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How about this one?

But something I've been lusting after since I found out about them last year or so: an Apple PowerCD. I don't have any idea if it would be useful at all to you, but hey, I'm still geeked I moved up from a Quadra 840AV to a PowerMac 7600/132 (look 'em up on Apple History if you want links) :)

I would love manufacturers to start taking this issue more seriously. Choice of fans is important, but also the hard drives as well. Apple fans can look smug here I think - Apple do take this stuff seriously. The PC world? Not so much, and it's a real shame.

For those who's commenting that LEAP is copy of what's available in vi or EMACS (poor or not), it's actually a left over from a Canon Cat computer that Raskin designed post Macintosh. That particular computer actually came with two LEAP keys under space bar. With common keyboards not having such specialized keys, Raskin's having to result in using key combinations that many are used to from vi and EMACS. You can see the keyboard layout here and then learn more about them by clicking on the keys. Raskin included some explaination of Cat in The Humane Interface.

Guide to Mac CPUsThis is Apple's own site for detailed specs on all their machines ever. I'm starting you off on the page for older machines to remind you that a well-configured 1996 Mac w/ a USB/Firewire card can run OSX just fine, thank you very much.

Mac of All TradesGetcher used macs here! Pretty visuals, delicious prices, detailed info. Selection could be better and there's no old stuff at all but I can deal with that. Have I bought from them yet? Nope. Am I likely to in the future? Yep.

MacResqThe best place I've found overall to pick up gear. Even the guys in that article figured that out.

Focus of Mac Hardware good workaday resource for doing mods. No cool toys. Considerable good data.

Missoula Mac User Group, Yeah, I know that you haven't heard of them; neither has anybody else outside of Montana AFAIK. Best place for overall newbie resources.

Powermax Cheesy setup, improving selection, good prices.

ResExcellence In the old days I would have suggested MacFixit, but these guys have taken their place. If you've been in the Mac world for a while you'll recognize them as the old-time source extraordinaire of ResEdit hacks.

Small Dog Shrinking selection, great quality, excellent service, annoying interface. Bottom line, these are the guys to turn to for premium service, support, and savvy. Been around quite a while and, hey, they enclose coupons for Ben and Jerry's.

applefritter. They've built Macs into everything from 1930's radios to LEGO people to ziplock bags. You can't buy anything there, but still much fun.

Think Secret Nice little rumor site. Some cool moments.

Of course, for those of us in the New York City area, there's always TekServe, an Apple and media gear mecca. You want to know what Lou Reed, Jam Master Jay, or Oliver Pratt are using? Ask them. You want toys? They got 'em. Ten cent cokes, vintage radios, serious testing gear, and a massive knowledge base. Hell, I once even applied for a job there when it would have meant giving up a far-better paying sysadmin gig. If they're good enough for Steve J., then they're worth a look.


Oh, by the way, the last time that I posted this list I included Shreve. What did I say?
ShreveExpensive, distracting, but the best place to get weird low-end stuff like Mac Plus manuals and Daystar cards.
There. You all feeling better now?
Rustin

How hard would it be for a hobbyist geek to use one of these devices, commodity hardware, and a little cleverness (like that of those Mac hackers who would take apart a Powerbook, flip the keyboard back behind the display, mount it on a stand, and call it an iMac Jr.) to design the "OpenTablet" spec?

Someone could make a fortune selling do-it-yourself kits with instructions... and of course the specs could be made open, for those of us (not me!) handy enough with a soldering iron and whatnot to make it ourselves...

A pen tablet running something like Debian... would easily be the perfect antidote to MS's admittedly nifty-looking new pen tablets :)

Slash dot had an article on how to reverse the screen on your apple powerbook duo. The guy used a glue gun and gave step by step instructions on turning your apple into a picture frame.

If you look at the photos closely, you can see a Lisa, a Newton 110-120-130 form factor, an eMate, a PowerCD, and a QuickTake 100- and 200-series cameras. Below and to the right of the Jim Henson poster, it looks like he's even got one of those set-top box prototypes, sitting underneath a laptop.

This is more of an Apple shrine than a Mac shrine, but I suppose it's mostly Mac enough for Wired to be able to call it a Mac shrine.

~Philly

If you look at the photos closely, you can see a Lisa, a Newton 110-120-130 form factor, an eMate, a PowerCD, and a QuickTake 100- and 200-series cameras. Below and to the right of the Jim Henson poster, it looks like he's even got one of those set-top box prototypes, sitting underneath a laptop.

This is more of an Apple shrine than a Mac shrine, but I suppose it's mostly Mac enough for Wired to be able to call it a Mac shrine.

