Category: Guest Post

Editor’s Note: I’m starting a new series named “Old Mac of the Month.” To help get things started, my buddy Kevin Lipe wrote up this piece about the Performa 578.

The Setup

Back in the bad old days of Apple, there were a lot of bad decisions being made about the Apple product line. What had in 1990 been the Macintosh SE, the Macintosh Plus, the Macintosh Portable, and the Macintosh II had ballooned into all kinds of different Macs for every price range. The “low cost” series were still the LC’s, the LC 550 and the LC 575. The powerhouse multimedia machines were the Quadras, the Centris series were the “business” machines, the Newton was a weird handheld thing that sort-of recognized handwriting, and PowerPC was on the horizon but not yet public. These were the days of System 7.5, when extensions were extensions and men were men.

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Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Marilyn Halpin. She and her husband run mac-fusion, an Apple-Authorized Service Provider in Signal Hill, CA. As such, she knows all about Apple support in the realms of education and business.

Yesterday’s announcement of Lion and Lion Server being only available in the Mac App Store made me cringe. Not because I will no longer be able to sell it. Not because I will lose what tiny bit of profit there was on it. Not because I have a love of physical DVD media. Not because you have to be on Snow Leopard to have this option.¹ I cringe because of how this shift to the Mac App Store works in the corporate world. As of today there isn’t a great way to deploy apps that are available in the Mac or iOS App stores. If you have 50 users that need FileMaker Go I can’t just buy a volume license of it and push it to their iPhones and iPads. I can’t use one Apple ID to manage 50 computers and apps that are only available through the Mac App Store. While there are several work arounds, none of them are optimal:

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Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by friend Kevin Lipe, after a discussion over beer and pizza about writing on the Mac, and how it has changed over the years. Longtime reader may remember that Kevin is the guy I bought this domain name from. Kevin is a native Memphian, a musician and a great writer.

The First Cut is the Deepest

The first word processor I ever used seriously for any amount of time was ClarisWorks 2.1. We had a Performa 578 running System 7.5.5, and ClarisWorks was all I had. I spent hour after hour writing “books” — usually twenty pages or so of fiction, or, well, a seven-year-old’s idea of fiction — and printing them out, reading them to my parents and to myself and to anyone else who would listen. I was a writer, the world’s youngest important author. I knew how to do everything ClarisWorks could do. I even tried to wrap my head around Publishers, which were a weird feature I still don’t understand.

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Editor’s Note: This is written by a friend of mine, Caitlin Woodward, who spent countless hours trying to find an iPad 2 here in Memphis.

I’m that person who picked out a specific model. Looking for a black 32GB AT&T. My dad wants the same model.

It seems like AT&T are the popular ones. On launch day, the first thing they ran out of was AT&T ones, about a dozen people in front of me. Right then, I ordered one from Apple.com, it said it was going to ship Apr 1, deliver by Apr 6. Talked to my dad a short bit after that, he stopped at the Apple Store in Oklahoma City to see if they happened to have anything, but they only had a few tickets left, all were Verizon.

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Editors Note: This post is written by Matthew Hedgepeth, a guy I’ve known for a long time. He graduates in May from the University of Memphis with a MIS degree and a minor in finance. He’s about to get married, and works for me at the Salvation Army. He is far more qualified to talk about money than I am.

When I awoke this morning hearing the news every one else heard about Steve Jobs taking another medical leave of absence I jumped to two different conclusions.

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