The iMac: First of a Family?

July 1998: Don Crabb was the first to speculate in public that the iMac wouldn’t stand alone for long (The iMac Line, Don Crabb, MacCentral, 9 June 1998). I have to agree with him. The iMac is as revolutionary as the original Macintosh – without breaking software compatibility (see The iMac: truly revolutionary). And just […]

Grand Rapids (MI) Schools Standardizing on Windows?

June 1998 – The Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS) appear to be standardizing on Windows, if their current $795,000 purchase of Windows-based computer systems is any indication. This may mean they will phase out millions of dollars worth of Macintosh equipment (estimated at 2,000 computers), some of it installed as recently as the 1997-98 school […]

The iMac: Truly Revolutionary

June 1998: How quickly we forget how revolutionary personal computers are! The first PCs were kits for electronic hobbyists. The Apple 1 came as a kit; users had to add their own keyboard, case, and power supply. The real revolution came in 1977 with the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and the Apple II – computers […]

An Expansion Slot in the iMac?

June 1998: I received an interesting email from Mark Sutherland the other day. He swore he’d seen a picture of the iMac with a VGA port. I quickly grabbed Macworld and looked closely at the pictures (no longer online). No sign of a monitor port. Just audio, USB, ethernet, and modem ports. I asked Mark […]

Fixing iMac

May 1998: The iMac has one flaw: no removable media drive. That’s right, there’s no standard floppy drive, nor is there a SCSI port for adding a Zip drive, optical drive, CD-ROM burner, or other removable media drive.

Is Apple Really Back?

1998: In his article, Apple Offers Sizzle in Forbes Digital, Michael Noer asks, “Is Apple really back?” Despite claims by Steve Jobs and the fact that Apple Computer is the sweetheart stock of 1998, Noer maintains that Apple is not back. Instead, he claims it is dying.

Fixing Sound and Display Problems in the Classic Mac OS

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 […]