~Philly

If you look at the photos closely, you can see a Lisa, a Newton 110-120-130 form factor, an eMate, a PowerCD, and a QuickTake 100- and 200-series cameras. Below and to the right of the Jim Henson poster, it looks like he's even got one of those set-top box prototypes, sitting underneath a laptop.

This is more of an Apple shrine than a Mac shrine, but I suppose it's mostly Mac enough for Wired to be able to call it a Mac shrine.

~Philly

here's some more pictures of that system:

Here
Here
and Here

However I would mount larger speakers into the unit if I did this.

here's some more pictures of that system:

Here
Here
and Here

However I would mount larger speakers into the unit if I did this.

here's some more pictures of that system:

Here
Here
and Here

However I would mount larger speakers into the unit if I did this.

here's some more pictures of that system:

Here
Here
and Here

However I would mount larger speakers into the unit if I did this.

In addation to the Anon's tron book, there are blue and red ibooks here. I'm sure you could do the same with a green tint, if that's what makes you happy. I personally would not though. My reason for that is basically not to mess with it till my warranty runs out, then everything is fair game. As it is, I have to send my own iBook to get it's touch pad replaced. Had I modified my hardware, they probably would not replace it. It's kinda too bad that Apple hasn't made replacement skins, so one could decorate their computer to hearts content.. I know, that I for one, would really like a comoflauge iBook :)
Either that or a nice paisly.

Apple chips are awsome! Particularly the cinnamon-sugar ones!

Why is this news? It's been done before.

The original TronBook and it's first cousin

I agree with the Tom7's post, why is someone's eBay item advertisement news?

Why is this news? It's been done before.

The original TronBook and it's first cousin

I agree with the Tom7's post, why is someone's eBay item advertisement news?

...notebook hacks can be found here.

More hacks can be found at the main AppleFritter hacks page.

...notebook hacks can be found here.

More hacks can be found at the main AppleFritter hacks page.

Use the Google, Luke. It's been done.

Well for starters there's this

and this

or these

these too

this too along with this

and this

Had enough yet?

Well for starters there's this

and this

or these

these too

this too along with this

and this

Had enough yet?

Well for starters there's this

and this

or these

these too

this too along with this

and this

Had enough yet?

Mac of All Trades Getcher used macs here! Pretty visuals, delicious prices, detailed info. Selection could be better and there's no old stuff at all but I can deal with that. Have I bought from them yet? Nope. Am I likely to in the future? Yep.

MacResq The best place I've found overall to pick up gear. Even the guys in that article figured that out.

Powermax Cheesy setup, improving selection, good prices.

Shreve Expensive, distracting, but the best place to get weird low-end stuff like Mac Plus manuals and Daystar cards.

Small Dog Shrinking selection, great quality, excellent service, annoying interface. Bottom line, these are the guys to turn to for premium service, support, and savvy. Been around quite a while and, hey, they enclose coupons for Ben and Jerry's.

Guide to Mac CPUsThis is Apple's own site for detailed specs on all their machines ever. I'm starting you off on the page for older machines to remind you that a well-configured 1996 Mac w/ a USB/Firewire card can run OSX just fine, thank you very much.

Focus of Mac Hardware good workaday resource for doing mods. No cool toys. Considerable good data.

Missoula Mac User Group, Yeah, I know that you haven't heard of them; neither has anybody else outside of Montana AFAIK. Best place for overall newbie resources.

ResExcellence In the old days I would have suggested MacFixit, but these guys have taken their place. If you've been in the Mac world for a while you'll recognize them as the old-time source extraordinaire of ResEdit hacks.

Think Secret The only rumor site I like that I forgot to mention yesterday.

