Category: Old Mac of the Month

This month’s post is by my friend Thomas Brand. Thomas writes at Egg Freckles, and is running in the St. Jude Marathon on my son’s team. You can learn more and donate here.

---

The Quadra 605 was the Power Macintosh Cube of the Quadra line. A miniature 32-bit workstation, with limited expandability but powerful specs. Like the Cube it came in a low-profile case that was never used again on any Mac. Unlike the Cube, it was available for a low-price almost anyone could afford. At $900 USD, the 605 was the Quadra for the rest of us.

Continue reading ⇢

This month’s entry is written by Jared Sorge. Jared’s been a Mac user since 1st grade and sold them from 1999–2003 for an Authorized Reseller in the Seattle area. Currently he’s a developer of FileMaker and iOS apps. You can find him on Twitter and ADN as @jsorge, or at his blog over at jsorge.net.

---

image via Apple PR

In January 2001, Apple brought out the Titanium PowerBook G4. This was a landmark introduction that would influence generations of designs across the PC industry (and still holds up well today).

Continue reading ⇢

This Old Mac of the Month entry is written by Brian Ashe, a Jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none when it comes to computers, networking, web app development, hardware, and design of all kinds. His website is perpetually coming soon and he neither tweets nor blogs but he loves hearing from strangers.

---

image courtesy of Apple PR

As Steve Jobs said in an oft-quoted interview with Newsweek in 2004, “At the critical juncture in the late ’80s, when [Apple] should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre.”

Continue reading ⇢

This month’s post is by Jordan Merrick, a freelance writer and web designer who runs Sparsebundle, a UK-based blog about technology, Apple, web design, video games.

---

This year celebrates the fifteenth anniversary of the iMac. You’d think that if we looked over the lineage of the iMac, we’d see a number of major design changes as time went on. But that’s not the case and, in fact, since the introduction of the iMac in 1998 it has had only two major design changes. Sure, it’s had a coat of paint, a change of clothes and it’s gotten bigger whilst losing weight, but the fundamental form factor of the iMac that we see today has been unchanged for almost ten years, a chinned display with (up until recently) a side-mounted optical drive. It’s a form factor that owes its beginnings to the iMac G5.

Continue reading ⇢

Linus Edwards is a writer who hails from Pennsylvania and has been a lifelong Apple user. You can check out his blog VintageZen and follow him on twitter at VintageZen66.

---

If you lined up every laptop computer made in the last twenty years end to end, one would glaringly stand out from all the others, Apple’s original iBook. While the other laptops would mostly be monotone colors in rectangular shapes, the iBook was brightly colored and in a distinctive clamshell shape. The shape was so outside the norm that some came to refer to it as the ‘Toilet Seat Mac.’ It looked radically different because it was based upon Apple’s other radically different computer, the iMac.

Continue reading ⇢

This month’s Old Mac of the Month submission is by Thomas Brand, writer of Egg Freckles. Thomas is a great guy, a lover of old technology and one heck of a writer. If you don’t read his site, shame on you.

---

Before the MacBook Air, before the 12 inch PowerBook G4, and long before anyone heard the term NetBook, there was a small light and powerful machine released by Apple Computer Inc. Developed during Apple’s troubled years, this portable computer was the last of its kind. A sub notebook that weighed only 4.4 pounds, when most laptops weighed nearly twice as much. Powerful enough to work on its own without the added complexity of an optional dock, this machine boasted its speed with codenames like Comet, and Mighty Cat. Manufactured by Apple’s original arch nemesis IBM, this laptop returned the PowerBook line back to its roots, with a form factor inspired by the legendary PowerBook 100. Big in Japan, this powerful portable machine would gain a cult following of its very own, and outlive a death sentence from Steve Jobs by selling for another seven months.

Continue reading ⇢

This month’s submission is by Scott Smith, a professional nerd from California, which seems radical.

---

I have been using Macs my entire life. As long as I can remember, from when my Dad bought a Macintosh Plus in the year I was born, there have only been Macs in the Smith Family House. Even though I am 25 years old, I would consider myself an old-time Mac user going back to System 6. However, it wasn’t really until 1993 that I realized the potential of what a computer could offer.

Continue reading ⇢

Will Hopkins is a budding IT specialist. You can find him on Tumblr and Twitter as @willjhopkins.

---

The first computer I remember using was a beige box with a small black-and-white monitor and a floppy drive like a mouth, lop-sided with a thumb indent. It was a Mac Plus, and I still have it.

My first Mac was our family computer, originally intended for doing taxes and the occasional batch of word processing or spreadsheet ninjary for work. Of course, we also had a floppy disk with Space Invaders, Wizard’s Fire, and (my favorite) Brickle.

Continue reading ⇢

K.H. Schumann lives in Bonn (near Cologne), Germany, where he tortures students with his desperate attempts to teach them penal law (or drives his research fellows nuts with his ideas of streamlining their workflow) at the local university. He just started his blog ausersperspective.com a few weeks ago and is still figuring out how to share his love for and thoughts about technology with the rest of the world. If You like his writing here, You would make his day with a comment. Or just follow him and his blog on Twitter @sillyhandle.

Continue reading ⇢

This month’s entry is written by John C. Vieira. He’s a copywriter living in Portland, Oregon. It’s very important that you read his blog at jcv.me and follow him on twitter @thelegendofjohn. Seriously, his self-esteem is directly tied to his internet popularity.

---

What does it mean to be the last of your kind?

The beige Power Macintosh G3 knows. It was the last beige Macintosh. It looked like every Power Mac before it but it was top of the line and it came with that ad campaign where a snail was carrying a Pentium II processor on its shell. It was the first computer to use the G3—the third generation of PowerPC processors. It could perform just as well and sometimes better, than its immediate, supposedly superior and certainly more notorious, replacement.

Continue reading ⇢

This month’s entry is by Devir Kahn. He writes a site named “The Geek Companion”, hails from New York State and enjoys long walks on the beach.

---

“You should really buy some Apple stock,” he said.

He was my friend’s oldest brother. Dark hair and rather tall. “It’s only about 60 bucks and that number is only going up.” He was talking to my friend’s other brother whom, at the time, was trying to convince me how much better the Mac was than the PC. They were both rather obsessed with computers, but I wasn’t buying it.

Continue reading ⇢

Editor’s Note: This month’s submission is written by Jeff Geerling. He writes a blog named Life is Prayer and hails from just north of me, up in St. Louis, MO. If you’d like to share about an old Mac that made a difference in your life, get in touch.

---

Imagine a time when computing was quickly becoming mainstream; computers with graphical user interfaces were becoming the norm, and expensive Macs were not doing entirely well in the market. Early Windows-based computers were obtrusive, buggy, and required more time setting IRQs and swapping hard drive ribbon cables than they offered uninterrupted uptime.

Continue reading ⇢