MacWrite FAQ

MacWrite was bundled with the original Macintosh and was the Mac’s default word processing program. MacWrite was developed by Randy Wigginton, Ed Ruder, and Don Breuner of Encore Systems. It defined the WYSIWYG word processing category and continued as freeware through version 5.0.

My First Mac: Doing the Diskette Shuffle

I had a friend, Michael. We’d played music together in a local band, but by day he was a camera-person at a Vancouver TV station. He’d gotten a Mac early in 1984, pretty much as soon as they became available in Canada. He’d demo’ed it to me, and while I thought it was pretty neat, […]

30 Years of Macs

Introduced on January 24, 1984, the Macintosh forever changed the way we work with our computers. Instead of memorizing and typing arcane commands, we could point the cursor using a mouse and click to do things – all for well under the $10,000 price of Apple’s Lisa.

Inside the Original Macintosh

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.

My Long Road to the Mac

My road to the Mac has been a long one. While some of my earliest experiences with computers were on a Macintosh, it would take another 15 years before I would come to own one myself. Along the way I would discover a passion for computers and technology that continues to this day.

Low End TV’s Guide to Cutting TV Costs

Almost everyone complains about the cost of cable and satellite TV, but few actually takes the steps necessary to ditch those overpriced services and use their internet connection to fill the void. That’s our goal in this series of articles.

25 Years of the Mac SE/30

On January 19, 1989 – 25 years ago – Apple released the first all-in-one Mac to run faster than 8 MHz. The 16 MHz SE/30 was built around a 68030 CPU and supports up to 128 MB of RAM in a small footprint computer – far more than any other black-and-white compact Mac.

Retro Gaming on the Mac

A lot of people go on and on about how “great” their PS4 is or their Xbox one, and many of these people missed the start of it all! The Commodore, the Sinclair Spectrum, the Atari, etc. It’s when computers started becoming more interesting and fun to use, when you were eager to actually get […]

A Different First Mac Story

Many people describe their first experience of using an Apple computer as “uplifting”, “simple”, and “straightforward”, but despite being a die-hard Mac user now, I found it very different. 

Still Hooked on Macs

In 2008 I wrote a short article for Low End Mac; little did I know it would spark a regular column, over 100 more articles, and strengthen my love of all things Apple. In 2014 I am still hooked on Macs and reminisce about my first Mac.

How to Connect an Old TV Antenna to Your Digital TV

Cutting the cable (or ditching the dish) can be a great way to save money. A lot of great content is accessible via the Internet, from sources like YouTube, Netflix, iTunes, and others. But there may be times when you’ll miss your local channels, whether for emergency news and notifications or just local programming. If […]

Best Titanium PowerBook G4 Prices

Apple introduced its first G4 notebook, the Titanium PowerBook (TiBook), in January 2001; the last one was discontinued in Sept. 2003 and replaced by the 15″ aluminum PowerBook G4. All titanium models have 15.2″ displays, two USB 1.1 ports, FireWire 400, one CardBus slot, room for an 802.11b AirPort Card (not the newer 802.11g AirPort […]

Best Power Mac G4 Prices

The Power Mac G4 offers a lot of power, expandability (3-4 PCI slots and several drive bays), and upgradability (1.5 to 2.0 GB maximum RAM) with prices starting as low as $60.

Best iMac G4 Prices

Your best bet G4 iMacs are the last generation models (1 GHz 15″, 1.25 GHz 17″ and 20″ models), which have better video, support 2 GB of memory, and are the only G4 iMacs to include USB 2.0 ports. (Whether you’re looking at flash drives, scanners, printers, iPods, iPhones, or almost anything but keyboards and […]

Best iBook G4 Prices

G4 iBooks are a good option with prices starting below $100 including AirPort Extreme – well under half the cost of a refurbished 13″ MacBook. The biggest drawback to the iBook design is the tedious process involved in disassembling and reassembling it to upgrade the hard drive.