1998 – Much of the following information has been distilled from a series of articles by Steve Gibson of SpinRite. Since these articles specifically address Click of Death (COD) tools in the Windows world, they provide excellent technical information but no Macintosh perspective. If you want to know more about COD, Gibson’s articles are the […]
1998 – Scott Barber blew me away with the news: He has Mac OS 8.1 running on a Macintosh IIsi!
April 1998 – You’ve probably heard that the University of Texas McCombs School of Business will require students to purchase or lease a specific Dell laptop running Windows NT beginning in the Fall 1998 semester. (Special thanks to thessaSource for following the story.)
“You can’t run a 9600 modem on a Plus.” “You’re wasting your money buying a 56k modem for that old Centris 610.” “Those old Macs don’t do handshaking.”
This page looks at the first MS-DOS coprocessor cards for the Macintosh, the Mac286 and its sibling, the Mac86. I have created this page in response to the lack of information about these cards that is publicly available.
By now you’ve probably heard of FireWire, the new high speed standard for moving data between devices. Also known as IEEE Standard 1394 or P1394, FireWire was invented by Apple as a faster alternative to SCSI in its many permutations.
The G3 All-in-One succeeded the Power Mac 5000 series for the education market. Key features include the G3 processor and a 15″ multiscan display (13.8″ viewable). The All-in-One was specifically designed for the education market, where less wires and parts to remove are a big plus.
1998: The price/performance ratio of the Power Mac G3, especially after recent price cuts, is simply amazing. And somehow Apple has packaged the technology into the G3 All-in-One for as little as $1,500. The rumored $2,000 PowerBook G3 also sounds like an incredible value.
Sometimes getting a SCSI chain working properly seems to be more hit and miss than science. We know the last device should be terminated, that the chain should not exceed a certain length, and that every device must have a unique ID. But even that isn’t enough to consistently build a busy SCSI chain and […]
1998: I thought that a good topic to kick off The Road Warrior would be the machine I’m typing this column on, the PowerBook 5300, which has been my workhorse computer for more than two years. Of course, I would love to have a new PowerBook G3 Series machine like the ones I’ve had an […]
It’s the hot new technology for 1998: modem bonding. Windows 95 supports it, many modem makers support it, and ISPs are beginning to support it.
1998: I recommend you read It’s the Latency, Stupid by Stuart Cheshire to get a good understanding of latency, then come back to this overview.
1998: According to the hype, v.90 (a.k.a. 56k) modems are the greatest thing since Zip drives. In some respects, they are. They’re ideal for surfing the World Wide Web, but perhaps less than ideal for other uses.
1998: We’ve looked at packets, compression, and latency. We’ve seen that each takes a toll on throughput. The following shows the effect of this at various modem speeds.
Code named Gossamer, this faster version of the Beige G3 builds on Apple’s success with the 233 and 266 MHz Late 1997 models. In addition to a 300 MHz PowerPC 750 (a.k.a. G3) CPU, the 300 MHz model has the option of a 1 MB backside cache – twice as big as in the earlier models. […]
1998: Should the Internet be a tax-free zone? President Clinton thinks it’s a good idea. Anyone shopping on the Internet is inclined to agree. Why would anyone oppose the Internet Tax Freedom Act?
Sad to report that Rodney Lain finally committed suicide on 6/14/02. He had gone off his anti-depressants.
March 1998 – This letter was written in response to news reports that the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, was considering phasing out Macs in favor of Windows computers. This letter should be appearing soon in Imprint, the university newspaper.
1998 – There are several variables that determine hard drive throughput: How fast your Mac can move data over the SCSI or IDE bus, how fast your drive can move data over the drive bus, and caching, including both disk caching by your Mac and the disk’s internal data buffer.
Apple popularized SCSI (small computer system interface) by making it a standard feature on the third Macintosh, the Mac Plus, which was introduced in January 1986. Although Apple only embraced a subset of the emerging SCSI standard, the new bus allowed chaining up to seven peripherals to the computer. The 8-bit parallel interface was theoretically […]
“No Newton is good news.” “Apple kills the Newton.” “Life after Newton.” These are just a few of the headlines since Apple’s Feb. 27 announcement to discontinue the innovative but unprofitable handheld computers. Although it would have been nice if Apple could have sold the Newton division and its technology to someone else, the fact […]
1998: By now, everyone should realize that the 56k modem is just a flash in the pan. So were the 33.6k modem, the 28.8k modem, and the rare 19.2k modem. And let’s not forget the 14.4k modem, the 9600 modem, the 2400 modem, the 1200 modem, the 300 modem, and the lowly 110bps modem.
1998 – If you’ve seen the snail, you love the snail. Apple’s incredible new ad pulls no punches, bragging to the world that a Power Mac G3 is up to twice as fast as a Pentium II PC.
1998 – It’s the talk of the Internet: Apple has apparently inked an exclusive deal with CompUSA as the only national (U.S.) Macintosh reseller.
It had to happen sooner or later: First, Apple dropped support for the Mac 128K and 512K. After all, with single-sided floppies, too little RAM, and no SCSI port, they could no longer be considered serious productivity machines. The last version of the Mac OS to support these computers was 4.1, introduced in 1986.
“Should You Buy Disposable PCs?” is the cover story in the February 1998 issue of Byte. It is certainly an intriguing question.
During Macworld San Francisco came the rumors that Claris would discontinue Emailer. With freeware Eudora Lite and the emailer in Internet Explorer 4.0, perhaps people would be unwilling to pay for Emailer.
A source in Kitsap, Washington, writes, “I read the articles about the Grand Rapids (MI) Schools trying to go to PC only, and I couldn’t help but relate to the problems in Grand Rapids. The South Kitsap (WA) School District, where I live and where my wife teaches, is going through the same horror. I […]
The SuperMac J710 was the last new model from Umax, and only about 50 were ever produced.
Low End Mac began on April 7, 1997. The first editorials were published on July 15, 1997. All editorials are by Dan Knight unless otherwise noted.
Can you say beleaguered? That became the word most associated with Apple in 1997.
This information is about what are commonly referred to as the x200 series of Performas and Power Macs. These machines, with the exception of the Performa 6360, were all PowerPC 603 or 603e machines with severe hardware problems.
It is out of sheer desire to help others overcome the year-long disaster that I went through, that I would like someone to be able to document this somewhere. Please take note, this affects all Centris 610 and Quadra 610 machines, but not the 660av.
Rather than have six separate pages for the remaining case studies, all of which are quite brief, I’m combining them all on a single page.
My workplace computer is a Power Mac 7600 with 48 MB of RAM. For some reason, it doesn’t want to run RAM Doubler, so I have virtual memory set to 96 MB to provide enough memory for Photoshop, FrameMaker, Netscape Communicator, GraphicConverter, and the other memory hungry applications I run regularly.
