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Anything authoritative will be covered by NDA, and Apple will likely not release specs of the Developer Transition Kit, since it doesn't represent a shipping product anyway, and for various other reasons.

But the BIOS version has been posted around publicly on forums; also, note http://macintouch.com/macintel04.html:

MacInTouch Reader
In response to the BIOS statements, the Intel Developer Transition Platform is NOT a "PHOENIX BIOS". PHOENIX is a specific BIOS maker, and this is not a PHOENIX BIOS. It is an Intel BIOS.

Further, it's no mystery how to get into almost any BIOS under the sun: just hold F2 at boot (F2 and alt-enter cover the vast majority of PC BIOSes). However, this means little, since this is merely a developer testing and transition platform only; the developer systems also don't have FireWire 800, or Bluetooth, or AirPort.

Does that mean that final products won't have these? Of course not. The transition platform's BIOS also has floppy support. Does that mean that Intel Macs will have floppy drives? No. The point is that the developer platform does not represent what will - or won't - be in shipping products. To see what Apple will be shipping with Intel processors in a year or two (or longer), look to Intel's roadmap. To see what technologies Apple will include, look to Apple's history and the current products: shipping Intel-based Macs will have all of the Mac features and functionality we have come to depend on.

Further, Apple has not forgotten about the 64-bit marketplace. But let's take this transition one step at a time.

If the late Jef Raskin had anything to do with it, they would; he recalls lobbying for versatile bitmapped displays and not hard-wired fixed width character generators, against Jobs and Wozniak.

Sadly Jef is no longer with us to defend the account, but he left a detailed history, The Mac and Me:

In my 1967 thesis, "The Quick Draw Graphics System," I took issue with the display architecture then in vogue. ... There were only a few CRT terminals at the Penn State computer center, and these could display only letters and symbols, usually in green or white on a black background. Hamstrung by specialized electronics -- in particular a circuit called a "character generator" -- that permitted no other use, they could not display graphics. One display at the center could draw thin, spidery lines on its large screen. With it you could do drawings that now seem crude, annotated by child-like stick-figure lettering.

In this milieu my thesis was radical in suggesting that computer displays should be graphics- rather than character-based. I argued that, by considering characters as just a particular kind of graphics, we could produce whatever fonts we wished, and mix text and drawings with the same freedom as on the drawn or printed page.

[Later, at Apple...]

The other Steve, Steve Jobs, was a delight to talk to about less technical aspects of computers. His enthusiasm and business orientation were exciting. They were just starting on the design of the Apple II, and I tried to convince them that they should employ bit-mapped graphics and not have a character generator, but Woz thought that software couldn't handle the character generation task fast enough and Steve Jobs didn't understand why I thought it so important.

I had a different vision of what a microcomputer should be like, and PARC's programmers and my own work had convinced me that software could do the job. I tried to convince Woz by working out the code to put bit-mapped characters on the screen and calculating timings by counting cycles, but the Steves were not open to the idea.

The concepts I espoused were far from the mainstream of computer design and for all their mold-breaking thinking, Steve and Steve were very strongly conditioned by the minicomputers they had seen.

Ouch. Just be sure to remember the typical FireWire static safety tips

Mitch Stone is quite right to call the "opening" of the IBM PC architecture an urban myth. IBM clearly had no intention of doing so. IBM successfully used litigation techniques to shut down a number of early PC cloners.

However, it is Phoenix and Lloyd's of London, not Compaq, which deserves the credit for first making PC clones possible.

Prior to Phoenix, IBM threw the weight of their enormous legal muscle against anyone who cloned the BIOS in their PC. Phoenix did a clean room design. None of the programmers working on the Phoenix BIOS had ever seen the IBM PC BIOS. In fact, Phoenix went out of their way to hire programmers who had never even worked on the 8088/8086 processor chips used in early IBM PCs.

But that alone might not have sufficed. IBM could have tied them up in legal restraining orders, etc. and watched them go bankrupt while the case inched its way through the US court system.

The real genius, was the Phoenix had a huge legal insurance policy through Lloyd's of London. This gave Phoenix the ability to survive such an attack. As a result IBM didn't sue Phoenix and once the proverbial cat was out of the bag, they didn't sue most other BIOS clone produces unless they were outright copies.

