Martin Russ surveys his dying Mac IIsi and ponders the purchase of a new model. Will he go for leading‑edge Power or a last‑generation bargain?
It's been quite an eventful month here at Apple Notes. There's an annoying (no, alarming!) hardware fault in my once trusty Mac IIsi: my boot drive has developed an alarming tendency to mess about with preference files, I seem to have RAM that isn't, and one of my SCSI plugs keeps popping off its socket. All this makes my Mac rather unstable — prone to suddenly stopping in the middle of everyday operations such as drawing a menu, or closing a dialogue box. It's all been rather distressing.
In fact the situation has become so bad that I'm considering retiring my loyal friend and moving closer to the leading edge of Mac computing. The IIsi is worth surprisingly little these days, and getting it repaired seems like a bit of a waste of money. Times have changed considerably since the IIsi and I first met, and so, following the often‑quoted 'change your computer every three years' rule, I've been looking around at the possibilities.
There are two schools of thought: one says that you should go for leading‑edge technology because you will need it in three years time (!), and the other says that tried and tested technology is less of a risk, and probably cheaper. Balancing on the advancing wave of technology is OK if you have the money, but not everyone does. With this in mind, the pragmatic solution seems to be to look closely at what has gone before and what is happening now, and work from that.
The most obvious major change over the last few years is the demise of the Macs based on 680n0‑based processors. The Mac II series turned into the Quadras, then the Centrises, LCs and Performas — with the range gradually becoming 68040‑only when the Quadra 630 came out. More recently, the rise of the Power Macs has seen the gradual demise of NuBus and the adoption of PCI, even by the Power Computing clones. With the third generation of Power Macs now coming on‑stream, the Mac range of computers is now wholly Power Mac, with the exception of some PowerBooks. The increase in computing power has seen a corresponding rise in number of features and complexity of applications, with a resulting increase in their size and the amount of RAM they require. MIDI Manager appears to have been declared officially obsolete by Apple, at least according to some reports.
So one approach to upgrading would be to go for a brand‑new Power Mac, choosing one with the right mix of features and price, and allowing just a little bit of room to cope with the evolutions of the next three years. On the other hand, the last generation of 68040‑based Macs are now very low‑cost, and they should have few problems with running those favourite old programs that you've been using for years. The Quadra 650 is a good example of one of the last set of 68040 Macs that has the option of an upgrade to Power Mac in the future by replacing the main board (if you can still find an upgrade when you decide to move on, of course). PowerBooks can be very effective replacements for the Mac Classics, SEs and SE/30s when you need to take a computer on the road. Performance musician Nick Rothwell uses a PowerBook in his live setup (see the 'Music and Movement' feature in the November 1995 issue of SOS, and Apple Notes in the December 1995 issue).
So what do I go for? Is it a Power Mac, a 68040 old‑timer, or a portable PowerBook? Tune in to this channel, same time next month, to find out...
Tip Of The Month: Emergency Recovery
Speaking of hardware faults, what happens if the hard disk that you boot up from suddenly dies? It does happen, and from my conversations with Mac users, many people don't seem prepared for this sort of emergency. What's needed is an emergency disk from which to boot so that remedial action and repairs can be undertaken. If you don't have one already, you need one!
One of the emergency boot disks I use came with the original System 7.1 floppies. The Disk Tools disk has a System Folder containing a very minimalistic set of system files, plus Disk First Aid and the HD Setup applications. The first port of call for a Mac crash recovery is probably the Disk First Aid utility. After that, professional help may be needed if all is not well.
But what about more recent systems? Making your own emergency disk ought to be straightforward, but for some reason it isn't as easy as it could be. If you use the System 7.5 installer program to custom install a minimal system onto a floppy, you may be told that there isn't enough room on the floppy. The solution is to install the minimal system onto a spare hard disk (I use a SyQuest removable) and then prune things by hand. Remove all the beeps and so on from inside the System, then put just the Finder and the System onto a floppy. You may also need empty folders for the Apple Menu Items, Fonts, Control Panels, and so on. I managed to get the system down to 854Kb, and this allows a 294Kb Finder and the 53Kb Disk First Aid to fit onto one HD floppy. (If you've only got 800K drives, you need to upgrade, because almost everything comes on HD disks these days.)
And let's hope you never need to use the emergency recovery disk!
