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So this would still be the wedge shaped iMac, not the desk lamp thing with the semi-spherical base, which I see came out in 2002. I got the latter at work around then, at which point I went to MacOS X.

I'd been using a 9100 before that, but some time during MacOS 8 I couldn't stand it any more and upgraded the CPU to a 604 so I could run BeOS on it, and thus passed right over MacOS 9. The hype around MacOS X was sort of appalling, but Berkeley UNIX with a working integrated graphic environment, that was indeed a huge step forward, as long as someone else is doing the Cocoa programming. Just the idea of running classic MacOS is kind of horrifying, even without MSIE on top of that.

Donn wrote:So this would still be the wedge shaped iMac, not the desk lamp thing with the semi-spherical base, which I see came out in 2002. I got the latter at work around then, at which point I went to MacOS X.

"Desk Lamp Thing" = "Lollipop Mac" in True Believer's parlance. One of these was the first computer my brother purchased for his 'entire family' and was great for about six years until he replaced it with a 23" iMac. The Lollipop Mac has been placed on a shelf in the kitchen where it is used to access online recipes and the like as well as lightweight information gathering. Last year, we were considering taking out the guts and replacing them with a Mac mini which could fit into the form factor which really worked for them, effectively creating an up-to-date computer. However, Good Old Apple made the monitor on the Lollipop incompatible with anything but the factory iMac motherboard interface... So, it remains and will until it blows up or something. The PS went out two years ago but a replacement was found on eBay for $12.

I never used the BeOS or even looked at it. Some friends were rabid about it before and after its introduction but always in combination with the BeBox hardware. The combination was supposed to be the benefit of moving to Be. I really like Mac OS X also. In the 1990-95 time period, I was doing a fair amount of work with Un*x running a web server and a mail server using NetBSD mac68k on a creaky old (but very effective) Mac Iici so getting new hardware to run the Un*x OS with a very Mac-like interface was a welcome thing. (I have been using the Mac OS since System 6 and stopped arguing the OS wars a very long time ago.)

I got the hardware too, but really it ran better on the 9100+PPC604. Dual 603e were cool and at the time BeOS ran them like nothing else could, but they had no cache, I guess because of multiple CPUs gets a lot more complex when they're cached, and one 604 with cache gets more done than two 603e without.

This was the era when Apple was happy to have its hardware cloned, and some of the cloners were agreeable to shipping a BeOS install CD with their hardware - UMAX maybe, Daystar, etc. Daystar I think I remember in particular had a machine that was very competitive with anything Apple had - and it would run BeOS at an additional advantage that some people saw as kind of humiliating to Apple. That didn't last long, as Jobs showed up and closed subsequent hardware specs to outsiders. But when it was time to desert the long-sinking MacOS ship, Apple reportedly talked to Be about using BeOS. In some respects a similar concept: POSIX 1003.1 compliant, responsive graphic interface but also very manageable from a terminal window, UNIX shell environment. But a single integrated system, not a constellation of subsystems communicating through a big Mach kernel. Doesn't seem like much now, but in the mid-'90s it was something. You just couldn't get software - the big names don't want to port their stuff to a lot of platforms without a big prospective customer base, and the big prospective customer base isn't going to come on board without the software, so 95% of us end up with Microsoft Windows, and 0.005% of us run BeOS.

Donn wrote:I got the hardware too, but really it ran better on the 9100+PPC604. Dual 603e were cool and at the time BeOS ran them like nothing else could, but they had no cache, I guess because of multiple CPUs gets a lot more complex when they're cached, and one 604 with cache gets more done than two 603e without.

This was the era when Apple was happy to have its hardware cloned, and some of the cloners were agreeable to shipping a BeOS install CD with their hardware - UMAX maybe, Daystar, etc. Daystar I think I remember in particular had a machine that was very competitive with anything Apple had - and it would run BeOS at an additional advantage that some people saw as kind of humiliating to Apple. That didn't last long, as Jobs showed up and closed subsequent hardware specs to outsiders. But when it was time to desert the long-sinking MacOS ship, Apple reportedly talked to Be about using BeOS. In some respects a similar concept: POSIX 1003.1 compliant, responsive graphic interface but also very manageable from a terminal window, UNIX shell environment. But a single integrated system, not a constellation of subsystems communicating through a big Mach kernel. Doesn't seem like much now, but in the mid-'90s it was something.