Of course Gates and Microsoft were right there eager to sell DOS and Basic to any clone maker who had an interest.

Macintouch quotes Phil Schiller, an Apple VP as saying, "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."

Well, if he were going without email today, he'd have missed Apple's announcement that they really are going to use Intel chips starting next year...press release available here

Macintouch has a report with a lot more info.

Believe it or not the average mac user is not some slashdot geek type.

The average mac user will not upgrade the stock RAM. This usually results in thrashing when the average user runs word and safari at once. Painful. All the more painful with a slower HD. The average user will also not touch the energy settings. Disk access makes a big difference on these machines (speaking also from experience of upgrading HD and RAM in my pb).

Looking again at the first chart on http://www.macintouch.com/perfpack/comparison.html you can see that the imac is not pulling its weight in CPU-intensive tasks either. Factor in also the fact that the emac is half the price and you have a serious case for buying the emac.

We've had several of these things go bad after 3 to 4 months of use. Apple claims there is no problem with them. Google for it and you'll find lots of unhappy iMac owners:

http://helicon.macbay.de/iMac_problems/iMac.html

http://www.macintouch.com/imacg5part07.html

Reminds me of the defective G3 iBooks...

http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/

Apple refused to admit a problem with those either until they were threatened with a class action lawsuit... then, magically, they admitted the defect and began repairing them... beware of anything from Apple that starts with an 'i'

Until today, the eMac G4 could outperform the iMac G5 due to some low level issues, see http://www.macintouch.com/perfpack/comparison.html .

If it hasn't been fixed, the eMac may still give better bang for buck. If this matters to you then hold off buying until you see an accurate performance comparison.

Another in-depth review, focusing more on features and less on the OS's underbelly is over at MacInTouch... http://www.macintouch.com/tigerreview/index.shtml

Doesn't stacking the mini impede the airflow? http://www.macintouch.com/macmini05.html

"Unless you have a problem with clean room reverse engineering"

If he's got a problem with reverse engineering, he must be buying all of his PCs from IBM right? I mean, wasn't the BIOS reverse engineered?

http://www.macintouch.com/pchistory.html
http://www.macintouch.com/pchistory.html
http://www.jmusheneaux.com/01.htm

Links from a quick google sesssion.

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/

"Unless you have a problem with clean room reverse engineering"

If he's got a problem with reverse engineering, he must be buying all of his PCs from IBM right? I mean, wasn't the BIOS reverse engineered?

http://www.macintouch.com/pchistory.html
http://www.macintouch.com/pchistory.html
http://www.jmusheneaux.com/01.htm

Links from a quick google sesssion.

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/

are we sure at this point that Jack Campbell doesn't run CherryOS?

It's highly debatable whether you could call it "pure 64-bit". A description of the implementation from here:

Also, the Windows NT implementation on the Alpha was not really true 64 bit, but used a less ambitious system called VLM to allow access to more memory than 32 bit system. Here's a quote from Microsoft about it:

"As you can see, the VLM APIs don't constitute true 64-bit computing. Sure, you can allocate and use this memory if it's physically present, meaning that virtual memory doesn't work with these addresses. But 99.44 percent of the Win32 API can't work with addresses above 4GB, so it's just you and your 64-bit pointers. Think of it as frontier territory with no newspapers, running water, or phone lines."

Do you work for Symantec? Is there a reason you're trying to defame Jack without providing any evidence for your

I don't work for Symantec, and I'm not "defaming" Jack. He's earned his infamy all by himself. He's a self-admitted convicted felon, and he's been playing fast and loose in the Mac community for years.

Here's that link, once again, since you apparently didn't see it:

Jack Cambell

named Switchback which infected OSX Macs, but nobody noticed it.

There are others such as Renepo.B
MacOS MW2004 Trojan, MP3 Concept, Opener, and a sound driver virus.

I think clearly the only virus myth about OSX, is the myth that OSX has no viruses that can infect it. Apparently there are at least several examples of OSX viruses, and that number seems to grow. It may even double every year.

I've always felt that using a computer without virus protection was like having unprotected sex without a condom with multiple partners. Back in the old days, when they used to say that the Commodore Amiga had no viruses, and that only MS-DOS suffered from viruses, Amigas got their own viruses that infected their systems. Usually it was one of those Amiga demo programs that people downloaded from BBSes to show off the Amiga's graphics and sound. Someone would infect it with a virus and pass it around. Amiga users felt that the Amiga virus was a myth, and many got hit. Now I see the same thing happen for OSX, only OSX is on the Internet and is subject to more danagers than the BBS world once offered.

