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At no time in Macintosh history did they have an industry-standard serial port

Actually, if we're getting pedantic (or historic in this case) the 128K, 512K, and 512KE all sported DB-9 serial ports.

sounds like you're talking about a PPC LCII. It'd be nice. Although I suspect if they did that, people would start questioning, 'if X computer is only $500, then why is Y computer $3500, buy into the whole "macs are much more expensive than PCs" thing', and just buy a pc, rather than get a $800-1000 eMac. i'd buy one, though.

whee.

It would have been nice for you to mention that you're using a Mac, instead of obtusely implying it (8600, BBEdit Lite).

The section of OSX that copying a file involves is not BSD-related, as I understand it. It's Mach. (People who know more about OSX than I do, feel free to pipe up.) The kernel of OSX is not very BSD-based, and most of what you're talking about (HDD access, scheduling) takes place in the kernel. (To be fair, the scheduler that FreeBSD uses was adapted from Mach.)

The 8600 (which was discontinued over a half decade ago, by the way) is not even compatible with OSX. The minimum requirement for OSX is the Beige Power Mac G3. (See Apple's requirements page.) So, I'm guessing you put in a G3 daughterboard. (Find out about the 8600 and available daughterboards at lowendmac.com.) But OSX doesn't support processor upgrade cards. (First paragraph of the requirements page.) Maybe you didn't put in an upgrade card, and are using the mach_kernel for the 604 from the Darwin project like this guy did. Either way, you're still not using a supported system.

So, you're using unsupported hardware, and a BSD-related OS in an operation that's not related to the BSD bits, and using this to say that BSD sucks. Hmmm.

I'm surprised an 8600 w/ daughterboard (which one, by the way? The 233MHz with 512k of cache?) works at all with OSX. As for why it's slow for you, I can only hypothesize, since I'm not a Mac guy. (That's right, anybody can find this stuff out with a quick google search or two!) The G3 upgrade card is going to need an L2 cache enabler. Do you have one installed? Okay, how about this idea. I'm guessing that your old, discontinued, unsupported hardware uses a bus controller (or other critical chip) that is not being programmed optimally by OSX. Why? Because the programmer writing that code knew that the chip wasn't going to be supported!

My advice is to stick to using 9.1 on your 8600. And don't generalize about BSD from your situation; it's an extreme.

Dude, I am absolutely NOT wrong.

"announced 1998.05.06; North American release on 1998.08.15 at $1,299; replaced by Revision B in mid-October 1998"

Apple had no plans to ship until August. Jobs himself said at the intro something to the effect of "while we are announcing it today, it will not be available for sale until August." I clearly remember this, and I wish I could find a video clip of it, but this text of a Don Crabb article posted on usenet will have to suffice.

If you don't believe me, search Google groups for "imac" with a date range of the month of May, 1998. Here's a small thread I found where people question the stated long delay between announcement and shipping.

A three month delay from announcement to shipping is extremely rare, but not unprecedented. And you'll notice that I *also* said in my post that in this case it would not make sense for them to do that because of the bad timing.

Now, please, let's see your proof that the original iMac announced on May 6, 1998, was slated to be shipped immediately.

~Philly

Check this out. Apple sued the hell out of them, so they eventually gave up. (well, not really them, but threatened, through the US government, brazilian exports, so the government made them give up) My professor have one of these machines in a shelf in his room at uni.

That was the Mac IIsi. Ran at 20MHz, but the whole system was rated for 25MHz. Management decided they didn't want it to compete with the IIci. A bit of soldering and a new clock chip, and you have 25% better performance.

(Is it 'overclocking' when it was designed to run at that speed in the first place?)

The problem in Mac-land right now is that while they have superior software (in just about every thing I can imagine) the hardware is so far behind....

• target-mode booting to access a Mac's internal HD. Macs have that options since the first powerbooks (called SCSI Disk Mode at that time). Why is this not possible on an x86 box?
• standard gigabit ethernet on Powerbooks and PowerMacs
• better design on powerbooks
• finally (with notable exceptions) Apple HW lasts longer (it's like buying a German car or washers)

The problem in Mac-land right now is that while they have superior software (in just about every thing I can imagine) the hardware is so far behind....

• target-mode booting to access a Mac's internal HD. Macs have that options since the first powerbooks (called SCSI Disk Mode at that time). Why is this not possible on an x86 box?
• standard gigabit ethernet on Powerbooks and PowerMacs
• better design on powerbooks
• finally (with notable exceptions) Apple HW lasts longer (it's like buying a German car or washers)

Most mac users don't play that many games. Secondly, that claim only holds true for OS 9, OS X has alot of "eye candy" that slows office & non game applications way the hell down, even with a $400 video card.

