It has been five months since the passing of Steve Jobs. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I was a bit distracted when Mr. Jobs passed and I wasn't able to give the proper respect that someone would expect to give to the passing of one of their idols. For as long as I live, I will never be able to forget the date Steve died. The next day my wife gave birth to our first children, twin boys, on 10/6/2011. March 2012 marks 15 years since I first learned that Apple acquired NeXT and Steve Jobs would be returning to the company. It's hard to believe that much time has gone by, but I remember it very well. Back in 1997, although I had only been using Mac's for about four years (and only owned one for two years) I was very staunch in my belief that the Mac was the superior platform, and could never see myself as a Windows user. I was a senior in high school at the time, and had carefully woven my way into a position where I was doing all of the technical support for m
One of my on-again, off-again, side-projects has been getting my Apple //e setup as a dumb terminal for OS X. I've been tinkering with this for about 9-years now, but never really had a setup I was happy with. I occasionally re-visit the project, but could never dedicate the time to get it right. In my ideal setup, I wanted one monitor that handles multiple devices (Atari 7800, G5, Apple //e, etc...). For the most part my Dell 20" LCD has served me well, but o ne source of dissatisfaction with regards to the Apple //e is how it handled the composite video output in 80-column mode. The video would twitch every few seconds which is very annoying and tough to read. About a week ago, the display started to fail. The screen would go black after several minutes of use. I suspect that the inverter is failing, but don't want to just throw $100 at a hunch. For $150, I decided to replace it with a 22" 1080p HDTV instead of a new monitor, primarily because of the variety of
I finally had a reason to get back to the "Classic II #2" project that I started working on about 2.5 years ago. When last we left this malfunctioning Mac, I had finished washing the motherboard to see if that would serve as a temporary fix for the leaking caps. Unfortunately, the office remodel put everything I was doing on hold. Well, the good news is that it did work. After reinstalling the board, the computer booted up flawlessly. However, I was brought back to this project through a trade proposal for this Classic II and an Apple 3.5 External 800k floppy drive in exchange for a Power Mac G3 All-in-One (AIO). Normally, I wouldn't be interested in something that recent, or your average run-of-the-mill Power Mac. The AIO is different. It is both rare and unique, and something I just couldn't pass up. So, as of last week, I no longer own Classic II #2, which was a model variation on my Classic II #1. #2 is the original Classic II sans speaker grille on the left s
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