Have you heard about iCab, the new shareware Mac-only web browser from Germany?
Category Archives: Mac Musings
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.
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.
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.
1999: I got a lot of positive feedback on last week’s column, I Was Wrong about the iMac, but also a lot of negative feedback on two paragraphs:
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 […]
1999: The title of the PCWorld article is supposed to say it all: Apple’s World Is Still Small: Mac Sales Are Successful but Still Lag Behind Windows’.
It’s that time of year – since before Christmas, people have been looking back at 1998. What were the most significant events?
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.
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 […]
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.
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.
1998 – Windows users not only put up with outrageously totalitarian behavior by Microsoft (as the DOJ hearings are making more obvious every day), but also actually love Microsoft for it.
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.
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.
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 – 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 – 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: