1999: If you thought the iMac was nearly perfect, think again.
Author Archives: Daniel Knight
1999: Our friends at the Macintosh Broadcasting Company (MacBC) are thinking different. In the article Is It Time for a Cheaper Mac?, they propose that Apple wait to release a new inexpensive modular Mac until it can ship with Mac OS X Client installed.
1999: You’ve gotta love the spin people put on things.
1999 – I got home last night to find another box from Contour Design waiting for me. (The first one came in February; it contained the Contour USB UniMouse, a very nice three-button mouse for the iMac and the Blue & White Power Mac G3.)
1999: To begin, I want to thank Charles W. Moore of MacTimes for bringing up the subject of censorship and Web filtering (see Thin Edge Of The Wedge: Why Internet Censorship Is A Bad Idea [no longer online]). Over the past two days, AppleLinks (It Is Too Censorship!) and MacBC (Is Filtering the Same as […]
1999 – With the Power Mac 7500, 8500, and 9500, Apple introduced a new way of upgrading their computers: the CPU daughter card. Prior to this, all of Apple’s upgrades (except for PPC upgrades to 68K Macs) meant changing the system board.
“Since Littleton, the cost of being different has gone up. Thousands of powerful e-mail messages have chronicled an educational system that glorifies the traditional and the normal, and brutalizes and alienates people who are or who are perceived as different under various names – geeks, freaks, nerds, Goths and oddballs. One of the powerful messages […]
1999: Charles W. Moore objects to the United States government requiring larger ISPs to provide content filtering to its customers for free or at cost (see Thin Edge Of The Wedge: Why Internet Censorship Is A Bad Idea [no longer online]). Although I agree with Moore in general that censorship is a bad thing, I […]
Apple has used the SCSI bus since introducing the Mac Plus in 1986. The SCSI bus must have termination power for clean data transmission. Most Macs provide termination power for the SCSI bus, so most SCSI devices for the Mac don’t need to provide it.
1999 – We’re taking a look at upgrade and replacement options for 68030-based Macs today.
1999 – Did it strike you odd that Apple completely ignored the iMac at the World Wide Developers Conference? Sure, the latest PowerBook G3 is an incredible machine, but what about the Power Mac, the consumer portable, the iMac?
1999: PowerBooks have always been six of one, half-a-dozen of the other. Usually a step or two slower than their desktop siblings, in the past, PowerBooks often suffered from compromised screens, small hard drives, and serious memory limitations.
1999: According to The Internet Operating System Counter, the Mac OS and Linux are the fastest growing server operating systems.
The Columbine massacre in Colorado has been on my mind – and probably yours as well. It’s very troubling on any number of levels.
1999: The idea of an iMac with “Intel inside” is both more and less ludicrous than it sounds.
It’s easy to visit a site like Low End Mac and find out when a model was first produced and when it was discontinued. But how do you determine how old a specific device is?
1999 – The Power Mac 7200 offered good value, but its only official upgrade path involved replacing the entire logic board. What other options were there?
1999: I think Apple surprised most of us by releasing the iMac Revision D at 333 MHz instead of 300 MHz. A lot of us had expected the lower speed, possibly coupled with a boost to 64 MB of RAM or the addition of a DVD player, neither of which happened.
1999 – I have an issue of BYTE magazine from many, many years ago with a cover story on benchmarking (along with one on a new computer from Apple called Macintosh). It’s a topic the computer industry has followed with keen interest for decades.
1999: Once upon a time there was a compact computer called the Macintosh. It used small disks, a small keyboard, and a small screen. Then a company called Radius invented a revolutionary device: a full page display for the Macintosh. Unlike conventional displays, this was a portrait monitor – taller than it was wide.
1999: Mark Twain is purported to have said, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Whether he actually said it or not, the fact remains that statistics can and do lie. Of all computer users, Mac users should know it best.
The PowerBook 1400 was available in several different configurations, including two different displays (dual-scan and active matrix) and three different CPU speeds (117, 133, and 166 MHz). Only the 117 MHz version merits a Road Apple rating – and only because Apple left out the Level 2 (L2) cache.
The Macintosh IIcx, IIci, and Quadra 700 share the same case design, and some users have found it a challenge removing the hard drive. That’s a shame, because the IIcx was designed for ease of construction. Apple demonstrated assembling one from part in under two minutes, if I recall correctly. You can use any standard […]
1999 – If you haven’t read Fred Langa’s latest anti-Mac tirade, you’ve missed a great compilation of misinformation and innuendo. (By now most Mac users know that Fred Langa seems to have a low tolerance for Apple Computer, the Macintosh, and especially the iMac.)
For the past several weeks, we’ve been buying and installing new Power Mac G3s at work. You know, the Blue and White ones.
1999: A special thanks to Jeffrey Cho of The iMac NewsPage for bringing this one to my attention: Has the Age of Disposable Computers Arrived? The US$299 WEBzter Jr. from Microworkz is one of the first PCs to emulate the iMac by shipping without a floppy – but with a 56k modem, so it’s Internet […]
1999: I’m not alone in my burnout. I received a lot of email after last week’s column on burnout. Several writers, including a fair number of webmasters, said it helped them put things in perspective and reduce their hectic pace a bit. I’ve been slowly recovering from a few consecutive days that thoroughly drained me.
IF YOU’RE NOT DUTCH, YOU’RE NOT MUCH That’s been a common bumper sticker here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for as long as I can remember. Our most prominent ethnic group, if not our largest, is Dutch-Americans.
This article was written in 1999, the days of the Classic Mac OS (then at version 8.5), which was designed for a single CPU – and the G3 was then bleeding edge. We now have OS X, which supports multiple CPUs, CPU cores, and hyperthreading, but some of the problems discussed in this article remain […]
1999: Some people still don’t get the iMac. The new InfoWorld (15 March 1999), in a sidebar on page 40, comments, “There is still no floppy drive on this computer….” Duh!