Hunter Irving is something of a tech time traveler.
Or he might just be someone who can’t easily let go of the profound influence that working at Seattle’s former Living Computers: Museum + Labs had on his passion for vintage computers.
As a former guide and systems engineer at the Paul Allen-founded facility, which announced its permanent closure in June, Irving chose to blend his expertise with a touch of nostalgic childhood memories upon stumbling across a 1986 Apple Macintosh Plus in a thrift store.
Now residing in Blacksburg, Va., Irving didn’t hesitate when he saw the machine, promptly paying $150 to bring it home.
“When I plugged it in, it failed quite violently and filled my office with smoke,” he recalled during a call with GeekWire this week. “It was a pretty gross experience.”
A blown capacitor was straightforward to replace, but Irving’s ultimate objective of getting the nearly 40-year-old machine connected to the modern internet demanded a bit more effort.
Seattle fuels a love for vintage computers
Originally from North Carolina, Irving’s first computer was a hand-me-down from his dad — a Macintosh SE/30, akin to the Macintosh Plus.
Irving pursued computer science at Appalachian State University and first visited Seattle in 2016 to see a cousin. A trip to Living Computers convinced him he had to stay.
“I went there, spent an entire day there, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to work here,'” Irving recounted. “And over the next few months I applied to every job posting they had, and I eventually got in.”
As a guide, Irving provided tours and engaged with visitors. He also ensured machines on display remained operational, performing boot sequences or using magnetic tape to load operating systems on vintage equipment. He shadowed members of LCM’s engineering team on restorations, including a CDC 6500, teletypes, and an Apple Bandai Pippin that he helped restore.
Irving departed the museum after nearly two years for an engineer position at Seattle University, before returning east for a job at Virginia Tech. He was saddened but not surprised by LCM’s eventual permanent closure.
“It had been closed for so long, I kind of saw it coming,” he said. “It was of course sad to hear that it was all going to kind of be scattered to the wind.”
When Christie’s auctioned computers and other items from Allen’s collection in September, Irving aspired to bid on several items, including a PDP-8 Minicomputer and chess set that ultimately sold for $35,280.
“While I worked at the museum, I got to design a few different exhibits,” Irving remarked. “Guests could come and play chess against this machine. If they beat this 1980s chess program, we would take a Polaroid picture of them and put that into a binder, and that was sort of our Hall of Fame.”
‘Like the future meeting the past’
Irving describes himself as a treasure hunter. He frequently visits estate sales and thrift stores, often passing on old computers as he doesn’t really need to expand the growing collection in his garage.
“Most of the time you don’t find anything. That’s the thrill of the hunt,” he explained. “When you do find something, like a Macintosh Plus, that’s a special day. I had to go for it.”
After replacing the blown capacitor — a procedure he learned from a former LCM systems engineer — Irving revisited some games from his childhood. But soon, he wanted to connect to the internet. Although he found a relatively simple solution using a BlueSCSI hard drive emulator and a Raspberry Pi Pico chip, actually browsing web pages was more complex due to modern HTTPS protocols.
All those technical details are discussed in a 14-minute video (above) that Irving uploaded to his YouTube channel.
There are existing methods to get vintage Macintoshes online, including the tool MacProxy, but “modern web pages just really aren’t designed with vintage computers in mind,” Irving explained.
So he developed his own tool, MacProxy Plus, which translates and simplifies content to make it possible to access sites like Reddit, Wikipedia, NPR.org, WayBack Machine, and more, along with a reasonable facsimile of YouTube dubbed “(not) YouTube” that (very slowly) plays videos.
Everything is documented on a GitHub page where Irving shares all of his code, inviting others to experience the fun and breathe new life into vintage machines worldwide.
“The end result is something that I feel would have been right at home in Allen’s museum,” Irving stated.
And in 2024, amid the buzz of artificial intelligence and generative AI, Irving’s project has even enabled him to run OpenAI’s ChatGPT on the vintage interface, appearing as if it originated in the 1980s.
For curiosity’s sake, I asked ChatGPT if the AI software could run on a 1986 Macintosh Plus computer. GPT replied it wasn’t possible due to limitations like hardware, the operating system, and lack of internet access.
ChatGPT, update your data collection and meet Hunter Irving.
“What’s cool about it is it shouldn’t be possible, it shouldn’t be able to exist,” Irving observed. “It’s like the future meeting the past. It’s a time machine that shocks you a little bit initially, and then you’re like, ‘Whoa, OK, this is kind of fun.'”