Apple News In Brief
- SPEED FREAK
You may have seen adverts for Intel Pentium processors with clock speeds of 166MHz or more, and wondered how the PowerPC is responding. Well, although you can get 150MHz PowerPC chips as I write, the first deliveries of 166 and even 180MHz chips should be arriving as you read this. By the late autumn, 200MHz may even be available. And don't forget that a 166MHz PowerPC 604e chip is more than equivalent to a Pentium with the same clock speed. - SYSTEM 8.0: COPLAND
The long awaited Copland operating system, which has long promised such goodies as multitasking, a customisable desktop (even more than now!?) and an improved set of file management utilities, may now be even longer in arriving. It now begins to look as if it will happen slowly, as incremental improvements to the existing System 7.5. - BMW?
Although many people have been saying that Apple will be changing from making a broad range of Macs and concentrating on just high‑end BMW‑style computers, the latest word is that Apple will continue to produce low‑end affordable Macs, which has to be good news for Mac musicians who aren't at the hard disk recording/DSP/film/TV end of the market.
On The Net
There are other parts to the Internet beyond the World Wide Web. Two of the most interesting areas are Newsgroups and Mailing Lists.
Newsgroups are a bit like a global free newspaper, except that the reporters are ordinary (sometimes) people — so anyone can post a story. As a result, there are some weird and wonderful 'news' topics (the definition of what is 'news' is often stretched to breaking point!). To read newsgroups, you need a news reader utility program, but often WWW browsers include one. The news topics are sorted into groups by a series of categories. Here are some example newsgroups on the subject of music:
- alt.fan.jimi‑hendrix
- alt.music.orb
- rec.audio.pro
- rec.music.makers.synth
- uk.music.misc
Mailing lists are a more targeted version of newsgroups, but based on email. Rather than being available for anyone to read and contribute to, mailing lists are 'subscribed' to. Once subscribed, you then receive email which is also posted to everyone on the mailing list, and anything that you post to the list is automatically sent to everyone else. Musical topics include lists covering electronic music, synthesizers, automated composition, and even programming languages like Max.
How It Works — Communications
This month I'm taking a closer look at the kind of programs you'll need for electronic communications using your Mac.
- TERMINAL EMULATORS
Just about the simplest way to communicate over a telephone (apart from talking, of course!) is directly from one computer to another. In its basic form, this involves making a connection from your computer to another computer, and then making your computer compatible with the other end — emulating the sort of terminal device the other computer expects. This explains the name 'terminal emulator 'for the application program that accomplishes this task so that your computer can communicate with the remote computer. In most cases, the remote computer sends text to you, and you send text back. A terminal emulator is often included in the set of utility software that comes with modems, and these programs often have catchy names ending in 'Term'. - BULLETIN BOARDS
One use for this inter‑computer communication is to allow people to leave messages on the remote computer, which other people can then look at. Rather like a bulletin board — so that's what it's called. Bulletin board computers live at the other end of telephone lines, and can be used to provide all sorts of messaging and storage functions. Many bulletin boards have become entwined in the Internet. - EMAIL
Long before the Internet became hugely hype‑worthy, people with computers and modems were sending each other messages using electronic mail — email. No stamps, no envelopes, and no need for blotting paper. Instead, all you need is someone to act as a sorting office — which is where bulletin boards come in. Why put messages on a bulletin board and expect people to come to that board when you could move the message to a bulletin board that they already use? From this simple idea, email has evolved to allow the transfer of electronic messages from any computer to almost any other computer. It's a little like the biggest MIDI network you can imagine, only bigger. One of the most popular Mac email programs is called Eudora, for reasons which escape me at this moment. - FTP
Bulletin boards can be used to store more than just messages. One way of transferring data between computers is called File Transfer Protocol, or FTP for short. This can be used to transfer applications, picture files or MIDI files — the contents of the file don't matter. FTP programs are often called by obvious names like FTP, although one of the popular Mac versions is called Fetch. - WWW
The World Wide Web is another name for a set of specialised computers which are spread all over the world, and connected by the Internet network. To communicate with these computers, you need a WWW browser. This allows you to wander around all the WWW computers, which are called servers because they act as intermediaries between your WWW browser and their information. The information on the WWW is in the form of pages, rather like a very large magazine. A recent count estimated that there were over 30 million pages on the WWW.