If you think the original Macintosh was an impressive piece of design and engineering, you may find Apple’s Lisa even more innovative.
Category Archives: Low End Mac Tech Journal
Over the years, we’ve covered using a CompactFlash (CF) card with an IDE adapter to replace a laptop’s hard drive and make it quieter. As it turns out, there’s a lot we didn’t know about this subject until recently.
In my previous article, I looked at HTML5 video support in browsers compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard on PowerPC Macs. Today we’re looking at video performance on YouTube, which recently made HTML5 video its default.
On Tuesday, January 27, 2015, YouTube announced that it had made HTML5 video its default instead of Adobe Flash, which is still be supported. What does this mean for Mac users?
Yes, there were viruses for the Classic Mac operating system. Not a lot, mind you, especially in comparison to the vastly more popular Microsoft Windows platform, but they did exist.
In the 1990s, several Macs included infrared networking support, a legacy short range point-to-point technology often forgotten nowadays. It can be used to transfer files between Macs, to mobile phones, and to print to IrDA compliant printers, among other things. This article provides an overview of infrared networking on Macs and the models with built-in IrDA […]
SCSI isn’t the black art it sometimes seems to be, but the various terms different people use for the same thing makes it tough to sort out. I hope the following lessens the confusion.
Motorola StarMax computers were only on the market for a few years, and their five-year warrantees have long since expired. Motorola no longer offers any support for this hardware.
First available in the Power Mac G4 in late 1999, the G4 processor is to the G3 as the 604 was to the 603 – and then some! Like the 604, and unlike the G3, G4 is designed for multiprocessor operation. It also runs about 25% faster for basic floating point math calculations and has a built-in […]
Arthur, legendary King of England, became the code-name for the third generation PowerPC (PPC) processor, eventually named the 740 and 750. The successor of the 603e, these third-generation CPUs were optimized to run real software, not for some theoretical ideal.
The “power user” second generation PowerPC (PPC) CPU was the 604, unveiled in December 1994 along with the 603. Containing 3.6 million transistors, drawing twice the power of the 601, and with a dual L1 cache (16 KB for instructions, 16 KB for data), this workhorse could deal with four instructions per cycle. The 604 […]
The second generation split the PowerPC (PPC) line into entry level 603 and power user 604 chips. The 603 has only 1.6 million transistors, draws about half as much power as the 601, has two smaller caches (8 KB for instructions, 8 KB for data vs. a 32 KB unified cache in the 601), and […]
The biggest change in the Apple product line prior to 2006 was the transition from Motorola 680×0 CPUs to the PowerPC (PPC) family of CPUs. Designed by a consortium of Apple, IBM, and Motorola (a.k.a. the AIM Alliance) and based on IBM’s POWER architecture, PowerPC became the most widely used RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) processor with […]
You may know that Apple’s original networking protocol was LocalTalk, which was replaced by Ethernet in the early 1990s. What you may not know about is Farallon’s clever EtherWave networking solution that bridged the two technologies.
The Quadra 700 and 900 introduced the 68040 in 1991. In great part due to a much larger L1 cache (4 KB for data and 4 KB for instructions vs. 256 bytes in the 68030) and parts of the CPU running at twice clock speed, the 68040 provides 2.5-3 times the performance of the 68030 at […]
Apple introduced the Mac IIx, which has a 16 MHz 68030 CPU, in September 1988. The 68030 incorporates the memory management unit (MMU), which was a separate chip for the 68020, giving the ‘030 the ability to use virtual memory (VM) with third-party software, although Apple didn’t include VM as part of the Mac OS until System 7 in […]
Apple took a big step when it introduced the 68020-based Mac II in March 1987. The new computer was modular, not an all-in-one design like the first four Macs. In addition to 6 expansion slots, a huge power supply, color support, and room for two floppy drives and an internal hard drive, the Mac II runs its […]
The earliest personal computers used 8-bitCPUs (central processing units). Apple, Commodore, Rockwell, and Atari designed their computers around the MOS Tech 6502; Radio Shack’s Color Computer used the Motorola 6809; and most others, including the Radio ShackTRS-80 and all CP/M computers, used the Zilog Z-80 or Intel 8080. All ran in the 1-4 MHz range and […]
Way back in the 1970s and early 1980s, it was rare enough to have a personal computer in the home, classroom, or office. Today it’s common to have several computers, tablets, and/or smartphones in the workplace, school, or home.
Hard drive capacity is limited not only by how densely bits can be packed on a magnetic platter, but also by the number of sectors and tracks and drive surfaces in the drive itself and the number the computer’s operating system is designed to handle.
With careful use, you may two years out of your vintage PowerBook battery, but with improper care, it could give out in less than a year. It’s worth the time and effort to take proper care of your PowerBook battery.
This article contains frequently asked questions (FAQ) regarding the PowerBook 2400c, with answers to those questions. An archived version of this article is available on Apple’s website. We have added corrections and updates.
Late last week, Apple delivered iOS 7.0.6 and iOS 6.1.6 to address the “goto fail” bug in iOS and Apple TV OS 6.0.2 as well. This week it released OS X 10.9.2, Security Update 2014-001 for OS X 10.7 and newer, Safari 6.1.2 and 7.0.2 so everyone running OS X 10.7 Lion and newer will […]
This article was originally published on 2001.05.29 and is adapted from a series of articles and sidebars in the February 1984 issue of Byte magazine. Although some of the details included in this article are specific to the original Mac, many also apply to other compact Macs, such as the Plus, SE, SE/30, Classic, and Classic II.
Apple introduced a new feature, Safe Sleep, with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther in 2003. When enabled, Safe Sleep writes the contents of your Mac’s memory to a file named sleepimage on its hard drive before putting the computer to sleep (this works like the Hibernate command in Windows). In case the Mac loses power […]
The SD memory card has come to dominate the world of digital cameras, both still and video, and it’s even made it way into recent Macs and many Android tablets. This is the story of the card’s origin.
Anyone can easily find Universal Binary builds of Firefox and Camino that will simply install and run on their Mac, so why would you want to scrounge around for an optimized build?
The iMac ClockUp page was originally posted at <http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~t-imai/imace1.html> and is no longer available there. We have adapted that information for the benefit of those who wish to overclock tray-loading iMacs. The original author is not known to us.
I have found that, by far, the easiest way to install Leopard on unsupported G4s is to spoof the clock speed in Open Firmware before installing. Spoofing will have Open Firmware tell OS X that your G4 is up-to-speed until you reboot. This will allow you to install without hacking an install disc or working in […]
The good news is that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard seems to be able to run on any Mac with AGP graphics built around a G4 processor – and even on the 2000 Pismo PowerBook (the first PowerBook with AGP graphics) as long as it has a G4 upgrade. The bad news is that the […]