Okay, moving right along. CPUs. Those yahoos think that the only option is to start from scratch. Get a clue. The last pre-Jobs big boxes kicked almighty ass. Amelio may not have been a gifted businessman but he was a much better heavy gear guy. As far as I'm concerned your best bet for DIY is to buy an 8600. It'll be $230, tops. You get a great case, big power supply, floppy drive, cables, and so on. Probably also a Zip, for which I will pity you as that model of Zip just LOVED to come down with the Click o' Death. Even if you flat throw out all the electronics you're still way ahead of starting from a place like Tom's.
Next, processor speed. When will those yahoos figure it out? Before you get obsessed with latest and greatest ask yourself, "what exactly will I be DOING with this machine?" If you're running stuff like BBEdit (ah, my one true love!) or Photoshop for still work then any 400MHz box with fast drives and plenty of RAM will be, for all intents and purposes, instantanteous. Buying anything faster just means that you're acting like the small-donged dimwits who buy $20K stereos to get fidelity five times better then they can hear.
Drives. I'm always amazed at how terrified Windoze-damaged (let alone *nix) folks are at the thought of external drives. Get over it, already. On a Mac all that driver clash claptrap is a distant and not very credible folktale. Get a basic little 6 Gig internal and invest your money in external Firewire devices. You think this LAN party stuff is cool? On a Mac pretty much any well configured boot drive will boot any similar recent Mac. Stop carrying your entire box with you; stick to drives. Even better, get two or three smaller ones instead of one big one and, short of FBI seizures and vast fires, you become crash proof. Mac dies? Plug your drive (you did remember to back up your core data, right?) into another Mac and you're up and running again in minutes.
The future. If you're such an almighty techie that you just *need* to build a new cooler world every year or so, then remember, Mach kernel plus gigabit ethernet equals mongo shared resources. Even if you're too lazy to set up a formal Beowolf system, it's pretty damned easy to just keep adding machines and splitting the jobs between them. Instead of buying a whole new box, maybe you should just buy a second one and start spreading load to it.
OSes. Yup. No question, Jaguar is pretty spiffy. But almost every vendor site above (as well as eBay and co.) will sell you older legit disks and serial num.s for about fifty bucks. If you buy from a place like Small Dog you'll even be clearing out some of that famed Apple back inventory.
That's it. You want more? Then go to my site already (though best to wait a few weeks for my next redesign). Want more then that? Then pay me and I'll think about it.
Promising to not ever again use up time posting tutorials on /.,
Rustin

So I wonder if the poster has ever seen the Desktop Hacks at Applefritter, which include the Shop Vac Mac and the Lego Mac?

Loomis

...with the Mac heads, right?

But your original question was why Apple didn't use *nix as the basis of it's modern OS way back in the 1990s. Do you remember "Taligent" and "Pink", the joint venture between IBM & Apple to create a viable OS standard based to compete with the Wintel cartel?

Pink was the OS that was supposed to be designed ground-up to be completely based on OO principles and technology. Apple put all it's eggs int that basket, and had to go shopping for an OS after years of missed delivery deadlines. Remember the play that Apple made for BeOS, before Jean-Louis Gasse and friends put a ridiculous price tag on what was still an unfinished OS? The net result was that Apple (and IBM) never finished fully OO-based Pink so it bought Job's NeXT. This allowed Apple to layer the MacOS on top of the OO-layer that NeXT had layered on top of BSD-Unix. And this also brought Apple's prodigal son back home.

...anactofgod...

Brazil has tried this before.. have a look at http://www.applefritter.com/macclones/unitron/ for a 1980's Brazillian Mac clone :)

Nah, G3s in Colo(u)r Classics are becoming commonplace (sort of). G4s in Colo(u)r Classics are something special.

actually, it looks like a cross between an emate and a tandy model 100. it'll be interesting to see if it finds a niche.

You want evidence?
http://www.applefritter.com

There's your evidence.

Ever heard of MacQuariums? Little Blue the budgie and its Classic cage? The Lego Mac? This has been going on for years. The Classic Mac has always been an inspiration to modders...there's something just so kawaii about it that decoration of it is second nature. All I can say to the 1337 PC c@s3 h4x0rz is "what took you so long?"

applefritter has a great collection of Mac mods.

I'm amazed that Apple didn't release a rack mount system years ago

They almost did, they built a prototype rack mount version of the ANS, called Deep Dish.

...called Babymac, part of the SnowWhite project from way back when.

. . .

Apple's a little new to this UNIX desktop thing.

Erm, not really, there's AUX, oh and a little thing called NeXTStep and even UNIX for the Lisa (mention only). You might add MAE the Macintosh Application Environment which was written for Solaris and HP/UX, or to a far lesser extent (because it's hard to say that this was other than a split away organisation eventually subsumed by IBM and turned into frameworks for VisualAge amongst other things), the Taligent OO-OS initiative, which was targetted to interoperate with AIX at least at one stage in its life.

Since Jobs left Apple - 1988 iirc - Job's has been involved in UNIX on the desktop. It's no secret that the NeXT technologists / staffers supplanted the previous Apple corporate hierarchy.

Some interesting reading is this USENIX paper The Challenges of Integrating the UNIX and Mac OS environments.

My point is that Apple has a fair deal of relevant experience, and the NeXT - Apple merger is almost distant history, in corporate terms, when Be Inc. seemed to have a chance. And man, that feels a long time ago, even though it isn't _that_ long :)

It _is_ actually possible to put PCMCIA cards into an iBook, however it's an ugly procedure and involves a fair bit of work - two of the data pins are swapped. It's not really practical for everyday use (at least in an iBook).

At one point it was a regularly discussed topic on the Applefritter Forums. See this topic @ the aforementioned forums for further information :
- Blueberry iBook monitor Hack?
- Airport slot as a PCMCIA slot???

