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This article first appeared in the May 1999 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
It's always seemed to me that the big new product and upgrade seasons for Mac software and hardware were in August and January, coinciding with the MacWorld Expo trade shows. In the last couple of years, May has also become a big month because of the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. Apple tries to create a buzz among software developers by dangling new toys in front of them.
For example, in 1997 Apple gave developers the first nearly complete version of Mac OS 8 and in 1998 they rolled out the iMac. Apple outdid itself this year.
On May 10, before a record attendance of more than 2,500 developers from all over the world, Apple's forever Interim CEO, Steve Jobs, commanded the stage for nearly two hours to present new products and tantalize his audience with what's in the pipeline. In addition to the live audience, Apple claims that nearly 20,000 of us tuned in over the Internet to watch the show live via a QuickTime 4.0 streaming video webcast.
Jobs started out by trotting Janet Baker, CEO of Dragon Systems onto the stage. She announced that Dragon will be porting its Naturally Speaking voice recognition software to the Mac later this year.
On the hardware side, Jobs introduced two new G3 PowerBooks. The slow one is 333 MHz and its faster sibling is 400 MHz. Both have all the amenities built in, including 14.1 inch active matrix display, dual USB, VGA and S-video port for video mirroring or expanded desktop, fast Ethernet, fax/data modem and five to ten hours of battery life, depending on whether you sacrifice a peripheral slot to an extra battery. Apple claims they're as much as twice as fast as the highest powered Wintel notebooks according to the standard BYTEmark speed tests. The only downside, besides price, is that they're still a bit heftier than the competition at just under six pounds.
Apple delivered on its promise to deliver OpenGL for the Mac OS. OpenGL is a set routines developed by Silicon Graphics for displaying accelerated three-dimensional graphics. A surprising first big use of OpenGL appeared almost at once when Arena Software announced that the first open beta test of Quake 3, using OpenGL, would be on the Mac. This announcement was warmly received by game developers, but others are still wondering what this means for the future of Apple's own QuickDraw3D. OpenGL is a free download.
For most people, the most interesting announcement of the day was the release of Mac OS 8.6 as a free upgrade for owners of Mac OS 8.5. Simultaneously with Job's announcement, the upgrade appeared on Apple's ftp sites and a few other sites such as, download.com. Almost instantly, the sites became inaccessible as thousands of users tried to grab the 35 megabyte download. For the next few days, ftp.info.apple.com slowed to a crawl, making the download nearly impossible. It was almost as bad as when Apple had the exclusive QuickTime only version of advertising for The Phantom Menace.
Even though it's given for free, the Mac OS 8.6 upgrade is actually a fairly substantial overhaul of the operating system. Most of these improvements take place under the hood, where most people never need to look.
The biggest change is an entirely rewritten nanokernel. The nanokernel is the core set of routines built into the operating system which handle such details as memory management, I/O and task scheduling. The most surprising change in the new nanokernel is that Apple quietly rolled preemptive multitasking and multiprocessing into the operating system. All recent Macintosh operating systems have had multitasking, but of a type called cooperative multitasking.
To see the difference, consider a toy being shared among toddlers. If their teacher relies on the toddlers to fairly pass the toy around, this is cooperative sharing. If the teacher makes sure no child has the toy too long and everyone has a turn, then this is preemptive sharing. Anyone who's watched toddlers play knows cooperative sharing usually doesn't work very well.
Inside your Macintosh, programs are like toddlers and Mac OS is the teacher. One badly behaved program hogging the machine can slow everything to a crawl, as users of Microsoft's Outlook Express well know. All present Macintosh programs will continue to cooperatively multitask. But, newer programs can be written to take advantage of preemptive multitasking.
In the process of adding the new multitasking capabilities, Apple also added multiprocessor support. In the analogy given above, this is equivalent to having two or more toys being shared. There are no multiprocessor Macs being made now, but a few years ago Daystar was manufacturing the Genesis MP Mac clone, and Apple licensed the Daystar technology to briefly make a Mac 9500 with two processors. In both of these machines the multiprocessing support in Mac OS was crudely grafted on, and Mac multiprocessing faded away without so much as a whimper.
Now multiprocessing is back as a core part of Mac OS. Apple hasn't announced plans for Macs with more than one processor, but you can be sure third party accelerator manufacturers are already moving in that direction. Expect to see such add-ons before Christmas.
My road to Mac OS 8.6 had a few bumps.
Over a couple of days, I upgraded three computers from either Mac OS 8.5 or 8.5.1 to 8.6. These included an iMac and two Power Computing clones: a PowerWave 604/132 and a PowerBase 240. None of the machines could be upgraded without a fuss.
On the iMac, the problem was simple. Apple has released several firmware updates for the iMac, and the installer knew this and didn't want to continue until the firmware was brought up to date. After downloading and running the firmware updater, the installation went smoothly, as expected.
Ever since Apple knifed Power Computing Corporation and the rest of the cloners, I have been facing operating system upgrades with some trepidation. Both my PCC machines have performed superbly with all the Mac OS upgrades over the last couple of years, but I expect to eventually have problems. Because of this, I usually read the documentation accompanying the Mac OS installers pretty carefully before upgrading.
The documentation accompanying Mac OS 8.6 warns that some third-party disk drivers may have trouble with the upgrade. Since Apple's hard drive utilities won't work on non-Apple SCSI drives, I use FWB's Hard Drive Toolkit on my SCSI drives. Just a few weeks before, I had upgraded to HDT 3.01, so I thought I was safe. To my surprise, the FWB web site was recommending version 3.02 for Mac OS 8.6. After downloading and installing the update, the PowerWave upgraded without a hitch.
On the PowerBase, the boot drive is an IDE drive and the secondary is a SCSI drive. Apple's disk utilities will work on anyone's IDE drives, so I upgraded the secondary drive with HDT and let Apple's installer take care of the boot drive. The installation went fine and the machine booted up right away. But, there was a problem.
My PowerBase has two monitors attached. The built-in video drives a Radius full-page display. The second monitor is a 17 inch display connected to an ATI XClaim VR video card with the XClaim TV add-on. Right away, I noticed that the built-in video was rock solid while the XClaim card was producing an annoying flicker. After a series of experiments, I solved the problem by installing the OpenGL software mentioned above, because it contains newer drivers for the RAGE graphics chips.
Then, I found out the TV software refused to work. The Mac OS 8.6 upgrade had helpfully removed the ATI Video Memory Manager extension, which is needed by the XClaim TV software. After replacing the extension, everything returned to normal.
A welcome result of the upgrades is that some software runs noticably faster. For example, I run the Distributed Net RC5-64 contest program on several machines. It goes through keys slightly faster, faster on the PowerBase and the iMac after the upgrade, as long as you quit the Finder.
Along with every operating system upgrade comes a spate of third party program upgrades. Most notable among these was Netscape Communicator 4.6. Communicator 4.6 is mostly a bug fix upgrade. If version 4.5 is working for you, there's little reason to get it, and the upgrade might even be more trouble than it's worth. This is because Netscape has bundled several outdated plug-ins with the package, and the installer doesn't check to see if newer versions are already available on your system. Be prepared to reinstall the newer versions of RealPlayer, StuffIt Expander, Internet Config and Shockwave Flash.
Bob Smaracko of Apple Computer will be showing off Apple's new hardware and software at the June 22 meeting of the Louisville Computer Society. The Louisville Computer Society meets from 7:009:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.