AirPort Works!

Ignore all of my insults, Apple.

Rodney O. Lain - 2000.03.08

"It takes a deaf man to hear."
- Thomas Edison

Before Macworld San Francisco, I'd given up all hope of being able to have a wireless AirPort connection with anything less than an iMac, iBook, or Power Mac. You see, I have a "Wall Street" PowerBook G3. No AirPort functionality, in other words.

PowerBook G3 Series Then, while at Macworld, I had the good fortune of acquiring a WaveLAN PC card that allowed me to surf the 'Net sans wires.

Love is too weak of a word to describe my elation.

Distance made my heart grow fonder of the world of wireless web weaving, when I made it home, relegated back to my 56k connection.

In a fit of withdrawal, I bought an AirPort base station, assuming I could easily get back to the future of internet connectivity - after all, it was an Apple product, right? AirPort

Wrong.

I never got that thing to work. I reset the firmware in the base station. I did it again. And again. And yet again.

I tossed the base station under my desk and fired off one of two columns about my displeasure with Apple and its product, such as AirPort 1.1: Maybe it'll work this time at The iMac.

Then, Apple released version 1.1 of the AirPort software. I installed it - nothing happened. It still didn't work.

At first, I thought it was my WaveLAN card. But I was able to surf the 'Net at work, via our company's AirPort base station.

Hopeful, once more, I went to CompUSA, and the red shirts were kind enough to let me exchange my base station for another one. I brought it home, monkey-see-monkey-do'd the instructions and . . . Viola! We're wireless, babyyyyy!

Now, I'm ready to see if US West can get their act together and give my suburb DSL connectivity. Hey, US West: Media One (our cable company) is running a special on cable modem access and installation!

Meanwhile, I'd like to take back every nasty thing that I'd ever said about Apple during the last few weeks.

Now, if only the folks at Cupertino keep their collective noses clean (namely, by not shipping products before they're ready for prime time!), preventing me from having to open up a can of you-know-what within the constraints of this column.

Good going on the AirPort upgrade, guys.

Now, if only you can market this thing the way you should and sell a few million of them.

Rodney O. Lain (1968-2002) called himself a fashion victim: He liked wearing socks with his sandals. When he wasn't dispensing fashion advice, Rodney wrote for Low End Mac, The Mac Observer, Applelinks, and many other websites. Rodney lived in Minnesota. His own website was iBrotha.com, and we have collected as much of his writing that has since disappeared from the Web as possible in The Rodney O. Lain Archive.

The most widely read Things Macintosh columns:

Apple is a company, 10/4/1999
The main difference between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, 1/17/2000
The $600 iMac, 12/24/1999
Apple will rule the computer world, 11/17/1999
I'm not paying $20 for my OS X upgrade, 2001.07.25.
A Mac is like Prozac, 10/13/1999
I'm a drop the funk bomb on ya: Milking the Macintosh for all it's worth, 2001.03.20.
More links and links to memorial articles in the Things Macintosh index.

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