As for apples older than 12 months old, apple released their 733mhz desktop system in February of 2001... it just took a while for Apple's laptops to break the 700mhz barrier (for marketing reasons). Granted, that model came with a 16 meg video card, but also a 4x AGP bus, so you can pick up a 32 meg card on the cheap these days... which would make the age:performance ratio of the apple about as good as your computer, although you obviously win out on price.

Since you're using my laptop, usually viewed as a lesser peforming computer compared to a traditional desktop at the same speeds, how well would a laptop in the PC world from circa October 2001 fare next to mine? This would be a better comparison.

They made a lot of mistakes when designing it, similar to mistakes made when Michael Spindler wanted ultra-cheap 603-based Macs and had his engineers take an LC-class motherboard and graft a PPC chip to it.

The mistakes on the eMac are thus: the 17" monitor was basically grafted onto an unchanged CRT iMac motherboard and power supply. The iMac had a 15" CRT from day one. Anyone who's worked around computer hardware for any time knows that a 17" CRT monitor sucks more juice and gets hotter than a 15". When you consider that the third-gen CRT iMac lost the fan and was cooled by convection alone (Steve HATES fans in computers) any change in heat production would render such a machine unable to exhaust enough heat to sufficiently cool itself. Also add to this the power draw problem, and you have a recipe for a completely unstable machine that breaks down at the drop of a hat.

A friend of mine fixes Macs for a living. He has to deal with dying eMacs practically every day (he has a few contracts with schools) and detests them.

The eMac is going to wind up in the Road Apple category at Low End Mac eventually. Just watch. Also just watch Apple quietly retire the machine and build another all-in-one Mac for scholastic use.

They made a lot of mistakes when designing it, similar to mistakes made when Michael Spindler wanted ultra-cheap 603-based Macs and had his engineers take an LC-class motherboard and graft a PPC chip to it.

The mistakes on the eMac are thus: the 17" monitor was basically grafted onto an unchanged CRT iMac motherboard and power supply. The iMac had a 15" CRT from day one. Anyone who's worked around computer hardware for any time knows that a 17" CRT monitor sucks more juice and gets hotter than a 15". When you consider that the third-gen CRT iMac lost the fan and was cooled by convection alone (Steve HATES fans in computers) any change in heat production would render such a machine unable to exhaust enough heat to sufficiently cool itself. Also add to this the power draw problem, and you have a recipe for a completely unstable machine that breaks down at the drop of a hat.

A friend of mine fixes Macs for a living. He has to deal with dying eMacs practically every day (he has a few contracts with schools) and detests them.

The eMac is going to wind up in the Road Apple category at Low End Mac eventually. Just watch. Also just watch Apple quietly retire the machine and build another all-in-one Mac for scholastic use.

They made a lot of mistakes when designing it, similar to mistakes made when Michael Spindler wanted ultra-cheap 603-based Macs and had his engineers take an LC-class motherboard and graft a PPC chip to it.

The mistakes on the eMac are thus: the 17" monitor was basically grafted onto an unchanged CRT iMac motherboard and power supply. The iMac had a 15" CRT from day one. Anyone who's worked around computer hardware for any time knows that a 17" CRT monitor sucks more juice and gets hotter than a 15". When you consider that the third-gen CRT iMac lost the fan and was cooled by convection alone (Steve HATES fans in computers) any change in heat production would render such a machine unable to exhaust enough heat to sufficiently cool itself. Also add to this the power draw problem, and you have a recipe for a completely unstable machine that breaks down at the drop of a hat.

A friend of mine fixes Macs for a living. He has to deal with dying eMacs practically every day (he has a few contracts with schools) and detests them.

The eMac is going to wind up in the Road Apple category at Low End Mac eventually. Just watch. Also just watch Apple quietly retire the machine and build another all-in-one Mac for scholastic use.

I will use my I-Book to hack into their systems and upload a virus.

Are you sure it will be compatible? Jeff Goldblum used a Powerbook 5300.

JP

Hi ramen - I guess you're referring to the same point made here.

I don't disagree -- a USB-only mac would have helped spur USB adoption. But Apple was clearly a follower in this case, leveraging the widespread adoption of a royalty-free standard. According to the article itself, USB was already supported by a "vast army of cloners" before the imac came out (the article is dated Aug 98). In other words, Intel and party had been successful at getting motherboard makers to provide USB ports! The device support was just a matter of time.