So yes, the facts speak for Symantec, that OSX viruses exist, and possibly they could grow in number.

This bone-headed stunt of offering a contest to virus infect two Macs only shows how gullable people are. It was a phoney contest.

Jack Cambell

I got jacked by jackwhispers.

Jack Campbell, who is behind this, has been behind a number of rather dubious projects. There's a page about him at Macintouch http://www.macintouch.com/mactable.html.

This is the notorious Jack Campbell, one of the shadiest characters around. It's undoubtedly a publicity stunt for his business. What a jerk.

Citation?

The AutoStart 9805 Worm for one.


And define many. To some, a few dozen is many.

The last count I saw there were over 50 unique virsues/worms that infected macos. None that infect OSX however.

David Coursey writes for eWeek about the lack of Mac OS X malware: How do I know there are no Mac OS X viruses and malware out there? Because the Mac product manager of one of the major security software companies told me so. And when people tell me I don't need their product, I usually take them at their word. I won't identify the person since he thought he was talking to me for a book project, but people at Apple were happy to confirm this to me. They don't put it in their advertising for obvious reasons.

Um...yeah. Can you say "Oops"? Now they've responded with some vague fears, but that's just to stir up some sales, as everyone has already guessed.

Next anti-virus companies will start writing their own viruses in order to drive up sales. Sheesh.

• c. You agree that your purchase of Products constitutes your acceptance of and agreement to use such Products solely in accordance with the Usage Rules, and that any other use of the Products may constitute a copyright infringement. The security technology is an inseparable part of the Products. The Usage Rules shall govern your rights with respect to the Products, in addition to any other terms or rules that may have been established between you and another party.
• Apple reserves the right to modify the Usage Rules at any time.
  
  d. You acknowledge that some aspects of the Service, Products, and administering of the Usage Rules entails the ongoing involvement of Apple. Accordingly, in the event that Apple changes any part of the Service or discontinues the Service, which Apple may do at its election, you acknowledge that you may no longer be able to use Products to the same extent as prior to such change or discontinuation, and that Apple shall have no liability to you in such case

In short... you don't own it. At least, not in the shiny plastic disks kind of way.

Also worth noting: The last update of the iTunes application limits you to five connections per day when sharing playlists. The update previous to that disabled the application's ability to get CD track names on songs ripped with applications other than iTunes.

It's sad that Apple feels the need to hobble one of its finest applications for its core market of home users because the RIAA's panties are in a bunch.

*cring* I'm just guessing here, but you don't really want to run macwrite, right? You have old files in macwrite format that need to be saved? If so, you might find some handy information at Macintouch. That doesn't help you get them off the floppy, but you could just email them from a floppy equipped pc, no?

"Not if you're, like my mom's friend, an average (read: computer-illiterate and rich) mac consumer."

That sounds more like a computer-phobia thing. Once she's settled in though, you'll be glad she has one. No monthly calls for spyware/virus removal. :-)

"Or ir you're, like me (read mac-illiterate and poor) not intimately familiar with the ins and outs of osx"

Stick with it. You'll like it once you get the gist. Want to flip your mom's friend out for a second? Just hold down control-option-apple and press 8. Then say "Oh crap!! I think I broke it!" Repeat the key sequence to return to normal ;-)

"much less that quicktime plays CDs..."

Well *it can be done* but I wouldn't recommend it :-) 'Bare bones' meaning it plays the songs like individual sound files. You can hear the tunes, but it's certainly a less than perfect experience. If you just detest iTunes for one reason or another, I'd check into one of the shareware/freeware players available at versiontracker.com. Definitely give iTunes a chance though. It really does everything you could ask of it, and there are no gotchas in the application's EULA for regular use.

"There's no good reason for that."

