A G4 Saved our lives today…
With apologies to Elton John and In Deep for mangling their song titles
OK the headline is hyperbole… But sorry, not sorry! So this is how the story goes. At work we have a Crosfield drum scanner – possibly the last one in action for hundreds of miles (this is piece of kit that cost well over £150k maybe 30 or more years ago). Drum scanners were the essential “pro” element of print reprographics for many years – they were how we got transparencies and photos into colour separations (and a later digital form) before desktop scanning was a thing; and for decades after that it was still the “pro” version…
Anyway to the story – the Crosfield is powered by a very very old Mac – a PowerMac 8100/100 to be precise – because when the scanner was converted to digital that was the Mac that accepted the interface card that allowed it to talk to the Mac and the software needed to drive the scanner (I’ll come back to that in a bit). It used to do more, like colour correct scans, but modern Macs have overtaken the capabilities of its (admittedly specialist, but old) software.