Sales records of a "fading icon":
Macintosh sales records, 1984-1995:
1984 - 300k units
1985 - 200k units (the only year sales dropped)
1986 - 300k units
1987 - 560k units
1988 - 890k units
1989 - 1.12 million units
1990 - 1.28 million units
1991 - 2.09 million units
1992 - 2.50 million units
1993 - 3.31 million units
1994 - 3.85 million units
1995 - 4.50 million units
Do you wonder why the financial and general media seem so clueless? They just are! Any savvy developer takes one look at these numbers and the idea of raw market share becomes irrelevant.Remember that sheet of Apple-logo stickers that came in the box with your new Mac? Find it and stick one on your car's rear window. Let's show the world what 9% market share looks like! (Thanks, MacWay.) If you need a new sheet, send a SASE to Michelle Sain, Apple Computer, One Infinite Loop, Mail Stop 303-4GK, Cupertino, CA 95014.Recently I wrote about the OS Shootout Challenge (at the SPA Spring Symposium March 4) that Guy Kawasaki handed to Microsoft. For reasons one can barely begin to imagine, Microsoft refused to accept the challenge. Now what could they possibly be afraid of? Remember this the next time you see MS touting claims of high performance. The show did go on, however, with Jim Louderback, editor-in-chief of Windows Sources magazine.
Results will be posted on Guy's EvangeList, and summarized here next month.Meanwhile, if you want some real entertainment, check out "The Secret Diary
of Bill Gates, Aged 40 1/4."Two or Three Monitors
One thing that has always made a Wintel user jealous is the Mac's ability to use two or three active monitors, and drag windows between them. This is something that has
been mostly impossible in the Wintel world, the exception being Borland's C++ which supports a second monochrome monitor for use as the debugging window, and some applications that allow tools in one monitor and work in another. The difference is that it is not inherently part of the system. In Windows, you cannot open an application window and drag it across the overlapping interval between monitors, but a Mac can support up to THREE. All you need is the built-in video and a monitor card in the NuBus or PCI slots for each additional monitor, and the Monitors control panel to set up correct alignment, and define the levels of color and greys you desire for each one.
My own setup, Fig. 1, is an Apple Multi-Scan 17 (an excellent model no longer being made*) set at 1024x768 sitting next to a Radius FPD greyscale monitor (640x870) which I rescued from being junked, and Sony multimedia speakers hanging like ears off of each. The amount of workspace this gives me is amazing; I wish I had had this during all those years I worked at 21st Century Graphics on a IIcx with 15" monitor. Of course, it would have cost a lot more then.If your Mac is using a monitor card instead of the built-in video (in order to get a higher pixel depth or density than built-in allows), then for nothing more than the cost of a cable adaptor ($30) and a cheap 640x480 monitor you can have a similar setup too. 
Use the second monitor as a place to put your Photoshop, Illustrator or other tool windows, or a place to put your text/HTML editor while you use the primary monitor for the browser window to view your changes. You will wonder how you got along without it! Any monitor that is plug-compatible with the built-in video (that is, not requiring a special card of its own) will work. You won't even need much more RAM than you have now (assuming >16) because display is a function of your video RAM, not the standard RAM. (Unless you waste it by displaying DeskPictures on each monitor, like I do. Example of waste: my System Heap is 10,798K! But, then, I have 56 megs installed.)This just in
Another one nips at our heels: that double-monitor advantage may be going away. Today, Feb. 27, I read an announcement of a video card from Tridium Research that supposedly allows Wintel users to plug in two monitors, with the same drag-across capability Mackers have always had. Knowing about all thehardware/software/config problems that bedevil the Windows world the only thought that comes to mind is "show me." I asked a friend who is very well versed in the ways of Wintel, Unix and otherOSs and he doubts it as well, saying that developers have to support such a thing for it to implement correctly. If it works I am sure one of our other columnists will be writing about it.Wintel users (and curious Mackers) might want to visit their page at http://www.accessone.com/~tridium/ or phone (206) 402-9449 directly for more information. (A correspondent notified me after the column appeared of another card for PCs that supports from 2 to 8 monitors.) I guess that means we will indeed have to install three monitors to stay ahead, and when armed agents from the Gates/Perot administration come to take our Macs and replace them with Windoze 2000 boxes we can cry into two monitors, one for each eye.*Stay far away from their current 1710AV model. It is full of glitches and annoying gotchas, and is in no way worth the $300 or more over the cost of a standard Trinitron 17" model. For that money you can hang a pair of high quality speakers with a subwoofer and still come out ahead!Q/A
For some reason my 8500 started refusing to print. I go to the Chooser and find Appletalk is not active. I click the Active and it tells me the Printer port is in use, and won't let me select it. I restart, and the same thing happens, even if the Shift key is down and all extensions disabled. Help!
Try shutting down for a while. This fixed things in one case recently. I believe what happened is false information got into RAM which survives a restart, but a full shutdown that allows the RAM to discharge all data (only takes a couple of minutes) fixes the problem. If this also fails, zap the PRAM (Parameter RAM, a small chip kept charged by the internal battery) by holding down the keys Cmd-Option-P-R while restarting. Keep them held down. The Mac should Ping and restart, over and over, as long as the keys are held down. Or, use the Zap PRAM control panel, mentioned in an earlier column, and available on my Web page and any online service. Afterwards, you will also have to re-enter some Control Panel preferences: Mouse, Startup Disk, Views.I use Quark XPress and I am sick of the attitude of the company. They nickel-and-dollar me for upgrades, act rude and unhelpful on the phone, and I can't fax documents through my GV Teleport Platinum modem. I heard PageMaker is addressing the problems that I left them for Quark in the first place. True or false?
True enough. The limitations of the older versions of PageMaker mostly involved the lack of trapping and choking capabilities and this has been fixed in version 6.0. The faxing problem you mention is indeed a Quark problem and the fix is in the next column, Macking 11. I personally like PageMaker, having run up over 20,000 hours in the program since version 1.0 back in 1986. I never left it for QXP because I did not need color capability at the time.One advantage QXP has over PM6 to this day is the open architecture with custom XTensions that modify the program at the structural level. PM6's Plug-Ins work more like scripts, but since the Adobe takeover, the future of the program is to integrate it with Photoshop and Illustrator under OpenDoc (and, sadly, Microsoft OLE until then) so that the programs flow seamlessly into each other.Unless you need specific XTensions that have no PM6 equivalent, go ahead and make the switch now so you will be familiar with the program's differences by the time version 7.0 ships and QXP loses most of its reason for existence. PM6 ships with a set of plug-ins that would cost you over $2000 to buy their XP equivalents (according to Adobe).If Quark dies, it will be their own fault. The company is legendary for its bad attitude toward its customers. There are tales on Usenet and in various DTP forums that would make your X-acto stand on end. Example: they used to have a policy of not replacing disks destroyed by fire or flood. You had to buy a new copy of the program and bill it to your insurance company. Maybe that's no longer true, but I have had no reason to ask. Reports are coming in from people who have good experiences talking with the company, but most of the long-time Quark users I know will do anything to avoid calling them.