supporting a Mac of this generation died sometime between birthing my kids and now, because of course, no connection magically appeared.

Cue looking through the Control Panels and applications to find things I used to be an expert at wrangling, like Kermit and Mac TCP/IP. The upshot is that it looks like a thing or two might be missing, but I should be able to download them from Apple’s archives … if I could download to a Mac format floppy that the Quadra can take. That’s where things stand today: I need to install some things on the machine to see if I can get it up on the internet. Another option is to update the PC Exchange software and see if I can save my RTF copies of my papers down to a PC format disk and pick up a USB floppy drive to transfer the papers to my Inspiron 6400.

For all the myriad small disappointments on this particular adventure, there’s something fun about doing this kind of troubleshooting again and trying to think outside the box to solve the problem. It’s like the old days, sitting in the basement of Seelye with an array of Macs and PCs, repairing disks for desperate School for Social Work students or miraculously unjamming the printer for stressed out seniors during finals.

Those were the days.

Along the way, here’s some useful sites I’ve found for assistance with vintage Mac file access:

• Apple’s Archives – An extensive collection of software and supporting applications for old Apple versions downloadable for free.
• Oakbog – Professional file transfer services and vintage Mac advice.
• Vintage Mac Museum Blog – Run by Adam Rosen of Oakbog, the blog has many interesting articles about vintage Macs including tips for transferring files.
• Low-End Macs Vintage Mac Pages – The site catalogs all older Macs and provides useful links and articles for troubleshooting a host of issues as well as transfer tips.

I have an answer for that: many pocket devices are too small to actually provide many users with a comfortable user experience for consuming the type of media that we want to be able to consume.

This is something that I notice all the time when I’m commuting: people squinting at their phones or awkwardly clutching them while trying to thumb-key something into a browser window or phone-based app. Granted, I haven’t played with an iPhone, I don’t have one and my brother has only let me touch his for about 2 minutes over lunch, once while he was visiting, but it seems to me that what anyone broaching the tablet space is trying to resolve is a very simple human factor: the device-size issue.

Ideally any device that lets us interact with email, web browsing, apps to carry out particular tasks should be highly portable and not awkward to carry around, however, under a certain size the simple fact of not being able to read the screen efficiently gets in the way. When I first got a Blackberry, I made sure to get the version that had a full QWERTY keyboard because at the time, I thought that this would handily solve my desire to be able to type while sitting on the train commuting back and forth to work. My laptop is too big and too unwieldy to haul out for casual use on the train or when out and about away from home, but what I quickly found is that the Blackberry keyboard is too small and cramped for comfortable, much less speedy typing.

This Christmas, I received a Kindle as a gift and immediately felt much more comfortable with this size for a device. Even thumb-keying on the Kindle is much more comfortable and less error-prone than trying to eke out a sentence on the Blackberry. Overall, the Kindle is a nice e-reader, though it falls down for the purpose that I really wanted it for: reading my secured eBooks from the University of Phoenix for the graduate program I’m currently enrolled in. Though UoP fulfills its eBooks through Amazon, they are protected with digital security – not just a simple password-protected PDF – and the Kindle isn’t capable of unlocking the digitally secured eBooks. Big bummer, because what I really wanted that Kindle for, was to be able to read my textbooks, scholarly journals and various other digitally rendered print sources on the go without having to print them out and waste the paper on things I’m only going to read once or twice for class.

Unless I’m misunderstanding the specs for the iPad, I should actually be able to download and unlock my eBooks for my classes and also not have to lug around a heavy laptop to read them and in my mind that is part of the power of this type of device. The usability factor for any kind of student of any age is very high and much more engaging than the black-and-white display on the Kindle or the Sony eReader especially since the iPad isn’t just a reader, but a device oriented on the consumption of different kinds of media.

Where I agree with some about where the iPad falls down, is the lack of multi-tasking. Given the iPad’s size however, browsing websites should be a much more comfortable experience and if the iPad supports a full-featured browser, then a certain amount of multi-tasking can be achieved through the use of web applications. This brings me to my other big hope for any type of tablet device, which is providing a better way to foster portable interaction with health care applications such as electronic medical records and electronic practice solutions.

Currently, the health care industry is somewhat bogged down in trying to go digital, mostly because the means of input is not well-suited to the type of workflow that doctors, nurses and other health care professionals require. While there are many useful apps for handheld devices for the health care industry and many health care organizations are implementing desktop or laptop-based electronic solutions, a high-level observation of how those solutions are used in hospitals and practices shows that they are not ideal for the people who need to use them because they are either too small for the large amounts of data entry that most forms and charts require or too static, in the case of desktops and laptops, interrupting a workflow that requires most health care professionals to be on their feet walking around seeing patients and interacting with those patients for many hours a day.

Tablets are the ideal size to help bridge this big gap in the successful adoption and efficient use of these technologies in the health care space, but up until now the ways to interact with the tablet have not been very good or the tablets themselves have been too heavy to carry around in the way that most of us would carry around an armload of folders, charts or a notebook. It’s this notebook-type experience that I’d really love a tablet to emulate and I think that the iPad gets very very close, but possibly missed the boat about tapping into uses of the tablet in the health care industry.

We’re still on the cusp of something with the tablet format and I think that the iPad goes a long way towards moving us down that road, but I’ll be keeping an eye on other vendors who are bringing tablet devices to market this year to see if anyone really hits the tablet-as-interactive-notebook paradigm out of the park.

I’m currently enrolled in a Master’s of Health Administration, Informatics program with the University of Phoenix. Our assignment this week was to analyze a trend in healthcare and given my specialization within the degree, I chose telemedicine as my topic.

Through the course of my research for the paper, I found an article referencing AFHCAN and the implementation of mobile telemedicine carts for widespread use in Alaska outside of urban centers. What I found most interesting in this article, was the creativity of the networking solution that was put into place to provide remote locations with large volumes of information, including x-rays and graphics.

At the time the article was written in 2006, Alaska’s infrastructure is described as still being highly reliant on dial-up modems at speeds of under 900 baud. Applications and systems that require a high rate of bandwidth therefore wouldn’t suit well for implementing a remote care system.

The AFHCAN project instead focused on the real bottom-line necessities of a telemedicine system and made use of asynchronous data transfer to transmit large amounts of information from remote locations to assisting specialists.

The mobile carts used also combine technologies that are practical for use in the target setting. Some of these technologies are pretty cutting edge, including video otoscopes and similar, or as prosaic as a scanner and a digital camera with a docking port.

The beauty of this system is that it really works and provides excellent health outcomes for patients who are diagnosed through the tool. It’s a case of a good usability, carefully targeted for the audience the tool is intended to serve. On top of all that, the system helps to save money on transport costs, allowing the carts to pay for themselves.

This is the kind of application of technology that really gets me excited about the marriage of high tech and healthcare and where things might be headed in the future.

Related Resources:
Alaska Telemedicine: Growth Through Collaboration

Harler, C. (2006, October). Telemedicine: Alaska net shows how narrow you can go. Business Communications Review, 54-57.