I do remember those days. MacOS licensed to other vendors was a "Big Thing". I remember the laptops which an outside firm marketed before the "Mac Portable" which needed the ROM chips from an SE or a Plus to work. Road warriors of the day when to long lengths to get MacOS on a laptop. I don't know much about BeOS so thanks for giving me a thumbnail description. Interesting that it was under consideration for the "New Mac OS" The developments would have been interesting. (And then a kid in Finland threw a monkey wrench into the whole thing. Also interesting that Android is a spin-off from Linux and dominates the phone/tablet market. I have an Android tablet. It was $75 on clearance and, even though an iPad is a little more elegant, the Android hasn't crashed or weirded out because something I did.)

[quote="Donn"}You just couldn't get software - the big names don't want to port their stuff to a lot of platforms without a big prospective customer base, and the big prospective customer base isn't going to come on board without the software, so 95% of us end up with Microsoft Windows, and 0.005% of us run BeOS.[/quote]

Software drives hardware and, if the software you must use is for an OS which doesn't run on your hardware, you choose different hardware.
I'm not crazy about Windows but, when I have to, I think I can get as much out of it that can be got. Or so I would like to think so. For the vast majority of computer users, if the boss is going to put it on your desk and pay you to use it, you are fine. When you buy something for home, you buy the same kind because you know it.

Jeff "back to practicing, a concert is coming up" Benedict

I liked the "original" form factor of a Mac, too. The SE/30 was a heck of a box. Great server. And for whatever it is you do with it.

You have more old crap around the house than I do.

Hm, SE30? ...

wikipedia wrote:In the naming scheme used at that time, Apple indicated the presence of a 68030 processor by adding the letter "x" to a model's name, but when the Macintosh SE was updated to the 68030, this posed an awkward problem, as Apple was not willing to name their new computer the "Macintosh SEx". Thus, "SE/30" was the name chosen. Internally, code names such as Green Jade, Fafnir, and Roadrunner were used.

Oh, nice, 68030 was a more or less modern CPU, with MMU on board so it could handle virtual memory. My Amiga had one - maybe even the deluxe 25Mhz version, I forget. Had it up to 12Mb, though that was just for NetBSD, the native OS was swimming in 1Gb - and was fast and responsive, similar to this Mac laptop with 100 times faster CPU and 4000 times more memory. Modern bloat.

A few years ago, my then - 13 y old son was curious about older versions of personal computers. Fortunately, at my folk's office where I worked, they really never recycled anything, so they still had various old hardware consigned to the back room of the basement, due to requirements for document retention. We had just about everything, including 3 1/2 floppies, 5 1/4 floppies and even a few 8-inch floppies from a late-70's Toshiba machine (long gone, but we still had the discs!)

Well, guess what: they all still fired up!

So on a Saturday I took my son and we set up a few of the old machines in the conference room in order of their age. He got to play with DOS, some intermediate machines, such as IBM PS2, first generation Windows, green monitors, first generation color CRT monitors, etc., all the way to my then-current computer.

Watching him deal with the same frustrations that we all dealt with when faced with the C:\> prompt was quite amusing, along with the limitations of 8-place dot 3-place suffix file names, especially on the "classic" WordPerfect 5.1, which, even though a step up from WordStar with its font prompts instead of WYSWYG technology, and first generation menus, was still strange to see on screen looking back from current technology, and in retrospect was so cumbersome to type the commands assign a document to a directory, instead of current drag-and-drop.

At the beginning, he was insistent at the end of the day he would like to take some of the older hardware home to play with it. I cringed, but restrained myself. So sure enough, after a few hours of frustration, he went home to the then-current home computer, appreciating the advances of personal computer technology to date, and never mentioned them again!

What a "blast from the past".

iiipopes's post brings back a lot of memories. I haven't seen the C:\> prompt for a very long time (Glad that I haven't). We started with an Apple IIe in '84. It came with Dos 3.3. The 6502 processor speed was just 1 MHz! Came with 64K memory... that's Kilo bytes not Meg. Had one 5.4" floppy and a green screen monitor. I remember it cost us $1995. We've sure come a long ways since then.