This Firewire v/s USB article gives a good perspective on the whole issue. While Firewire is the better engineered standard, there were questions about Firewire's power usage and the high license fees being charged by Apple.

All -- Thank you for your polite responses to my original post. Some moderator took a rather dim view of it though - modding me down to zero. :)

clickable link, for those of us who are lazy ;)

As others have pointed out, Apple didn't sell the same machine for 5 years. Here's a useful chart showing the different versions of the G3/CRT iMac. (I think there may have been some slight variations for the educational market, in terms of memory and drives)

Things which remained the same across revisions:

• Shape and size (height and weight changed slightly, I think this was due to CRT changes)
• 15" CRT (actually, I think different CRTs were used, but all were 15")
• USB
• CPU type (various revisions of the G3 processor family)
• Lack of floppy drive
• 10/100 Mbps Ethernet
• 56 kbps modem

• Price (no, it didn't start out as a sub-$1000 machine!)
• color (Bondi blue, fruit flavors [strawberry, orange, lime, blueberry, grape], indigo, ruby, graphite, blue dalmation, flower power, snow)
• speed (started at 233Mhz, finished at 700Mhz)
• memory (32MB ... 256MB)
• hard disk (4GB ... 60GB)
• mouse (they eventually dropped that evil hockey puck but it took them too long to do that...)
• keyboard (changed when the mouse changed, I think)
• video card (Various flavors of ATI Rage cards, from Rage IIc to RAGE Ultra 128)
• IR port .. quietly dropped in Revision C (when the fruit flavors were added)
• internal expansion .. the never-supported "Mezannine" slot was dropped in Revision c)
• Firewire .. introduced to some machines in 1999, but wasn't included with all machines until 2001
• Airport (802.11b) .. slowly added to product line, same as Firewire
• Fan .. Rev. A and Rev. B had fans, the fanless iMac began with Rev. C
• optical drive .. CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, CD-RW of varoius speeds (I don't think the Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) or SuperDrive (DVD-RW/CD-RW) were ever available)

Um, they weren't the *same computer* they sold 5 years ago I'm afraid. I count 20 revisions made to that machine in 5 years. That gives each system a shelf life of about three months!

The thing she just can't learn to deal with, is the "print monitor". When stuff is queued for printing, and then there's an exception (out of paper or something) the OS's printing service pauses and even after you fix the problem at the printer, it does not resume until the user tells it to. She can't get it into her head to bring the print monitor thing to the foreground and tell it to resume. Instead, she tells her app (Claris Works) to print again. And of course, nothing comes out.

I have showed her many times. And she doesn't get it.

Even classic MacOS is too much for some people. If she had something like Windows or Linux, it would be totally impossible.

The venerable macquarium

Apple makes TVs now?

Always did.

"Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 4.3)."

"Math is hard!", sayeth the lameness filter (author).

Apple makes TVs now?

Always did.

"Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 4.3)."

"Math is hard!", sayeth the lameness filter (author).

I managed to get NetBSD run on my old SE/30 awhile back. Well, I guess I don't know about run... more like... limp? Anywho, I found some old 16MB SIMMS and a network card for the machine; I might actually get around to installing them one day when I don't have anything better to do.

Low End Mac has tons of information on maintaining Macs going all the way back to the original SE, Plus, etc. These older little devils might not look like much and the newer machines might look like "dalmations" or "flower power" throwbacks, but they're built like tanks.

I thought this was going to be an article about another flaming PowerBook model. This one should be filed under "It's funny. Laugh!"

Five years it was. According to LowEndMac:

The original iMac "announced 1998.05.06; North American release on 1998.08.15 at $1,299; replaced by Revision B in mid-October 1998"

So it has been a little under five years.

The Blue & White G3, the first professional line Mac without a floppy:

"G3/300 introduced 1999.01.05 at US$1,599; discontinued 1999.06."

So that was only about four years ago.

For a while I was looking to build a FreeBSD box. Being a big Mac fan, I did not see a need for a floppy. It is difficult to find cases that do not basically require a 3.5" floppy drive. I was trying to go legacy-free, but the selection of motherboards was lacking.

I have seen way too many floppies fail over the year. They are good for basic SneakerNets, but can never be relied on for things like archival and for rescue disks.

if you're on the level, LowEndMac is a great resource for this, they've got bag-loads of content on running older systems and pointers/links for where to find good deals on used systems. happy hunting!

ok, ok, so he probably just forgot that it was a Plus or an SE...

