This is the last installment of the story I’ve been telling about how my classroom science lab went from no computers to a Power Mac computer lab in just three years.
Monthly Archives: November 2000
Our Fair Computer Company has released some quirky yet useful features in its computer systems and OS, and then advertised them very little – if at all. Apple’s SCSI Disk Mode and it’s modernized offspring, FireWire Target Disk Mode, are excellent examples.
“Which is the better server for my home network, the Quadra 650 I’ve been using or the smaller Quadra 605?”
2000 – As you spend time repairing machines, mostly by swapping parts, inevitably you wind up with a hulk with nothing in it that works – it’s just a place to hold parts. Bad motherboard. Gummed up floppy. CD won’t eject. Questionable power supply. Things like that.
The Mac Classic uses an 8 MHz 68000 CPU. The installed hard drive is a 170 MB Quantum ELS170S formatted with LaCie Silverlining software. This was not the original hard drive, which was a slower 40 MB mechanism.
Continuing the saga begun in last week’s column, at the end of my first year at my new school I had installed a small network of aging 680×0 machines in my room.
2000 – America Online’s Instant Messenger (AIM) is one of a host of chat applications that has become part of an Internet user’s standard suite of tools in the past two years.
2000: A rip off of Apple’s G4 Cube appeared at Comdex last week. While we’ve heard nothing yet from Apple legal, it’s a sure bet that Apple will throw a lawsuit at DA Computing as soon as they’ve researched the matter a little.
The Mac SE/30 uses a 16 MHz 68030 CPU and 16 MHz 68882 FPU, just like the Mac IIx and IIcx. The hard drive in this SE/30 is an Apple-branded Quantum LP80S formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5.
2000 – I’ve been using MenuChoice 2.1 for ages, probably going back to the System 7.1 era (1992-94). It’s one of those remarkable pieces of shareware that I’ve come to depend on – and it’s so well written that, despite the fact that is hasn’t been updated since April 18, 1994, it works flawlessly with […]
2001 – Let’s listen in on your standard Mac vs. PC flame war….
2001 – When you are finally able to obtain a computer, it may be that you are offered a chance to help make the purchasing decision; you may be forced to accept a computer you don’t really want – or you might be faced with accepting donations of PCs or Macs, because that’s all you […]
2000: In a previous article, I mentioned that Jesse Berst was jumping the gun by saying that Apple was offering nothing new. A particularly astute reader pointed out that, in fact, Apple has indeed stopped innovating. This reader was obviously a Mac lover and was in no way bashing me or Apple. So, has Apple […]
I think we have enough time now with Mac OS X Public Beta to reach a painful conclusion: The transition will not work, at least not well enough to sustain the Apple we know.
2000: Author’s Note: This article is purely speculative – no John Does or rumor sites were involved its writing. This is solely based on what the author hopes Apple could have in the works.
2000 – So you want a G3. You may have noticed that there are a number of G3 upgrades on the market. You may have also noticed that the prices on real G3 computers are falling fast.
2000: When wireless networking first starting coming on the scene, I was very against it. All sorts of bizarre ways were coming out to make my PC access my network wirelessly. I remember the idea of using your power outlets as some sort of conductor to carry the signals and achieving about one megabit per […]
The reason this column is called Mac Lab Report is that these articles will chronicle the steps I took to go from a classroom with one computer to a classroom with 10 fully networked Power Macs in less than three years – at virtually no expense to our science department budget.
