MadMacs

This was from the July 2001 cover article, "Extreme Upgrades", which in reality wasn't much: most just got minor upgrades and a new coat of paint. The only exception to this was a Macintosh LC which was gutted and replaced with a beige G3 logicboard.

I put this up because the 9600 was one of the coolest computers Apple ever made (pre-Steve Jobs era) but they could've done better. The paint job is hideous: they didn't even bother using masking to show the rainbow Apple logo, and they didn't bother adding a new mouse (they got USB in it, however). The idea was "salvaging" but they took out the floppy drive without replacement (kind of pointless, really), and wasted the PCI slots. The 9600 came with six PCI slots (no other Mac came close to that since) but rather than replace it with cool stuff, they spent it on, well, junk. While useful (FireWire and USB) things were added, some were novelty (TV card), and some were junk (four extra serial ports! Who cares?)

They mentioned that FireWire drives would be faster than the internal SCSI drives, but I think (and correct me if I'm wrong) there was a PCI card for IDE hard drives. And since 2001 was the post-PC card era (a dry time in which the only alternative was software emulation), they could've popped an OrangePC card in to allow even more capabilities for the Mac. Of course it can't play "the newest games" (for 2001, that is) but there were still hundreds of games generally off-limits to Mac users until DOSBox and the Intel revolution came around.

You'll also notice that they tried to install Mac OS X. While an unofficial hack was created by 2002 to allow installation, keep in mind this is Mac OS X 10.0 they are talking about, and at that point, Mac OS X was a slow, bloated piece of junk.

Note: You'll notice that the theme is "built on salvage" for this one: that's why they had the underpowered 3D card, etc. But another Mac in the article featured a $10,000 panoramic monitor, not to mention the expensive hard drives (45GB in FireWire drives weren't cheap in 2001) and extra RAM. So they could've added nicer things to the 9600.

May 2001 MacAddict

This one was the last remaining from comp/mag, originally posted November 20, 2011.

This issue (love the cover, it's bright and nice) is Volume 6, Issue 5, and #52. Cover price still $7.99.



Highlights:

- The DSL/Cable Wars ended with DSL as the winner, not taking into account other providers at the time (they only used their local services, apparently)
- Yes, this was the era of the dreadful iMac colors: "Flower Power" and "Blue Dalmatian". We don't know what the engineers were using at this time, but I'd guess it was something illegal and woefully bad for you.
- A $10,000 plasma TV? You can get plasma TVs for about 1/20 of the price now, same size (42")
- A close-up of the Motorola G3 processor. Looking back, it's strange to think that Google owns a good chunk of the former Motorola now (not Motorola Solutions, though).
- "Give it up. While it would be nice to make the next Quake-killer in Flash, it just isn't going to happen." At least, not for another 10 years...and such a game on Flash would probably destroy all but the most powerful of computers.
- The 250MB USB Zip Drive is reviewed. It's noisy and slow to write on traditional 100MB Zip Disks. Within a few years, Zip disks would be obsolete (my words, not theirs)
- How to land an airplane in a flight simulator (a rare one: they don't do game help normally)

All in all, a pretty mediocre issue (104 pages) but I still like the cover.