...you can buy a used clamshell iBook for just a little bit more...

...you can buy a used clamshell iBook for just a little bit more...

now i'm really lookin forward to installing NetBSD on my Quadra 660av. kudos to NetBSD!

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say the magazine is probably set to sell at $2500, the cost of The Original Macintosh itself.

Remember back in the day (c. 1997-98) when PC's were shipping with 10x-24x CD-ROM Drives and Macs were still shipping with 4x drives?

"Apply Murphy's law" to your mental processes. Yep.

I wrote an article about a *three* screen PowerBook G4 back in November. It actually ran a real operating system with real apps -- okay, it was completely fictional, but that's beside the point. Anne Onymus, Rumor Monger

I am still a mac classic user

Mac Classic

Yeesh!! Get with the times, man!

The Mac Plus had a starting price of $2600, but nevertheless, it didn't cost them a cent to actually engrave those signatures since they were put by the developers right after the mold was made. That's why they're in raised engraving. Also, I believe they only broke that mold after Mac Plusses were out of production, so it was on ALL Mac Pluses.

Dear Grubby,

Please drop by anytime to pick up your complimentary Mac Portable. I'm sure you'll enjoy this state of the art (well, for '89) 'portable' (only 17 pounds).

BR, Steve

People universally hate pop-ups anyway. Low End Mac did an Annoying Web Stuff survey. According to the survey, "98.6% of those surveyed dislike popups and pop-unders, 83.8% strongly dislike them, and over one-third (34.5%) avoid sites with them when they can." That was more annoying to the survey participants than regular ads for gambling and porn!

An ad may grab the viewers attention if it's annoying, but how many of us actually buy products based on annoying ads. I, for one, would avoid GM cars ("nothin' beats nothin'") and AFLAC insurance because of their obnoxious ads *alone*

People universally hate pop-ups anyway. Low End Mac did an Annoying Web Stuff survey. According to the survey, "98.6% of those surveyed dislike popups and pop-unders, 83.8% strongly dislike them, and over one-third (34.5%) avoid sites with them when they can." That was more annoying to the survey participants than regular ads for gambling and porn!

An ad may grab the viewers attention if it's annoying, but how many of us actually buy products based on annoying ads. I, for one, would avoid GM cars ("nothin' beats nothin'") and AFLAC insurance because of their obnoxious ads *alone*

And the NeXT cube was available before that. It is seen as the inspiration for the Mac Cube (and Steve Jobs ran NeXT, too).

Um, sorry, no.

Those suckers didn't even have an FPU.

68 _LC_ 040

http://www.lowendmac.com/quadra/q610.shtml

However, during the latter part of the Spindler era, some truly god-awful PPC Performas came out. This poisoned the Performa name. I'm not sure if Steve killed the Performa designation or his immediate predecessor, but by the time it was killed nobody took the Performa seriously anymore and nobody shed tears over the designation's demise.

Actually there were a few Performas that kicked serious ass in their day. Gotta love that low-slung case. Vroom.

However, during the latter part of the Spindler era, some truly god-awful PPC Performas came out. This poisoned the Performa name. I'm not sure if Steve killed the Performa designation or his immediate predecessor, but by the time it was killed nobody took the Performa seriously anymore and nobody shed tears over the designation's demise.

Actually there were a few Performas that kicked serious ass in their day. Gotta love that low-slung case. Vroom.

However, during the latter part of the Spindler era, some truly god-awful PPC Performas came out. This poisoned the Performa name. I'm not sure if Steve killed the Performa designation or his immediate predecessor, but by the time it was killed nobody took the Performa seriously anymore and nobody shed tears over the designation's demise.

Actually there were a few Performas that kicked serious ass in their day. Gotta love that low-slung case. Vroom.

A dual 1GHz G4 OS X system vs the $300 cheaper dual Athlon 1800+ MP WinXP box, which normally comes with a gig of RAM, but they ripped out half of it so both systems would have the same. Who wins anyway? The MP by about 70% every test.

[533MHz 512MB G4 OS X] / [633MHz 128MB $399 Compaq Celeron WinXP] times: startup 102s/41s...login 19s/6s...launch IE 10s/3s...scrolling a PDF 50s/33s...shutdown 36s/19s.

"Truth is, the G4 is little more than a G3 with a slightly better math section and an internal graphics coprocessor (AltiVec)."

Don't forget this, too.