I believe the main reason iTunes has a separate EULA is that it makes use of services from Kerbango, Gracenote, etc. Rather than force you to agree to those terms with the OS install, it's limited to the only app that makes use of those services. Minor annoyance, sure, but if Gracenote decides to change their license to "All your base are belong to us." then you aren't forced to scrap the system, just iTunes :-)

Not that it would ever happen in the first place, but I think keeping those things out of the main system EULA is a good thing. That same philosophy keeps the DRM clause out of iTunes.app if don't want to buy anything from iTMS. Compare that with Microsoft, who has a DRM clause right there in the Win XP EULA. I will never use Windows, because I cannot agree to their EULA's terms.

For Mac users, MacInTouch has info about these services as well as info about US and Canadian tax software for the Mac.

Just to echo what's already been said: the standard hard drive failure rate is less than 1%. Even the evil Deathstars, one of which (75GXP) took out a lot of my music, writing, and email (didn't recognize the warnings), still had a failure rate below 30%, which while utterly unacceptable, is still not the kind of failure rate you're talking about among multiple manufactures. Unless you're installing hundreds of hard drives a year, the kind of failure rates you're talking about are absurd and indicative of some other problem. My WD1200 has been humming along, problem free, since I installed it to replace the Deathstar, along with an ATA card to get around the bad ATA controller chips on the Rev 0 B&W (whole other story).

Then the more savvy will begin to realize that the G4 is bottlenecked by its slow bus speed, and there'll be a lot of pissed off people having spent money on a computer that, even by Apple's own standards, is outdated.

It hardly makes sense to criticize a budget model for not having the latest state-of-the-art processor. Apple certainly is not treating the G4 as outdated. In practice, the G4 is a good performer. It is included in all of Apple's iBooks and Powerbooks as well as in the eMac. benchmarks put it pretty squarely in the middle of the pack as far as Apple's offerings go, and not that far below the G5 models.

There was also the ping of death that Apple just simply ignored for a couple of years. And when they finally fixed it in System 8, it was a $75 "upgrade".

Lets also not forget about 4 new vunerabilities that came out last week. These were discovered back in June 2004.

Blind faith of apple uses amazes me, apple loves to screw over its customers. From having my macplus burn out its power supply($300) because apple was too cheap to install a fan, to not providing upgrade paths for any of their machines even though they had a fricking slot. Luckily 3rd parties stepped in with upgrade daughter cards. Or when apple decided to switch to PPC, leaving everyone else who bought 680xxx mac screwed. Then doing same thing when going over to OSX, screwing customers that had legacy apps to run in slow/unstable emulated mode.

You know what I can do with my PC today? Use software that was written back in the early 90s. The other day I was playing "XCOM planetary defense" on my PC, game I used to be envious of pc users back when I was apple fanatic. Luckily the koolaid wore off and switching over to PC has my made my wallet fatter. And upgrade means simply buying a processor or a new video card.

Not in terms of (lack of) success, but rather the Mac mini has all of the design features that made the Cube nice - lack of a fan, and a small form factor.

True it's not as expandible, but it solves the Cube issues in that it is cheap and fairly powerful (apart from the slow HD, which I iamgine you could rectify a bit with a nice 5200RPM model).

After seeing those results a friend of mine is thinking about a Mac mini over an iMac G5!

Without a built-in CD/DVD drive? As underpowered as it is? I just can't see that as a mainstream desktop computer.

It comes with a CD-R burner by default, BTO option of a DVD writer! You are confusing the Mac mini with the frankenstein the article spoke of.

Furthermore when you speak of it being "underpowered" you do not know what you are talking about. I was doing DV editing and Photoshop work just fine on a 667MHz Powerbook. Furthermore, check out this performance comparison of various Macs, including both Mac minis - on default settings the Mac mini outpaces the new iMac G5 for some tasks! It's only constraint is really IO, having a slower laptop disc. The G5's get a lot of press but the G4 was a pretty good chip as well. And again it's going to be a bit faster but far more cheaper than any Mac laptop.

For most things people do everyday, the Mac mini is more than enough computer.

As far as RAM and internal drives being upgraded... Yeah, you can, but you void your warranty and it takes two putty knives and some good luck to open the case. Not exactly what I would call easy.

According to several websites opening a Mac Mini and replacing the RAM does not void your warranty unless you break it while doing so. However, Apple provides a list of what is user-servicable on all there computers. Unfortunately, the Mac Mini is not on that list yet.

According to this (second paragraph), nothing's supposed to be placed on top of the box. Pressure on the top may prevent a CD or DVD from being ejected.