It _is_ actually possible to put PCMCIA cards into an iBook, however it's an ugly procedure and involves a fair bit of work - two of the data pins are swapped. It's not really practical for everyday use (at least in an iBook).

At one point it was a regularly discussed topic on the Applefritter Forums. See this topic @ the aforementioned forums for further information :
- Blueberry iBook monitor Hack?
- Airport slot as a PCMCIA slot???

It _is_ actually possible to put PCMCIA cards into an iBook, however it's an ugly procedure and involves a fair bit of work - two of the data pins are swapped. It's not really practical for everyday use (at least in an iBook).

At one point it was a regularly discussed topic on the Applefritter Forums. See this topic @ the aforementioned forums for further information :
- Blueberry iBook monitor Hack?
- Airport slot as a PCMCIA slot???

Bell & Howell was the manufacturer. I used to see those models in museums a lot in the early 80s.

Here you go

CHRP:
Common Hardware Reference Platform. 1995 AIM Alliance (Apple, IBM, Motorola) strategy for doing the same thing but with details like OpenFirmware defined. Motorola lost several hundred million dollars when Apple killed it's licensing program and they were stuck with warehouses full of CHRP motherboards. Be's BeBox were based on a superset of CHRP. This evolved into Apple's modern line of Macs as well as IBM's RS/6000.

Operating systems that were to run on this hardware:
Windows NT (up to versions 3.5.1 and 4.0, Service Pack 2), AIX (still does on the RS/6000 & AS/400), OS/2-PPC, Solaris, ChorusOS, Netware, Taligent (never released), WorkplaceOS, LynxOS, MkLinux, LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog Linux, MacOS.

Most folks aren't aware that Apple actually did ship some fully CHRP boxes, the Apple Network Server 500 & 700. These ran AIX by the way, from Apple.

Also any number of other CHRP-derived boards have shipped over the years, most based on Motorola's VME series but IBM has also released plans.

On a related topic there was a widespread rumor in '95 that had lots of legs of IBM's PowerPC 615 project. This was supposedly an x86 (486?) core on chip alongside a PPC (604?) core. They'd share data paths, cache, other portions but would be able to run either x86 or PPC OS's. Nothing ever publicly came of it.

But I seem to recall having a mouse for my Apple IIe. Am I remembering wrong?

Applefritter has some great lego-cased systems...even a powerbook!

"When Jobs came in he killed the licensing and effectively killed Power Computing and the Motorola division selling the Mac clones. "

This is true but you should mention that Apple bought out Power Computing's MacOS Licence for something like 100 million dollars.

"The sad thing was that Power Computing was putting out a killer mac system, the main big advantage was it had 6 PCI slots where the Apples had only 3 or 2 or 1 depending on the model. The lack of PCI slots was a big gripe at the time of Mac Power Users. Now with USB and Firewire it's kinda moot. "

I think you have your history mixed up a little. Power Computing did have a 6 pci slot mac clone, the PowerTower Pro. But so did Apple, the Power Mac 9500, which eventually became the 9600, which had a much better case. In fact, the PowerTower Pro used a modifed 9500 motherboard. The lack of a six sloted mac did become an issue when apple released the beige G3 but never released the PowerExpress.

"I wish I had gotten one of those Power Computing Power Tower Pro's back then instead of a Performa 6400/200. Only one meg of un-upgradeable video ram in that thing and a 7" useless PCI slot. UNGH!"

You can't really compare a Power Tower Pro and a Performa 6400. The Power Tower Pro was Power Computing top of the line mac while the 6400 was Apple's comsumer level machine. PowerComputing was a little cheaper than Apple but not so much that a Power Tower Pro and a Performa 6400 were in the same price range. A better comparison would be between the 6400 and the PowerBase. Both comsumer machines, but with the PowerBase having some advantages: EDO ram, upgradeable processer, 3 full sized pci slots and the first 3d video card in a Mac.

I dunno, but people manage to find something to do with old Macintosh+'s

A/UX got dropped way before OSX and even before NeXT was bought. A/UX will only run on 68k Macs. Here is some more info.

What I'd like to see is a laptop that can seperate the keyboard, main unit and monitor (have a little folding stand come out of the bottom maybe. So I could rest the keyboard in my lap, prop the monitor up somewhere (or hang it!) and find a convenient spot to set the main unit. I expect the keyboard could maintain contact with lowpower RF or infrared and have it's own battery.

You have just described the Outbound Laptop almost perfectly. I don't know that anyone actually hung the monitor on the wall, but I don't see any reason why you couldn't. The Computer is built into the monitor, without adding much bulk.

• Compubrick 160
  
• Compubrick SE
  
• Compubrick 6100

• Compubrick 160
  
• Compubrick SE
  
• Compubrick 6100