On recent Mac magazines …
In this country us Mac users have access to three major magazines: Mac Format, run by the same people as Linux Format, and their homepage is a month behind the actual magazine, as is the Linux Format page. Then there is Mac World, a sister paper to an American magazine of the same name, and Mac User. I buy the first two quite often, the last much less so.
The latest edition of Mac Format announces that two bored German Mac enthusiasts have put up a System 7 Simulator based on Flash, on which you can test drive a “1990 Mac”. When I first saw this I thought, why would anyone want to do that? I just tried it out and it’s a useful reminder of how basic the average computer was back then; they were certainly functional, but there were lots of people around who hated Macs. Most of the useful software was on the PC, although the Mac did have a version of Microsoft Office.
I was 13 at that time, and had just entered a boarding school in Suffolk. I was an avid reader of Personal Computer World, which covered quite a varied range of computers (remember that back then, besides the PC there was also the Atari ST and the Amiga in the same range, and superior in many ways), and the most exciting one was the NeXT, which was a black cube-shaped machine (there was a smaller workstation version as well) with a unique operating system, and the company that made it was run by Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple and is now back running Apple. You can read a bit about this operating system here. The NeXT failed, though, and before long its operating system was released for the PC. Then Steve Jobs went back to Apple, and took his operating system with him, and it’s now called OS X. I never seriously wanted a Mac until after OS X was out, and my first Mac was the one I bought this year.
Mac User this month has a preview of the next version of OS X, codenamed Tiger, and the version I bought mentions a few capabilities I never knew the current version (Panther) had, like the ability to send faxes straight out of the Mac’s internal modem. (That’ll come in handy next time I’ve got to get a time sheet in to the agency.) There’s an editorial about Apple’s falling sales this year, blamed on a rise in the popularity of mobile computers and the stagnation of the Mac’s 32-bit processor; my take on this is that if they want to popularise the Mac, they should allow other companies to make Macs, because most people want Macs for the operating system and not for the funky casing. The MacWorld Plus that came with my copy has a feature at the back by David Pogue (who does the Missing Manuals), on the superiority of the Mac’s operating system, particularly the latest version, overe Windows – particularly when it comes to security, which is the main reason I bought a Mac when, after tinkering with Linux for a while, I decided to get a serious computer.
