Writing and Editing with Microsoft Word

2001 – Everyone knows how to type, and many typists use Microsoft Word, since it is a standard for word processing. Word has plenty of unused and unknown features that facilitate the writer’s work. Whether they help to improve your writing, make word processing easy on the eye, or provide powerful editing techniques, those features […]

Mac Advocate Glossary

2001 – Here is a partial glossary of terms you are likely to encounter when discussing supporting the Mac platform with a longtime Mac user. If you have more contributions, tack them on in the message board.

Celebrating 80 MB Hard Drives

2001 – In 1991, I got my first Mac. It was a Mac IIsi with an 80 megabyte hard drive, which was considered a big drive then. Fast forward ten years, and we have 80 gigabyte drives that occupy the same niche in the storage environment. Compared to my first drive, a current 80 gig […]

If TV Characters Used Real Computers

2001 – MacCentral will occasionally post “famous people” sightings, where celebrities and others use Macs as props or as tools in public. I was thinking about this the other day, and wondered if people in TV shows used computers as much as real people – and real computers, not those 67-point font monsters that say […]

75 Mac Advantages, Part 5

2001 – For those of you new to this series, this is a look at the old 75 Macintosh Advantages brochure put out by Apple in the pre-iMac days. Many of the advantages still exist, but some have fallen by the wayside. There are references to OS X here, but my general attitude is that if […]

Software Subscriptions and Value

In the past few weeks, Microsoft has been getting some bad press. Okay, I don’t suppose that is particularly a news item. The current issue is the change in Microsoft’s software license. In layman’s terms, Microsoft is switching from selling its software to leasing it.

A Day With a Typewriter

The Royal Quiet De Luxe portable typewriter is about a ten pound machine capable of printing single page documents not wider than 9 inches and of indeterminate length. It was designed to allow the user to continue working while on board trains and in hotel rooms, but it was never practical for air travel, due […]

The Exclusivist Mac

2001: Last time I outlined the basic Mac Populist user. To recap: The Mac Populist believes that Macs should appear on every desk in every home and office. Their interpretation of “The Computer for the Rest of Us” is that the Mac is a computer meant for the mass market, and its destiny is to […]

The Underrated Power Mac 5400

A few weeks ago I got a letter from my friend David in Western Samoa. I lived next to David in Vaitoomuli village for two years while I was a Peace Corps Volunteer. We taught at the local high school together. I trained him on Macs, because I wanted to have someone to troubleshoot the […]

Farewell CRT

2001: Apple has been making CRT monitors since the late 1970s. Their last model, the Apple 17″ Studio Display with ADC, ended the line of perennially pricey displays with a myriad of off-the-wall features and ever-changing proprietary connectors. Yet there probably hasn’t been one model that somebody doesn’t love.

NeXT: Apple’s Right Choice

When I first wrote about BeOS, several readers were careful to point out the good sides of Apple picking NeXT instead of Be. Without the purchase of NeXT, we never would have gotten Steve Jobs back as iCEO, and there would be no iMac or iBook. But Apple got much more than Steve and a […]

The White iBook: Five Pounds of Genius

2001 – Apple has hit several home runs in the past few years, but it never did anything as fine as the latest iBook. The 4.9 pound portable is an almost incredible combination of strength, small size, good looks, and technology at a good price.

The Populist Mac

2001: My previous article, The Computer for the Best of Us, stirred up quite a few emails. Some were angry; others agreed with my opinion. What became clear, however, was that there are two interpretations of “The Computer for the Rest of Us”.

12″ iBook G3 (Mid 2001)

The Dual USB iBook had been the subject of great speculation in the weeks before its introduction. Gone were the tangerine orange, key lime green, graphite gray, and indigo blue colors of the past – the new iBook is simply white. Gone are the curves – the new iBook is a white box with rounded […]