Mac Mini

[Witchy]

On Fri, December 2, 2005 1:52 pm, Jules Richardson said:
> a GUI on top by people who probably know more about the game than anyone
> else,
> and supposedly the integration between the two is very good.

Works for me,

> (I don't dispute that there's a huge market for them from people who just
> want
> a machine for everyday office-type apps. Just wish there was a version
> with more connectivity for us hacker types! :)

That'll be the tower G3 or G4 then.....several PCI slots available for
whatever you want, yes you have to buy add-on cards but I doubt they'll be
expensive. As for OS support I was fairly gobsmacked to find that a G3
with OS9 will recognise my Compaq CRT, NEC LCD and USB several-button
mouse without me having to do anything.

> It never seems to do things quite as well as native ports - e.g. I could
> add
> various USB-to-whatever adapters, but they'd likely be flaky and not
> particularly efficient.

Naah. Perhaps back in the dark days of 'new' USB 1.0 but in the last 4 or
5 years it's been grand. Remember USB features many things dragged over
from the Atari SIO so it has a good legacy.....

> every external device, even though they all do different things and run at
> different speeds", and somehow it became reality. Nobody learned from the
> SCSI
> years (where it typically becomes a disaster if connecting anything other
> than a storage device :)

Not quite, Apple came up with their implementation of the serial IEEE 1394
bus and called it 'firewire', all of a sudden the PC people were playing
the catch-up game again.

The thing that I haven't read much about yet is the relationship between
said Atari SIO, USB and the first Firewire implementation. I think we're
safe to assume that Firewire scared the PC brigade. Anyone with more
intimate knowledge care to comment?

-- 
adrian/witchy
Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator
www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UKs biggest home computer collection?