A Perfect Compact Mac

1998: I miss the little guys. You may remember them. The original Macintosh (just Macintosh, no other name or model number). The 512K and 512K enhanced. The Plus. The SE and SE/30. Then the Classic and Classic II.

Mac Y2K Problems

1999 – Articles circulated in the past few days – see Cnet and Yahoo+ stories – note that Mac users shouldn’t be too smug about the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem. The Mac is not immune.

Apple’s Good Moves

1999: It feels good to be right. Last August, I asked, “Is Apple Too Popular for Its Own Good?” – and I suggested that Apple needed to outsource iMac production if it wanted to increase market share.

I Was Wrong about the iMac

1999: In all the excitement over the iMac, I got a bit carried away. I wrote editorials calling for a headless iMac (The Tiny iMac), a headless iMac with a DVD player and TV output (iMac TV), a behemoth 17″ iMac, a drive bay iMac, an expansion slot iMac, and more (see iMac: First of […]

Mac Musings Archive for 1998

1998 was the Year of the iMac. Announced in May, it didn’t ship until August, and it killed off all those legacy printer, AppleTalk, hard drive, keyboard, and mouse ports with something new called USB. The iMac quickly became the most popular computer on the market.

Resolution Independent Display

1998 – Thanks to utilities like SmoothType, ATM, and the anti-aliasing built into Mac OS 8.5, type today can look better on the screen than ever before. For instance, in the black and white sample to the right, anti-aliasing (courtesy of Photoshop) uses shaded pixels in spots where neither black nor white best fits the […]

Changing Computing Paradigms

1998: Paradigm is a buzzword of the 90s. A paradigm is a mental picture, a way of thinking of things. Significant changes take place when we think outside the box or shift our paradigm. This is what Apple was talking about with the Think Different campaign.

Give Thanks

This article is dated November 26, 1998 – Thanksgiving Day here in the States and the start of a four-day weekend – but I wrote it in advance so I wouldn’t have to spend any time working on Thanksgiving Day.

The PowerBook I’ll Buy

1998: For too many years the PowerBook was the underpowered cousin of the desktop Mac. The original Macintosh Portable was a 16 MHz 68000-based beast and weighed over 16 lbs. The battery alone was a good 3 lbs., but it did provide five to ten hours of use.

Microsoft: Playing to Win

1998: Bill Gates plays for keeps. He always has. And, DOJ permitting, he always will. I’m not a Microsoft basher. I’ve used their BASIC, DOS, Word, and Excel. My favorite web font is Verdana, a font Microsoft owns and makes freely available on its website.

Mac 2000 Revisited, Part 1

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 […]

Mac 2000 Revisited, Part 2

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 […]

Mac 2000 Revisited, Part 3

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 […]

Nightmare with Windows 98

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 […]

More Evidence that Macs Last Longer

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.

Mac OS X: Unix to the Core

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 […]

Why I Love the PowerBook G3

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.

Apple Must Outsource Production

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.

Oh, Canada!

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.

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 […]

The LCDs Are Coming

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.