You can, however, use the Mac mini on its side.

Actually, Apple says not to do that.

I suspect it's mostly a wireless issue, and if you're building a mini-cluster, you'd probably rather use Ethernet to connect them anyway, and you probably won't be using Bluetooth. Either way, at least the top machine would have antenna access, so if you absolutely needed BT/802.11 you could have one of them do wireless and relay to the rest over Ethernet.

p

And here's a bunch of performance benchmarks pitting the Mac mini against a range of other current Macs--not just abstract numbers but real-world tasks (think "17 Meg file"). I wonder how PCs stack up, particularly with Cinebench and the iTunes rip test...

However, the mini-Mac is not a cpu, and doesn't use a G5. But from recent testing, it's close enuf for mundane purposes.

The weakest links I see are the notebook hard drive (I'm guessing the Cube fiasco prevented them (politically) from a slightly different form factor with a "real" HD), and they could have spent the extra buck and added a second Firewire port.

Looking at the mini-Mac as a computer system, rather than as a cpu, I'm hard pressed to come up with a single comparable product (and yes, I include the operating system in the context of "computer system") anywhere else in the marketplace, While it would be nice to see an x86 "Cube" with a more substantial 3.5" HD quietly sporting an AMD64 cpu, Firewire (USB2 has about half the throughput for sustained data transfer), USB2, and 802.11_+Bluetooth capability, it ain't gonna happen -- except as some bizarre sort of artificial fireplace log, merrily heating the room.

Due to the "small AND quiet" constraints I have imposed on my definition of this market niche, you're going to be looking at an Intel-based cpu, probably the recently announced Sonoma Centrino, which has a couple of low-power variants (low power means less heat to dissipate) of adequate performance.

If Intel would mass-market a Sonoma set-top box with 802.11_, Firewire (connect to camcorders and external HDs), a BT keyboard+mouse/trackball, BT media remote, component video, DVI, and HD tuner + disc player (HD disk burning is not really necessary for the consumer market, IMHO), THEN there would be some SIGNIFICANT competition in this (very large) market niche.

But I don't see this happening anytime soon for two reasons:

Intel's pathological fear of Firewire will make it push USB2 and miss the camcorder video crowd

Where are they gonna get software to match OS X and iLife? From Microsoft (and still be cheap)? Linux-based OS and GUI solutions are feasible, but where are the INTEGRATED, easy-to-use consumer apps for Linux?

This should give you a pretty good idea of how current consumer-level Mac systems stack up to each other:

Macintouch Performance Comparison

Basically, the Mac mini is as fast as or faster than every consumer Mac except the iMac G5, and the iMac G5 only wins on a few specific tasks. For the money, there's no question but what the mini is the fastest Mac there is.

p

You're optimistic about the number of Linux machines that might be affected. This was discussing email, not download.

Erm... --> "I think I might write some OSX and maybe Linux malware and email it to the MyDoom authors to include in their next release."

i.e. the next time a MyDoom email arrives, it has three attachments. One for Windows, One for OSX and one for other UNIXs. Mark my words - multi platform malware is only a meme away. As more "regular user type" people start switching to other platforms we WILL see malware arriving by email targeting those users. By far the simplest way of doing this is to email them several flavours of said malware, to be sure that they will get one to run on their platform. Ask yourself this - what is to stop MyDoom from including (along with the PC payload) payload code for Mac OSX and simply asking the user to click both attachments? Why not include bash script and hit all UNIXs? All you have to do is edit login scripts to make sure things start at runtime. If the user knows an admin password, all the better. (Incidentally show me *one* OSX user who doesn't run their own Mac using a local admin account - the default behaviour).

Imagine a school that switches to any form of UNIX - these workstations are going to be used by the normal people for normal stuff like writing assignments / checking email / browsing the web - the email arrives - Hey kids! FREE XXX PORNO!! BYPASS YOUR FIREWALLS! Run this script! - have some attached bash script that could using a variety of methods compile code on the box (or simply download it or get it from a compromised machine) and hey presto - instant UNIX virus / worm. Hell you could simply write it in Python or PHP or even PERL - would run on anything. All you have to do is tell the user how to copy it into a shell and press return under the guise of giving them pr0n.

NEVER underestimate the power of a free pr0n promise on a male adolescent who seriously doesn't give a shit about school computers.

