Macintosh History: 1998

Was it only last year that Apple went from beleaguered to industry darling? Released the amazing iMac? Ran a profit every quarter?

Good-Bye, Newton

Alas, Newton, we barely knew you - which was adequately borne out by sales figures. Apple was bleeding in many areas: printers, monitors, computers (too many models), and more. They pared down the printer line, the monitor line, and the computer line.

And they killed the best PDA (personal digital assistant) the world had known, the Newton. With the school-oriented eMate (a Newton with a keyboard), Newton was starting to make inroads into new markets, but Apple chose to cut the losses.

It set the stage for the Palm Pilot to take over the PDA market, since the Windows CE machines never found their nice.

Rumors are some of the Newton technology will reappear in the Consumer Portable, which Apple is expected to announce in early 1999.

OS 8.1, 8.5, 8.5.1

Mac OS 8.1 was a free maintenance upgrade to Mac OS 8. The big improvement: HFS+, a new filing system that allowed far more efficient use of hard drive space.

HFS went back to the Mac Plus and System 3.2 of 1986, which needed to support drives 20 MB and larger along with nested folders. As drives grew past 100 MB or so, it soon became evident that HFS was wasting a lot of space.

The HFS model could handle a maximum of 65,536 blocks of data per volume. Hard drives typically use 512 byte sectors, so those blocks must be multiples of 512 bytes. Up to 32 MB, the sector size and allocation block match at 512 bytes, but beyond that the allocation block jumps to two, three, or more sectors. On my 2.1GB hard drive, the minimum allocation block was 63 sectors or 31.5KB!

HFS+ increases the maximum number of allocation blocks several orders of magnitude. The norm for a larger hard drive is now 4KB, which means small files no longer need to tie up as much space on the hard drive.

In fact, the size of the allocation block is a variable under HFS+, something Alsoft takes advantage of with their Plus Maker software. I recently used Plus Maker to convert my 2.1GB HFS hard drive into an HFS+ drive with 512-byte allocation blocks. Since I do a lot of web work, which involves a lot of small files, I increased free space from about 430 MB to over 945MB!

Mac OS 8.1 gave way to 8.5, which was the first Mac OS to require a PowerPC. The native drivers have improved performance, especially over a network. Unfortunately, a rare disk bug was soon uncovered that took several months to resolve.

Once Apple determined the cause of the bug, it released the Mac OS 8.5.1 update.

Of course, the other biggie under 8.5 is Sherlock, a search engine that works as well on your local hard drive, a server volume, or the internet itself.

The iMac

The iMac will probably take top billing as the most significant computer of 1998. Not only did it single-handedly show the world how cool Apple is, it became the top selling model for several months, drove the PC industry to finally use those USB ports they'd been building into their computers, and helped Apple turn an already profitable year into an incredible success.

The Classics

On August 31, 1998, Apple discontinued all support for the 68000- and 68020-based Macs, most 68030-based Macs, several LaserWriters, and the entire (long discontinued) Apple II line.

The Competition

Intel has been losing market share for years, but over the past few years, even big companies like Compaq have adopted non-Intel CPUs. Intel addressed this with the Celeron (or, as Steve Jobs called it, Celery) processor, a Pentium II with no backside cache.

Dumb. It flopped. So Intel released Celeron II, with a cache smaller than Pentium's (don't want to compete there), but still much more efficient than the original Celeron.

Windows 98 finally shipped in June, making Windows less Mac-like, more proprietary, and more bizarre than ever before. (Using a web browser as your OS interface? I don't get it.)

Personal Perspective

As a longtime Apple user (Apple II+, 1979 or 1980) and Mac lover (when I got my Plus, 1990), I was thrilled to see Apple turn a profit, have the most popular computer in the world, and quickly respond to a serious (albeit rare) bug in Mac OS 8.5.

As a longtime proponent of older Macs (see my Low End Mac site), I was disappointed that Apple dropped support for so many older models - but realize they were probably carrying a lot of dead parts inventory, which this allowed them to liquidate.

The iMac led to a whole new class of web site, the iMac site, of which The iMac Channel is a good example. Well before the first iMac shipped, Apple fans rose up in numbers to create pages and entire sites dedicated to a decidedly revolutionary computer: new styling, new bus, same familiar Mac OS.

It was the year Low End Mac grew from a personal website into a leading resources on older Macs.

It was a very good year.