Re: A2Central News

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <20060917134844451+1200@News.Individual.NET>,
Roger Johnstone  <roger@roger.geek.nz.removethisbit> wrote:

> In <eegbe1$2nuq$1@merope.saaf.se> Paul Schlyter wrote:
> 
>> Btw, true Mac devotees must have a hard time now: many years ago,
>> Apple abandoned the GCR diskette format on the Mac and went for MFM
>> like everyone else.
> 
> They supported GCR disks on all Macs until they dropped the floppy drive 
> all together.

My wife has an old Powerbook - don't know the model number bit it's
from around 1993.  When formatting a floppy, that powerbook does not
offer you to choose between a GCR and an MFM floppy.  The formatted
floppy is then always readable on a PC (special software is required
to access a floppy with the Mac OS file system though), which means it
must be an MFM floppy.  Perhaps newer Macs can only read and write but
not format GCR floppies?
 
>> Apple also scrapped the SCSI harddisks for IDE harddisks.
> 
> SCSI was the right choice in 1986.

Of course it was!  On the early 90's I got a PC with SCSI harddisks:
the biggest IDE harddisk back then was 512 MB and I wanted a bigger
disk than that.  And to be able to hook up more than one harddisk was
also quite nice, although I never actually did that.  The main
disadvantage of SCSI was that it was considerably more expensive.


> Early IDE disks were tied directly to the PC bus, which made them
> cheap and easy to use with a PC, but no good as an external hard drive
> for a Mac. Apple didn't switch to IDE hard drives until the interface
> was improved (block access instead of having to manually enter the
> cylinder/head/sector settings, DMA modes).

...and if your CMOS memory ran out of battery power (happens after a
sufficient number of years), losing these settings, you had to either
find a note about these numbers, or open up the computer to read them
off the harddisk itself.....


>> They added USB ports and not only Firewire.
> 
> Actually Apple added USB first, then FireWire.
> 
>> And now, Apple made the big switch to CPU's from "the big satan" Intel..... :-)
> 
> Ooh, that had a few innocent Mac users perplexed.  For years Apple had 
> been telling them that the PowerPC was 'up to twice as fast' as Intel's 
> processors. For some things it was, but unfortunately not for the stuff 
> the average home user runs. For most uses the Intel x86 and PowerPC have 
> always had similar performance at the same clock speed.
> 
> Again though, PowerPC was the right choice to make at the time. Back in 
> 1991 the best CPU Intel sold was the 80486 and the upcoming Pentium 
> didn't look like a great design, while the PowerPC had the backing of 
> IBM and Motorola. Things have changed though. IBM and Motorola have lost 
> interest in the PowerPC for personal computer use and the Core series 
> from Intel is now the best general-purpose CPU money can buy.
>
> -- 
> * Roger Johnstone, Invercargill, New Zealand -> http://roger.geek.nz
> * PS/2 Mouse Adapter for vintage Apple II or Mac
> * SCART RGB cable for Apple IIGS
-- 
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