Way back in the 1970s and early 1980s, it was rare enough to have a personal computer in the home, classroom, or office. Today it’s common to have several computers, tablets, and/or smartphones in the workplace, school, or home.
From nearly the beginning, Macs have supported built-in networking using a protocol known as AppleTalk. While networking is common today, outside of large businesses and institutions, networked computers were the exception in the mid 1980s. Out-of-the-box networking was a major selling point for the Mac.
With Windows XP support officially ended, switching to Linux could be a way of saving low-end hardware. I compare two identical machines, one running XP, the other running LXLE. Let the fun begin.
I put my MacBook out of the way and installed LXLE on a 10” netbook. Find out what I think after an entire day of use.
This weekend, Linda relayed a question from a colleague who wondered what sort of tech gear to take travelling. As with most simple to ask tech questions, my best short answer is. “It depends.” So let’s expand on it a bit.
As Mac OS X was starting out in 2001, Jonathan Ploudre looked back at BeOS, which Apple had considered as a potential replacement for the Classic Mac OS when it gave up on its Copland project. BeOS had much to commend itself, including a whole different kind of system architecture that made even older Macs […]
In this series of articles from 2001, Jonathan Ploudre looks at the unfulfilled promises of PowerBooks – and where they really come through.
In early 2001, just as the first version of iTunes was coming to market, Jonathan Ploudre wrote a short series of articles on home networking and setting up an old Mac as a network appliance.
In 2000, Jonathan Ploudre did a lengthy series of articles explaining where work bottlenecks are and provided tips on how to best work around them. Speed Reconsidered points out the real world performance isn’t always related to hardware speed. Bottlenecks: What Is Your Mac’s Slowest Component? explains that the thing that most holds back your […]
Back in 2000, Jonathan Ploudre wrote a 4-part series on Macs and font technologies. Over a dozen years later, they still have some helpful insights. A History of Font Technologies looks at the way the Macintosh changed everything by displaying regular, bold, italic, outline, and different sized fonts on your screen. Macintosh System Fonts looks at the […]
I have a friend who has so far survived while living a smartphone- and tablet-free life. He is thinking of getting some small device to give him Internet access of the go. He quoted a mutual friend – an iPhone owner – who said that he got an iPad “because the apps are better”.
On January 24, 1984, Apple announced the Macintosh to its Board of Directors and to the world – and the computer world has never been the same.
LEM Swap is Low End Mac’s Google Group for buying and selling Mac OS computers and related goods. We also have Facebook LEM Swap groups for Mac and iOS users in Canada and the UK.
If you’ve watched the news or been on the Internet this week, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the Heartbleed bug, which allows hackers to access data that is otherwise securely encoded. How? By hijacking the SSL encoding software itself!
LibreOffice is a competent, free alternative to Microsoft Office. Like Office, it’s kind of bloated and slow to load. I’m using it to replace AppleWorks, which is incompatible with OS X 10.7 Lion and later – and I’ve discovered that LibreOffice is no speed demon.
Hard drive capacity is limited not only by how densely bits can be packed on a magnetic platter, but also by the number of sectors and tracks and drive surfaces in the drive itself and the number the computer’s operating system is designed to handle.
First we had emoticons, those smiles, winks, and other usually sideways image created using standard keyboard keys. :-) And then came emoji, those tiny colorful expressive faces, animals, modes of transportation, food, buildings, and so much more. And now they have come under attack.
WordPress is a great, powerful, extensible content management system (CMS), but it can take a while to really figure things out. Tags fall into that category.
This years WWDC should see an announcement regarding the next version of Mac OS X, but will you be able to run it?
Apple are not the only ones updating their mobile OS with a massive ‘point one’ update; the whited00r team have just released 7.1 – and I check it out.
MacPaint was one of two applications bundled with the original Macintosh; it and was the Mac’s default paint program. It was written by Bill Atkinson, and its user interface was designed by Susan Kare. It continued as freeware through version 2.0. MacPaint images could be copied to the clipboard and pasted into MacWrite documents.
MacDraw was the Mac’s first drawing program. The vector-based drawing program was based on LisaDraw, which had been created for Apple’s Lisa computer – both applications were produced by Mark Cutter. MacDraw was especially useful for technical drawing, such as floorplans and flowcharts.
Second Class Macs are Apple’s somewhat compromised hardware designs. For the most part, they’re not really bad – simply designs that didn’t meet their full potential. The Macintosh LC is the oldest Compromised Mac, one of four models sharing the same problems.
Second Class Macs are Apple’s somewhat compromised hardware designs. For the most part, they’re not really bad – simply designs that didn’t meet their full potential. The LC II (a.k.a. Performa 400-430) was a slightly less crippled version of the LC.
Second Class Macs are Apple’s somewhat compromised hardware designs. For the most part, they’re not really bad – simply designs that didn’t meet their full potential. Take the 16-bit motherboard of the LC, replace the 68020 CPU with a 68030, strip out the expansion slot, and put it into a Classic case – and you have […]
Second Class Macs are Apple’s somewhat compromised hardware designs. For the most part, they’re not really bad – simply designs that didn’t meet their full potential. The first color compact Mac, the Color Classic, was full of compromises.
Second Class Macs are Apple’s somewhat compromised hardware designs. For the most part, they’re not really bad – simply designs that didn’t meet their full potential. The PowerBook G3 Series was a trio of very capable models replacing the 250 MHz Kanga PowerBook G3. The 250 MHz and 292 MHz models were lightning fast, but the […]
ClarisWorks 1.0 redefined the software category pioneered by Microsoft Works. Where Microsoft’s package was a software suite containing separate word processor, spreadsheet, and database programs, ClarisWorks was a single program.
Road Apples are Apple’s most compromised hardware designs. For the most part, they’re not completely bad – simply designs that couldn’t meet their potential. The first desktop Mac finished in an attractive black color, the Mac TV was pretty much a crippled LC 520 with a TV tuner instead of an expansion slot.
Second Class Macs are Apple’s somewhat compromised hardware designs. For the most part, they’re not really bad – simply designs that didn’t meet their full potential, such as the PowerBook 5300, Apple’s first PowerPC-based PowerBook.