Here ya go:
http://www.lowendmac.com/imacs/imac-b.shtml

BTW, anyone try consoling into a modern SPARC with USB ports, or are they only for peripherals?

I do just this on a quasi-regular basis; the console is a Rev. D iMac with a KeySpan serial thingy and cu(1) from Taylor UUCP, and the SPARC is a headless Sun Ultra 1 running NetBSD.

You can hang external monitors off of $999 iBooks (as pointed out by others) and the towers if you really cannot imagine being without your 17" monitor. What many people don't realize is that it can be possible to hang a different monitor off your old CRT iMac or the eMac. Why you would want to do this is a different question, since the internal displays are pretty reasonable... I know for sure that the older CRT iMacs had a standard VGA cable buried in there. When a buddy of mine got the first variety of iMac in 1998, we hung a 21" monitor and it drove it very nicely. Of course, it looks like crap since your formerly sleek computer is in pieces, but if you have a nice monitor around, and don't mind a desk that looks like a tornado hit it and a voided warranty, it may be worth doing. The eMac doesn't have to be disassembled to get external video- it has its own little external mini-VGA port. It can only drive external monitors at the same resolution as the internal monitor, though. 17" monitors can be nice, but the eMac display is pretty nice, and the price is pretty good- check out LowEndMac's various pages: eMac deals, flat panel iMac deals and CRT iMac deals and of course Dealmac and the Dealmac basement if you are trying to get a good price.

Wanting the Superdrive definitely cuts down on the opprtunity for a great deal, but I see an eMac refurb G4/800, 256/60/SuperDrive for $1,399 which is pretty impressive for writing DVD stuff.

You can hang external monitors off of $999 iBooks (as pointed out by others) and the towers if you really cannot imagine being without your 17" monitor. What many people don't realize is that it can be possible to hang a different monitor off your old CRT iMac or the eMac. Why you would want to do this is a different question, since the internal displays are pretty reasonable... I know for sure that the older CRT iMacs had a standard VGA cable buried in there. When a buddy of mine got the first variety of iMac in 1998, we hung a 21" monitor and it drove it very nicely. Of course, it looks like crap since your formerly sleek computer is in pieces, but if you have a nice monitor around, and don't mind a desk that looks like a tornado hit it and a voided warranty, it may be worth doing. The eMac doesn't have to be disassembled to get external video- it has its own little external mini-VGA port. It can only drive external monitors at the same resolution as the internal monitor, though. 17" monitors can be nice, but the eMac display is pretty nice, and the price is pretty good- check out LowEndMac's various pages: eMac deals, flat panel iMac deals and CRT iMac deals and of course Dealmac and the Dealmac basement if you are trying to get a good price.

Wanting the Superdrive definitely cuts down on the opprtunity for a great deal, but I see an eMac refurb G4/800, 256/60/SuperDrive for $1,399 which is pretty impressive for writing DVD stuff.

You can hang external monitors off of $999 iBooks (as pointed out by others) and the towers if you really cannot imagine being without your 17" monitor. What many people don't realize is that it can be possible to hang a different monitor off your old CRT iMac or the eMac. Why you would want to do this is a different question, since the internal displays are pretty reasonable... I know for sure that the older CRT iMacs had a standard VGA cable buried in there. When a buddy of mine got the first variety of iMac in 1998, we hung a 21" monitor and it drove it very nicely. Of course, it looks like crap since your formerly sleek computer is in pieces, but if you have a nice monitor around, and don't mind a desk that looks like a tornado hit it and a voided warranty, it may be worth doing. The eMac doesn't have to be disassembled to get external video- it has its own little external mini-VGA port. It can only drive external monitors at the same resolution as the internal monitor, though. 17" monitors can be nice, but the eMac display is pretty nice, and the price is pretty good- check out LowEndMac's various pages: eMac deals, flat panel iMac deals and CRT iMac deals and of course Dealmac and the Dealmac basement if you are trying to get a good price.

Wanting the Superdrive definitely cuts down on the opprtunity for a great deal, but I see an eMac refurb G4/800, 256/60/SuperDrive for $1,399 which is pretty impressive for writing DVD stuff.

Of course, isn't the purpetrator's name tagged to the transaction? You have to have a valid bank account to move funds out of your PayPal account.. wouldn't it just make it that much harder to hide from the authorities if you broke in to someone's account and moved stuff over?

This reminds me of when lowendmac got hit last month (earlier this month.. something like that). It's unfortunate PayPal has "critical mass" or whathaveyou. You'd think that someone big would care, but they can't even be bothered to work with all banks.