However, the students would only have access to the digital materials on-site at the partner institution for this project, and could not bring the software back to NYU. Normally, this wouldn’t present much of an issue, as MIAP’s “Old Media Lab” still has several old Power Mac G4 desktops and even a couple Macbook laptops running various early versions of Mac OSX. Yes, as it turned out, the students were working with a piece of multimedia artwork/software that required a PowerPC version of Mac OSX (10.0 through 10.5) in order to run. Going back to the lab, I had a hint of what was coming from the whiteboard: Uh oh. A couple weeks ago Mona Jimenez asked me to step into her course on Handling Complex Media, to help a student group with a tech request (business as usual).
