The Mac Plus uses the same 8 MHz 68000 CPU found in the original Macintosh and the 512K Fat Mac. The attached hard drive is a 160 MB Quantum, and the computer has 4 MB of memory. Because it is an older design, the Plus is generally considered to be about 15% slower than the 8 […]
Author Archives: Daniel Knight
2000: There’s no nice way to say it: Apple stock tanked on Friday. AAPL opened at $53.50 on Friday, dropped immediately below the $30 mark, and closed the day at $25.75.
I ran across this memo on my hard drive at work. It was written in late 1996, when Windows 95 was making serious inroads by claiming to be “almost as good as the Mac.” This was not a good time for Apple: Between authorized Mac clones dividing the Mac OS market and Win 95 siphoning […]
The SuperMac C500 and C600 used the PowerPC 603e CPU in a great variety of speeds, ranging from 140 MHz to 280 MHz on a 40 MHz system bus. The best performance, short of a G3 upgrade, comes from using a fast CPU along with the Cache Doubler module.
2000 – It’s been a couple years since Scott Barber posted information on running Mac OS 8.1 on a Macintosh IIsi. It was a fairly convoluted method that only worked with a few Macs and required first booting from an older OS, then from an OS 8.1 hard drive – but it was possible.
LisaList is Low End Mac’s group for Apple Lisa users, including those using Lisa emulation. The group was begun on 2000.06.18.
There’s been some interesting discussion of IBM’s new PowerPC 750CX and forthcoming 750CXe processors, especially related to IBM Discusses New PowerPC Chips on MacWeek. A lot of Mac users seem to think the 750CX would be a poor choice; I beg to differ.
Once upon a time – April 1998 to be precise – Intel created a cheap version of the Pentium and named it Celeron. It had no level 2 (L2) cache, and it sucked.
This mod has been popular for a few years: Taking an old compact Mac, disassembling it, and applying a Stone Fleck finish to the case. In this instance, MacCollect has refinished a Macintosh Classic, although neither this reduced photo nor any on the MacCollect site really does it justice. You really have to see the […]
Bernard Bélanger’s PowerSuitcase (also in French) is quite a bit different from most CustoMacs: It doesn’t even look like a computer.
2000: You’ve probably seen the online ads from CoolVCD.com and read the press releases: Video Compact Disc (VCD) lets you watch movies on Macs or PCs that don’t have DVD drives.
Jonathan Ploudre first started using Macs in 1991 with a Mac IIsi. He’s a technophile who especially enjoys making things usable. He’s a Family Doctor in Mount Vernon, WA, where he lives with his wife and three girls. He wrote for Low End Mac from May 2000 through Sept. 2002.
2000: How would you like a Power Mac G3 for less than $500? Or perhaps a G4 Power Mac for less than $750? Both deals are currently available from Web sources with a little mixing and matching.
2000 – You’ve got your site up and running. You know people are visiting it, because they send you email (you do have a contact link on every page, don’t you). You’ve even registered with some search engines, joined a banner exchange or Web ring, and received a few links from other sites. But how […]
2000 – I received an interesting request from a regular site visitor last week: Jonathan Ploudre wrote me on May 3, wondered if I could adapt the new content on Low End Mac for AvantGo. For those, like me, who don’t own a Palm or Windows CE device, the first question is: What’s AvantGo?
2000 – Unless you know your visitors have browsers that support Flash, PNG, QuickTime, and other recent innovations, stick to JPEG and GIF images on your website. Knowing the audience of Low End Mac includes a lot of people surfing on version 3.0 and earlier browsers, you won’t find any other graphic formats here.*
2000 – SETI@home is a scientific experiment that harnesses the power of hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
There are several ways to attach a group of computers to the Internet. At work, we have a Cisco router, an ISDN connection, and a range of 128 IP addresses. At home, I’ve used IPNetRouter on my SuperMac J700/180, which also acts as a mail and list server. The $89 shareware program does a great […]
There’s a real danger in web design – the desire to have too much control over what your site visitor sees. There are webmasters who construct their site using very complex style sheets, JavaScript, or separately coded pages for different browsers. And as each new browser ships, the designer has to figure out how to […]
I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again. The G4 is insignificantly superior to the G3 unless you are running AltiVec-enabled software. It’s not a claim I make lightly, since Apple is hyping the G4 as the greatest thing since, well, the G3. Truth is, the G4 is little more than a G3 with a […]
2000 – Let’s start with a note on include files (the topic of the previous article). If you include a “/” in your reference as in <A HREF=”/news/index.shtml”> instead of <A HREF=”news/index.shtml”>, then it will not matter where the file is located – it will always relative to the root directory. In other words, it […]
2000: Sean Terrill says that the G4 debacle is all Apple’s fault. He makes some interesting arguments in his article on Mac Junkie, The Great G4 Debacle: Why It Is Apple’s Fault (no longer online).
2000 – When I started designing web pages in early 1997, I knew nothing about HTML. I used Claris Home Page 3.0 and put things together until they looked right.
This article is adapted from a posting by Adam Takessian to the Vintage Macs email list. I would like very much to help other compact Mac users to know more about the AE HD+, because before I bought mine, the information on the Web was extremely limited, scattered across several different pages, sometimes inaccurate, and […]
Mike Ford posted the following to Vintage Macs, our group for users of pre-PowerPC Macs. Well, people asked, and people sent me info, and I got curious and went hunting myself. This is a brief collection of what I have found, and what I believe to be accurate, YMMV, corrections and additions welcome. The 8•24GC […]
2000: Remember how Steve Jobs announced the Power Mac G4 on August 31, 1999? There would be a less-expensive 400 MHz model plus two faster machines with AGP video and more. The “Sawtooth” models would run at 450 and 500 MHz.
This is a revision of a 3-part article first published in November 1998. A few things have changed since then, so we’re revisiting Macintosh 2000 in light of FireWire, the G4, AirPort, and other changes over the past 14 months.
Tom Owad likes repackaging Macs with toy bricks.* The Compubrick 160 takes a PowerBook 160 and converts it into a very compact desktop computer. In fact, Tom says the design was inspired by Apple’s Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM).
2000 – These instructions were written specifically for installing Mac OS 8.1 on a large group of Power Mac 6100s. However, they can easily be adapted to almost any situation where you may be updating the Classic Mac OS. This was written when the I was the IT Manager at Baker Publishing.
2000 – It’s a common question on our Compact Macs email list: Can I use an SE card in the SE/30? The short answer is no. This article provides the long answer.
