When we think of ethernet today, we think of wired networking with RJ-45 ports and plugs. These connectors look like an oversized phone jack. But that was only one of several competing connectors in the early days of networking.
Category Archives: Low End Mac Tech Journal
Let’s face it: High voltages are scary. When someone says “kilovolts”, you usually hear “killovolts”, right? And if you fire off a quick search on the Web, you find dire warnings everywhere that reinforce your natural fears. The warnings are so numerous and frightening, in fact, that it’s easy to believe that a CRT can […]
The truth is out there. Or perhaps in there is a better way of putting it, at least as far as batteries for laptop computers are concerned. The truth is that those expensive (and sometimes exploding) batteries are little more than repackaged Li-Ion* AA cells. And generally not the high capacity ones at that.
When Apple made the switch from PowerPC CPUs to Intel in 2006, the state-of-the-art CPU was Intel’s Core Duo processor, which was based on Intel’s 32-bit Pentium M architecture, which was originally designed for mobile use. The Core Duo was Intel’s first dual-core mobile processor, and it was used in all first generation Intel Macs […]
This article is taken from MacFacts 95. Scott Baret wrote and drew the original work in 1995 at the age of eight and began revising it a year ago. For more about this document’s history and Baret’s experiences with Macs through his school years, see About This Article at the end of the page.
Buying the best display for your Mac has never been easy, unless you wanted to pay for Apple-branded products. In the old days, Mac video ports were different from those used in the PC world, and today you need to research whether the display you’re interested in has VGA or DVI input.
This page contains some of the most useful information on the limitations of Personal File Sharing and AppleShare File Server for the Classic Mac OS. It vanished from Apple’s servers circa 2010 and is shared here as a public service to those still using the Classic Mac OS.
2002: As noted elsewhere today, I’ve been using ramBunctious, a classic Mac OS RAM Disk program, for years. Although it works in Classic Mode under Mac OS X, the RAM disks it creates are inaccessible to OS X, so I’ve retired a real workhorse program.
The Tanzania motherboard was introduced in October 1996 and supports PowerPC 603e and 604e processors on a 40 MHz system bus. This motherboard was used in the Power Mac 4400, Motorola StarMax 3000 and 4000, Power Computing PowerCurve and PowerBase, and Umax SuperMac C500 and C600, as well as some lesser known clones.
2001 – Packaged in a plain beige case with a single DA-15 connector, this single-sided 400K floppy drive (model #M130) works with early Macintosh computers. The “Click of Death” likely occurs on drives that have not been adequately dusted or as a secondary result of restoration by the liberal application of lubricant.
It was about five years ago that I first used the Web – and four-and-a-half that I started building my own Web pages using Claris Home Page. I’ve learned a lot along the way, some of it the hard way.
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.
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.*
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 […]
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 – 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.
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.
Every version of the Mac OS is ready for Y2K, but some programs for the Mac suffer from Y2K problems.
For those of us who cut our teeth with 8-bit computers in the late 1970s, dot pitch wasn’t an issue. A monitor might display 320 dots horizontally by 200 vertically. On a 13″ monitor (the norm back then) with 12″ viewable, you’d have about 9.5″ horizontally. That’s 0.75 mm per pixel, so a horizontal dot […]
I have yet to see a 15″ CRT monitor that looks crisp at 1024 x 768, or even a 19″ one that does justice to 1280 x 960 or 1280 x 1024 resolution. Yet these monitors are often rated for these settings, and often even higher ones.
I want to rattle on about this, since Dan [Knight] is testing out some of the things I’ve postulated about before. I keep seeing this dual RAM Disk/Disk Cache trend , and it astonishes me. I just haven’t figured out why everyone wants to equate them together, and then it dawned on me – some […]
“Although systems prior to Mac OS 8 can indeed do more than one thing at a time, OS 8 is also a better form of multitasking, a.k.a. Win95!”
A problem I used to have with using Macjordomo was with people sending subscription emails that were either in HTML format or had misspelt or missing subscription commands. Whenever I would receive such email, it would generate an error in Macjordomo.
1999 – I disagree about the G4 being a “marginally better” CPU than the G3. Given the 603 vs. the 604, where the 603 cannot handle multitasking properly and has a bus utilization rate that is so high that it cannot be configured for multiprocessing, nor can it handle intensive floating point calculations. The 604 […]
I maintained several email lists using Macjordomo, a freeware email list server from Leuca Software. The purpose of this page is to explain how Macjordomo works and how you can add, delete, or change your subscription – although the examples provided in this article are no longer in use. (Take that, spammers!)
Macjordomo is a powerful, easy-to-use freeware listserver. Versions are available for Mac OS 8 and 9 as well as Mac OS X.
