1998 – Back in March 1992, MacUser magazine ran an article comparing past and then-current Macs. One comparison was the original Macintosh with the Quadra 900: 8 MHz 68000 vs. 25 MHz 68040, 128 KB RAM vs. 4 MB to 256 MB, no SCSI or hard drive vs. several internal drive bays and an external […]
Category Archives: Mac Musings
1998 – Back in March 1992, MacUser magazine ran an article comparing past and then-current Macs. One comparison was the original Macintosh with the Quadra 900: 8 MHz 68000 vs. 25 MHz 68040, 128 KB RAM vs. 4 MB to 256 MB, no SCSI or hard drive vs. several internal drive bays and an external […]
1998: Once upon a time, I was a DOS geek. I cut my teeth on the Apple II+ and Commodore VIC-20. When we moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 1987, I managed to obtain a sales position at the local Heath/Zenith computer store. I had no DOS experience and almost zero Mac experience, but they […]
The first rule of computing: You can never have too much computer. The first corollary: Your computer is never quite enough computer.
A recent study by Computers, Support and Consulting in conjunction with MacMarines surveyed Mac users about their computer systems, as reported in the current issue of The Mac Report (no longer online or in the Internet Archive). As the publisher of Low End Mac, most of the results didn’t surprise me, but they are interesting.
1998: In HFS+ Nightmares, I wrote, “I sincerely hope my experiences with HFS+ are not typical.” Feedback from dozens of readers confirms that it isn’t.
1998: I sincerely hope my experiences with HFS+ are not typical.
1998: If you cut your teeth on the Mac or even a Windows machine, count yourself fortunate. A graphical operating system lets you play around and figure out how things work. It’s user-friendly, which is why the Macintosh caught on and influenced the shape of the dominant PC operating systems. The same concepts are playing […]
1998: This is a story with a long background. Most of you are fortunate: You’re not responsible for keeping dozens of Macs running, just one – or maybe a few. I support not just dozens and dozens of Macs, but dozens of different models.
If they got you with Y2K, what will they do for an encore?
1998: The future of Claris Emailer looks bleak. Although Apple says it is considering its options for the popular email program, Emailer owners are already acting as if the program is history.
1998.10: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Dickens said it first, but the words could just as easily have been written about Apple Computer in the year since Steve Jobs became interim CEO – or iCEO – for life.
1998: In one way, the Macintosh is the less popular cousin of the Wintel PC. I’ve heard there are now over 20,000 viruses for DOS and Windows computers. Twenty-thousand! Until this year, the Mac was stuck at 44. I think it was about five years since the last new Mac virus was created and discovered. […]
1998: I don’t usually write editorials on a Saturday morning, but an article on MacCentral (Apple Canada Scaling Back?) got my attention. Although I’ve lived in the States most of my life, Canada is my homeland and the place most of my relatives call home.
1998: From the original Macintosh of 1984 through March 1987, there was one Mac case: a compact beige box with a 9″ screen. (For more details, see last week’s Still Useful After All These Years: The Mac Plus.)
1998: The original Macintosh of 1984 was an incredibly cool computer – but impractical. With just 128 KB of RAM and a single 400 KB floppy drive, using it was an exercise in frustration involving a lot of disk swaps. A second floppy drive made the Macintosh a much more practical computer, but it was […]
1998: Some machines are designed to do a simple job simply. The best even do it with elegance. But some make you wonder what their creators were thinking.
1998: Once upon a time, LCD panels were incredibly expensive, adding $1,000 to the cost of a laptop or portable computer. These were mostly passive matrix with 640 x 480 resolution. The best were backlit, supertwist LCDs. Most were only about 10″ on the diagonal.
1998: If you’re a webmaster, one thing you want to do is have people visit your website. There are lots of ways to get people’s attention:
1998 – I’m practically ancient for this industry. I remember lusting after the TRS-80 in Radio Shack flyers back in 1977. I think it was in 1979 that I first put fingers to keyboard and used a personal computer (an Apple II+).
1998 – Boy, was I ever wrong! Back in April, I wrote No $500 PC This Year. I didn’t see how anyone could combine a decent motherboard, hard drive, CD-ROM, case, power supply, floppy drive, keyboard, mouse, and a copy of Windows for under $500.
A big screen will absolutely spoil you.
1998: Did you ever buy a computer, only to have them introduce a faster, more powerful model within months – sometimes at an even lower price? Better yet, did you ever have it not happen?
1998: I couldn’t believe the headline. The Clinton administration is asking the United States Postal Service to devise a system of permanent email addresses. The great benefit of a permanent email address is that, once you have it, you can use it forever, even if you change Internet service providers. How forward-looking!
1998.08: Don Crabb wrote today about Apple’s backorder problems (Supply and Demand, MacCentral, no longer online). Almost all dealers are out of iMacs, PowerBooks are back ordered, and Power Macs are hard to get. The price of success?
1998: Once upon a time there were no computers. We’ve come a long way, baby! The first computers were pretty primitive by any standard. There was no software – you had to wire the computer for its intended task. Then came neat things like software on punch cards, paper tape, and eventually hard drives.
1998: When you’re responsible for dozens of computers on a network, you try to plan ahead while choosing the most cost-effective hardware to meet your needs. Since 1994, that has meant buying PowerPC Macs.
1998: For years the loyalty of Mac users was the envy of the PC industry. Report after report showed that when Mac owners bought another computer, it was almost always an Apple Macintosh. But things changed.
1998 – On the Mac side of the fence, we all know the processors found in the Power Mac G3, the PowerBook G3, and in G3 upgrades in a host of older Macs are up to twice as fast as Intel’s Pentium II processor. But did you also know that Intel has a long history of […]
Feeling smug about the year 2000, Mac owner? Don’t.
