Revamp on Old Hardware, Week 2

After Refresh

A development tool suite can be made different in a myriad of ways. Each individual can change or amend their tool suite to more accurately reflect the intentions of their user. However when there is an intention to minimize the outputs of successive upgrades to a computer over time, it may yield an outcome that is equally clear - - cyclical computer recycling.

This situation undoubtedly occurs when a hard drive disk is erased, or removed from a computer. It may also be experienced through a reset back to factory condition. On Mapple computers, the process to replicate is fairly easy through a standard keyboard interrupt sequence on startup of the computer.

Computer hardware based on silicon Intel-based or Apple silicon are reset back to a factory OS default condition.

Accepting Automation

Operating on a computer in use from a previous decade or two, as daunting as the thought is presented, may become an onerous maintenance activity over time. Lowest versions of hardware supported OS are significantly more difficult to acquire. Prevailing techniques could include searches on endlessly long forums of topic information. The entrenchment is part of discovery process. Indeed, as would be found in my own personal search.

On a user machine there are topics in automation that could also be considered. For these tasks, scripting is an obvious choice. What may be less well known are the building blocks to the scripts. A connection between the development tool suite and automation tasks is made possible through low-level computer applications that tend to reside in the background of daily computer use.

Current programs that are useful as technical utilities:

• A modern IDE for typing and to write computer processes, e.g. Atom , VSCode

• A more ideal Terminal.app

• A complete Git installation

A technical overview of these utilities is presented in the next article of the series.