1998 – There is no functional difference between the Power Mac 7100 and the Quadra 650 with the PowerPC upgrade card: They use the same ROM. As for the PPC Toolbox, that appears on all the 68040 Macs I’ve worked with, simply because the PPC Toolbox is 68k code.
Category Archives: Low End Mac Tech Journal
Apple launched the Macintosh in 1984 with an 8 MHz 68000 CPU. When this list was published in April 1998, the fastest Mac was the 300 MHz Beige Power Mac G3. Here are Scott Barber’s picks as the best Macs from each CPU family Apple has used to date.
1998 – Okay, kind of a flame, but really specialized. I disagree that Apple should dump the 68k code simply because they want to isolate the 68040 machines from modern use.
1998 – I have this incredible desire to mention a few things about SCSI, seeing the wealth of posts that in some way or another ask whether this drive or that drive will work with this machine or that machine. This isn’t meant to be sarcastic, and it’s very serious – I have clients that […]
All Macintoshes are capable of achieving the 230 kbps (kilobits per second) transfer rate, since this is the speed of LocalTalk. The problem is, unless a device uses the LocalTalk protocol, the port cannot stream that way and is limited to normal serial modes.
1998 – “One topic you you didn’t address was VRAM. Since I use a lousy 15″ monitor, I’m assuming that increasing monitor size will be key to increasing ease of use/performance. Of course, I assume that someone in a prepress use already has two 24″ monitors….”
1998 – It sounds to me like you’re running the kinds and types of software that can create common crashes. I’ve noticed a considerable number of people on the list that don’t have crashes, but I’m not one of them. There are things you can do to shore up your system from crashes and eliminate […]
1998 – First, you’re going to need a lot of memory. All you can afford. Pump your Mac to the maximum memory you can get. Once you get over 80 MB, you’ll be kind of redundant – most CD-writing programs only provide for a 64 MB RAM cache. Aim for at least 64 MB of […]
By request, I’ve searched my personal archives and stumbled on my thesis. It’s rather short compared to the ones I write now, but it should get the point across. Now, there are two complete reposts here, so don’t get confused when the subject changes.
1998 – Long ago, as it has been mentioned, some companies used soft partition software.1 This was an overlay of the hard partitioning format. In some cases, this worked okay, but in most cases, it worked just like Stacker or eDisk2 (for more on these ancient utilities, see Miscellaneous Macintosh FAQ) – sooner or later […]
“How come my folders/apps inflated in size when I moved them from the old drive to the new one? The size of files has jumped by more than 25% across the board. Did I do something wrong in simply dragging the entire contents from the old drive the new one?”
“I’m using my PowerBook Duo 280c over Apple’s LocalTalk Bridge to get access to my ethernet network. What do I need to get TCP/IP to flow through that, too? Where can I get it?”
1998 – Go into your Preferences folder and remove Display Preferences and Sound Preferences. One of the problems when Mac system software switched over was that the engineering team at Apple created Monitors & Sound, instead of leaving them separate, when they created Mac OS 7.6. This created two separate versions of preferences files which […]
A Level 2 (L2) cache was a popular way to boost performance on faster 68030-based Macs, including the Mac IIci, Mac IIvx, and Mac IIfx. But none of the 68040-based Macs shipped with an L2 cache, although most were capable of using one. The L2 cache is automatically accessed by the 68040 series processor, whether […]
ISDN is a nearly forgotten service provided by the telephone company to provide digital transmission of voice, data, video, and more over a conventional land line. It is faster and more reliable than the 56k modems that have been in use since the late 1990s. [There was a time when we had ISDN service for […]
I have posted my answer to your question to the Quadlist, simply because it’s the most on-topic question I’ve gotten in a while. Contained within my answer are little tips that I think others need to know so that they can get powerful performance out of their machines as well. I have eliminated a considerable […]
1998 – Quantum makes the best SCSI drives for Apple or Mac clone branded equipment. I think they make lousy IDE drives though and vote for IBM or Maxtor when it comes to IDE.
Someone I’d love to give credit to, but don’t know who they were when they suggested it to me, gave me a wonderful idea for the RAM disk/disk cache solutions in an article I wrote a while back, RAM Disk vs. Disk Cache: When to Use Each
1998 – This is a long post, but it is relevant to many of the problems we have discussed recently. I would also be interested to know if people agree with what this Apple tech has to say.
1998 – Your results may vary, but this should provide a good starting point for tweaking serial throughput on your Mac setup. Note that FreePPP allows serial port settings of 115.2 kbps and 230.4 kbps, settings not possible with Apple’s serial toolbox routines. This follows up on our earlier article, Macintosh Serial Throughput, providing real […]
1998 – The entire idea of a LocalTalk gateway is to bridge LocalTalk devices that don’t have ethernet – such as Macs, early LaserWriters, other printers, etc. which are not TCP/IP devices (visible on the Internet in the Internet’s most common language) as LocalTalk devices.
1998 – Much of the following information has been distilled from a series of articles by Steve Gibson of SpinRite. Since these articles specifically address Click of Death (COD) tools in the Windows world, they provide excellent technical information but no Macintosh perspective. If you want to know more about COD, Gibson’s articles are the […]
1998 – Scott Barber blew me away with the news: He has Mac OS 8.1 running on a Macintosh IIsi!
“You can’t run a 9600 modem on a Plus.” “You’re wasting your money buying a 56k modem for that old Centris 610.” “Those old Macs don’t do handshaking.”
Sometimes getting a SCSI chain working properly seems to be more hit and miss than science. We know the last device should be terminated, that the chain should not exceed a certain length, and that every device must have a unique ID. But even that isn’t enough to consistently build a busy SCSI chain and […]
1998 – There are several variables that determine hard drive throughput: How fast your Mac can move data over the SCSI or IDE bus, how fast your drive can move data over the drive bus, and caching, including both disk caching by your Mac and the disk’s internal data buffer.
Apple popularized SCSI (small computer system interface) by making it a standard feature on the third Macintosh, the Mac Plus, which was introduced in January 1986. Although Apple only embraced a subset of the emerging SCSI standard, the new bus allowed chaining up to seven peripherals to the computer. The 8-bit parallel interface was theoretically […]
This information is about what are commonly referred to as the x200 series of Performas and Power Macs. These machines, with the exception of the Performa 6360, were all PowerPC 603 or 603e machines with severe hardware problems.
It is out of sheer desire to help others overcome the year-long disaster that I went through, that I would like someone to be able to document this somewhere. Please take note, this affects all Centris 610 and Quadra 610 machines, but not the 660av.
1997 – Surprising to many, the first Macs didn’t have SCSI. The Apple design team created a compact, closed box with a disk drive, CPU, monitor, 128 KB of RAM, keyboard and mouse ports, a floppy drive port, and two serial ports. The serial ports were the secret – they could support a 230.4 Kbps […]
