It's just plain poor design and bad risk assessment too.
There certainly should be some kind of alert when CPU temperature begins to reach a high point before the system freezes. The brick has status lights (Green for on and ok, orange for standby, red for "fault"). It really wouldn't have been hard to put a flashing LED or a buzzer in that triggered before there was real trouble.
According to one of Microsoft's tech note "The power supply may have overheated. The power supply should again work after it cools. Adequate cooling may take several hours. Make sure that the power supply has sufficient ventilation during the cooling period." Several hours?!
Only until people discover the RFID chip in each cell that's hooked to a micro GPS receiver and calls home so that it can be remotely deactivated if your leave the country or violate other terms of the licensing agreement.
The "Luggable" was the first portable to include a trackball, and the Powerbook 100 and its cousins the 140 and 170 were the first laptops in the form factor that has survived.
In 1991 all the other portables had the keyboard at the edge closes to the user. The few machines that were running the primative versions of Windows used a trackball that clipped to the side of the keyboard area and hung out on like an outrigger. They connected to the serial port by cable. If this sounds like and accident in progress, it was.
By pushing the keyboard forward toward the display, Apple created space for the trackball and provided a wrist rest as a side effect. Good industrial design all around.
Uh, more correctly, why is society so anti-males-between-age-10-and-30?
The extreme concentration of crime and other antisocial behavior in that demographic might be relevant.
The US in particular does a lousy job of handling the maturing of its males as shown by a number of measures - including grades, incarceration rate, mortality rate, and vulnerability to military recruiting pitches. However, it's not politically viable to treat them as a vulnerable population. (Not to just pick on the US, the Brits have plenty of trouble with yobs n hoodies, and the French have had very public problems with the Muslem young male population recently)
An 18 and 19 year old pair of chums just got arrested in Northern California for throwing baseball sized rocks from their car window into oncoming traffic while driving home drunk from a casino at 60 mph. One of the victims is still having surgery on his face, being treated for a broken jaw, and has lost an eye. A couple dozen cars were damaged as well. Sorry, but 50 year old women aren't nearly as likely to do crap like this as 10-30 year old males.
In 1985 the Laserwriter sold at $10k. The newly-invented copy centers bought them and started selling walk-in printing services. After inflation and all, the price is pretty comparable. Maybe there's enough market in some places to make a viable business model.
Let's see: 24 month ROI target, need $5k profit a year = $96 per week. Figure about 30% overhead, we want $150 per week in revinue. Given that it can be used for a lot more than laptop etching, it sounds reasonable as an added feature to a copy center or a trophy store.
They violated the Spyware act in California and should be prosecuted for that by the Attorney General once the AG office has done the research on the complaints that have been filed with them. Italy has already filed criminal charges there. None of it seems to have hurt Sony's stock price though.
Nah, old school is CubeWar on a PDP-10, Star Trek on a XDS Sigma 7, and dealing with the dwarf in colossal cave. Your game backups are on paper tape, punch cards, and mag tape reels. Your terminal is a teletype and the graphics are in your imagination.
Actually, industry observers and commentators up until 1990 frequently said that the graphical interface was a bad idea. Check out the press from that time and you'll see arguments that GUI's are too slow, childish, disrespect the expertise of users, and reduce productivity because they take your hands off the keyboard.
And the Intel processors of 1983-86 vintage were too underpowered to handle the overhead of a GUI at an acceptable performance level. Try booting one up in Win 2.0 some time...
BTW, a huge chunk of what we now consider standard interface stuff was invented for the Mac, such as the file interface.
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There certainly should be some kind of alert when CPU temperature begins to reach a high point before the system freezes. The brick has status lights (Green for on and ok, orange for standby, red for "fault"). It really wouldn't have been hard to put a flashing LED or a buzzer in that triggered before there was real trouble.
According to one of Microsoft's tech note "The power supply may have overheated. The power supply should again work after it cools. Adequate cooling may take several hours. Make sure that the power supply has sufficient ventilation during the cooling period." Several hours?!
Only until people discover the RFID chip in each cell that's hooked to a micro GPS receiver and calls home so that it can be remotely deactivated if your leave the country or violate other terms of the licensing agreement.
In 1991 all the other portables had the keyboard at the edge closes to the user. The few machines that were running the primative versions of Windows used a trackball that clipped to the side of the keyboard area and hung out on like an outrigger. They connected to the serial port by cable. If this sounds like and accident in progress, it was.
By pushing the keyboard forward toward the display, Apple created space for the trackball and provided a wrist rest as a side effect. Good industrial design all around.
Uh, more correctly, why is society so anti-males-between-age-10-and-30?
The extreme concentration of crime and other antisocial behavior in that demographic might be relevant.
The US in particular does a lousy job of handling the maturing of its males as shown by a number of measures - including grades, incarceration rate, mortality rate, and vulnerability to military recruiting pitches. However, it's not politically viable to treat them as a vulnerable population. (Not to just pick on the US, the Brits have plenty of trouble with yobs n hoodies, and the French have had very public problems with the Muslem young male population recently)
An 18 and 19 year old pair of chums just got arrested in Northern California for throwing baseball sized rocks from their car window into oncoming traffic while driving home drunk from a casino at 60 mph. One of the victims is still having surgery on his face, being treated for a broken jaw, and has lost an eye. A couple dozen cars were damaged as well. Sorry, but 50 year old women aren't nearly as likely to do crap like this as 10-30 year old males.
Let's see: 24 month ROI target, need $5k profit a year = $96 per week. Figure about 30% overhead, we want $150 per week in revinue. Given that it can be used for a lot more than laptop etching, it sounds reasonable as an added feature to a copy center or a trophy store.
They violated the Spyware act in California and should be prosecuted for that by the Attorney General once the AG office has done the research on the complaints that have been filed with them. Italy has already filed criminal charges there. None of it seems to have hurt Sony's stock price though.
Nah, old school is CubeWar on a PDP-10, Star Trek on a XDS Sigma 7, and dealing with the dwarf in colossal cave. Your game backups are on paper tape, punch cards, and mag tape reels. Your terminal is a teletype and the graphics are in your imagination.
Dedicated hardware - that's hot new shit.
Actually, industry observers and commentators up until 1990 frequently said that the graphical interface was a bad idea. Check out the press from that time and you'll see arguments that GUI's are too slow, childish, disrespect the expertise of users, and reduce productivity because they take your hands off the keyboard.
And the Intel processors of 1983-86 vintage were too underpowered to handle the overhead of a GUI at an acceptable performance level. Try booting one up in Win 2.0 some time...
BTW, a huge chunk of what we now consider standard interface stuff was invented for the Mac, such as the file interface.