Boy, 16 Sector is drawing this thing out longer than I’d hoped. They’ve got something up their sleeve for the few Apple II enthusiasts around us.
Yes, a new piece of Apple II hardware will be coming our way very shortly. The cat’s almost out of the bag! The good ol’ days of the Apple //e and Apple IIgs are what really make me nostalgic. I even purchased an Apple IIgs recently on eBay and I’m just saving it in the box with plans to break it out when I get around to finishing my new attic office space.
For clues on the odd antics of the 16 Sector site, check the commentary at A2Central.com in their post, “More 16 Sector riddles“.
p.s. A big “hear! hear!” goes out for that post in regard to the return of the great Carrington Vanston of 1MHz fame!
Back in the day, I used to always love mentioning the supposed quote from Bill Gates, which would have marked him as significantly short-sighted: “640k is more memory than anyone will ever need”, or some close variant thereof.
We love to quote it, because we love to hate Bill Gates and yet we can relate with the amazement of ever greater RAM requirements. For instance, I never thought when my powerhouse Mac came with 128MB of RAM that one day I would have a Mac with a video card holding more RAM than that! Insert similar nostalgic reflection here, ad nauseam.
Well, now I can just feel stupid and short-sighted without pointing the finger at Bill Gates. I never even thought to verify the quote until today for some unknown reason I decided to. Sure enough, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an official citation, and Bill Gates denied ever saying that.
There is a great pair of articles discussing the history of the PowerPC architecture on the Ars Technica website.
Check them out:
PowerPC on Apple: An Architectural History, Part I
PowerPC on Apple: An Architectural History, Part II
These are great reading for the pseudogeek. I say the pseudogeek, and not the ubergeek, because the ubergeek would already know all of this information, and it is too generalized. But for we geeks out there who also have lives, this is great reading, providing interesting facts and history, but without going overboard in depth.
My timing for blogging about these articles (which I’ve actually had bookmarked on my desktop for months) is ironic, being that it comes shortly after Apple’s announcement that it will be switching to the x86 architecture for future Macs over the course of the next 1-2 years.
I know, I have yet to blog about this; I have full intentions to. I purposefully did not blog about it when I first read about it, because first reactions sometimes can be very inaccurate ones. But the time is now ripe for comments, so I will be making some soon.
Again, with a bit of tongue-in-cheek irony, it is notable that the Ars Technica author wrote these articles at the behest of Mac enthusiasts, after he wrote a similar historical documentary on the Pentium line (Part I, Part II). I smell a “Part III” in the works!
I just ran across a fun Apple site called AppleFritter. Clinging to unusual and exceptional of all classic things Apple, it is a fun site for the nostalgic Apple enthusiast to peruse.
Check it out at: http://www.applefritter.com/.
They’re doing some pretty wild things! Especially make a point to check out the forums.
