This image from the 100th macZone catalog compares the Mac of 1986 with the Mac of 2000. I have used mostly Mac since they came out in the early 1980s, both in my law work and my science work.
This image from the 100th macZone catalog compares the Mac of 1986 with the Mac of 2000. I have used mostly Mac since they came out in the early 1980s, both in my law work and my science work.
Now (July 2002) I have a PowerBook 165c; a PowerBook 3400c; an 8600/200 AV; a G3/399 MacOS X Server; a Cube with a FlatPanel display; three CRT iMacs; two clamshell iBooks; two 12-inch rectangular iBooks; an eMac; and a FlatPanel iMac whose screen has an aspect ratio of 1440 / 900 that is close to the Golden Ratio and whose hemisperical body has area 2 pi (in units in which its radius is unity). All of them usually run MacOS 9, except for the 8600/200 AV which runs MacOS 8.6 and the PowerBook 165c which runs MacOS 7.1.
Although the Cube, the 12-inch iBooks, the eMac, and the FlatPanel iMac have MacOS X installed, I don't like the Aqua interface so I usually run MacOS 9 on those machines.
For portability, I bought a 7-inch SONY VAIO PCG-U101 from Japan. It fits in a coat pocket,has 512 MB RAM and a 30 GB hard drive, but it comes with Windows XP, not a Mac OS.
I wish that there were a Mac handheld, but as of now there is no such thing. I now have a Handspring with an EyeModule camera and two Hewlett Packard 568 Jornadas (each with a 256-MB card that contains my entire web site). The Handspring uses Palm OS, and my Macs can communicate with it via HotSync. Although the Jornadas use Pocket PC 2002 instead of a Mac system, Virtual PC with Windows 98 allows me to transfer files between my Macs and my Jornadas.
I like my Jornadas, and was unhappy to hear that after Hewlett Packard merged with Compaq, the combined company decided to kill the Jornada in favor of keeping the iPAQ.
According to a 26 July 2002 article by Guy Kewney in The Register: "... a user of the iPAQ ... spent the last two years trying to get Dixons and Compaq to admit that his model has a duff circuit ... I got onto a senior Dixons executive working in quality control, and gave him a hard time. He seemed surprised I was bothering. "The iPAQ, you know what the problem with it is, surely? It doesn't work." ... HP staff say they are appalled at what they are now finding about Compaq's attitude to customer concerns. One executive, asking not to be quoted by name, said: "We don't do things like that in HP. If a product has faults, we withdraw it, we replace it, we fix it, we produce a new rollout. It's terribly expensive! - so we don't launch a product till it's ready. But Compaq was just producing faulty designs, and replacing them with untested updates." Faults in the iPAQ range are so many, it's not always possible to be sure which of them is actually causing any particular malfunction. One of the worst problems has been the power supply, say resellers, with most returns due to simple failure. But there have been so many revisions and so many updates, that it's never really feasible to diagnose what is going wrong with any customer at any time, they say. And, they add, Compaq simply wouldn't replace faulty ones. They would promise, say resellers, but when it came to acting, they just didn't. Today, we have the new Jornada 928 announced. It is a Jornada - not just in name, but designed by HP. And the next edition will come out in Spring 2003, says Chaffard - and that will be branded Jornada too, and not iPAQ. HP is starting to understand that its original excitement over the iPAQ brand was a hasty judgement, and wrong. Whether it's ready to acknowledge that it has to kill the iPaq yet, and go with Jornada and the Jornada tradition, remains to be seen. ...".
Two things that might bring me to make MacOS X my primary system would be:
......