Indeed. Check out what the folks at the Apple booth told Henry Norr over on the MacInTouch website. Take home message was "doing it yourself does not void the warranty unless you damage something."

This simply isn't true. I'll let Henry Norr, veteran Mac journalist at http://www.macintouch.com/mwsf2005notebook.html/, tell it like it is:

This has been Apple's policy for donkey years.

According to Henry Norr's report on Macintouch http://www.macintouch.com/mwsf2005notebook.html
Upgrading the memory doesn't void your warranty.
I'll be waiting for more official confirmation, but it sounds like it may be the case that only issues directly caused by the memory upgrade won't be covered if you add RAM yourself.

"I went back to the booth later and got a little more info on upgrading the Mac Mini.

Apple "does not recommend" that users upgrade the memory themselves - you're supposed to have a service provider do it if you want to add more after purchase - but doing it yourself does not void the warranty unless you damage something. A booth person told me the memory slot is easily accessible once you get the case open."

Yes, Apple has wised up; happened quite a while ago. This has been mentioned at a few sites (here's one: http://www.macintouch.com/mwsf2005notebook.html) but merely installing RAM (or whatever) in your Mac doesn't void your warranty -- breaking your Mac in the process does. This has been Apple's policy for over ten years.

The vast majority of product warranties, regardless of product type, only protect against defects in design or manufacturing. Manufacturers routinely discourage consumer fixes by encouraging all servicing be done by qualified technichians. Apple is hardly special.

No one's mentioned this, but recent tests show the 1.25 G4 eMac keeping up (very capably) to the new G5 iMac. Let's give the eMac a little more credit than a "thin client".

I have to agree here. PCMag is full of it. If you look at the eMac benchmarks posted over at Macintouch just yesterday, you'll notice it has surprisingly good performance. This is likely something John Dvorak threw in there to attract angry Mac zealots. It's his M.O.: Piss off Mac fans to increase ad revenue.

Problem with that is that a lot of spyware is installed on a PC with the user's approval - nay, the user's help. The nifty screensaver, the "downloader helper", the pretty thing that dances across the screen.

There was recently news of a malware package for OS X but it seemed to require full user installation!

Malware like that doesn't often target the Mac, I believe, because of low numbers of machines to hit. If we increase in numbers, that may change. While we are probably safe from automatically spreading worms and viruses, never underestimate the stupidity of the user.

IMPORTANT: The contents of this email and attachments are confidential and may be subject to legal privilege and/or protected by copyright. Copying or communicating any part of it to others is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient you must not use, copy, distribute or rely on this email and should please return it immediately or notify us by telephone. While we take every reasonable precaution to screen out computer viruses from emails, attachments to this email may contain such viruses. We cannot accept liability for loss or damage resulting from such viruses. We recommend you carry out your own virus checks.

Want a new mouse? I highly recommend http://www.macmice.com/themouse.html. Keeps with the good lucks of your Apple and had 2 buttons and a scroll wheel. I know you want a solution out of the box, but since Apple is not going to do it, find your solution in this box.

This post is not a paid advertisment.

Sorry, I try to avoid doing business with well known con men. Which, by the way, brings your disclaimer into question. If you're not really getting paid, what is your connection to MacMice and/or Jack Cambell? Or do you mean that MacMice didn't pay slashdot for advertising?

Have you actually seen the new iMac G5? There are quite a few items you can replace yourself if you want -- with an amazing level of ease. As Macintouch said, "With the iMac G5, Apple has written a new chapter in computer accessibility. You simply lay it face-down on a flat surface covered with a cotton cloth, unscrew three captive Phillips-head screws, and tilt off the back with its integral stand. You then have complete, unfettered access to the entire computer, and it's very easy to add an AirPort card or upgrade memory. The hard drive is right there, too, along with the rest of the components. Apple seems to be setting up a new service system that encourages customers to do many of their own repairs."

You can't upgrade the processor (well, not yet -- look out for third parties to figure it out, like they always do) but right out of the box, you can upgrade most everything that you might want to upgrade.

Yes. In fact, a worm that spread almost exclusively by CD, the AutoStart 9805 Worm, was basically the only real worm threat on the Mac for that particular year, and IIRC even managed to get onto a couple of magazne CDs.