Apple Evangelist Guy has issued a challenge to Microsoft: John Dvorak has agreed to moderate a "battle of the bands" between the MacOS and Windows. The Software Publishers Assn. has agreed to host the match on March 4, 1996 at the SPA Spring Conference. Reason? After Microsoft came off looking so bad compared to Macintosh in a study early last year, they commissioned their own study, the details of which were kept mostly secret, and guess what: MS beat Apple. Surprise surprise. This challenge should settle things, but Microsoft has not agreed to sign on (as of 1/6/96). Drop them some email and tell them to get it in gear. To the victor goes the glory, and the loser will donate a pre-determined sum of money to a local charity. For more info, log onto (site no longer exists). Now for some questions that have been emailed to me recently.
I was told to "Zap PRAM" to solve a problem with my Views control panel. Just what does it mean, and what does it do?
PRAM, or Parameter RAM, is a small piece of memory, separate from your standard RAM, that stores, among other things, the settings from your Views panel, the mouse tracking speed, preferred startup disk, and the date and time. Every Mac has a battery on the motherboard, good for up to five years, that keeps a charge on the PRAM to preserve the data therein when the Mac is shut down, and even unplugged. Sometimes information in PRAM can get corrupted, causing the Views panel to reset itself to factory defaults every time you start up, or create unexplained crashes and other odd behavior. To reset the PRAM, hold down the keys Command-Option-P-R while selecting Restart from the Special menu. If done correctly, the screen will flash and the Mac beep while you are holding down the keys and the process will repeat until you release them.
Because it takes two hands on the keyboard to hold down those keys, and one hand to mouse the Restart menu item, people have a lot of trouble with this operation. Better to use the free control panel Zap! which simply requires a click on the Zap Parameter RAM button (with a confirm dialog that follows), greatly simplifying matters and protecting your fingers from stretch injuries. Zap! is available from all online services and right here.
Another cause of your Finder Views repeatedly returning to factory defaults, and your clock decaying backwards to 1956, or even 1904, is the battery has given out. Most Macs have it located in an easily accessible spot on the motherboard, visible when you remove the case. An unfortunate few have it soldered to the board, or buried under the hard drive. Unless you are comfortable stripping your Mac down to the shell, leave this fix to an Apple or third-party repair shop. All Apple dealers can order the battery and may even have one in stock. Note to owners of original Mac II models: This machine relies on the battery to start and when it dies you cannot start up even by pressing the switch on the back. If your battery is over three years old, or you can't remember when you last replaced it, do it now before it fails at a critical time.
If the Views control panel refuses to open, or crashes the machine, first trash the Finder Preferences file, located in the Preferences folder within the System Folder. Restart the Mac, then empty the trash and re-enter your preferences. If Views still won't open, replace the panel with a fresh copy from your install disks or your backups. Don't be impatient, however, if you have a lot of fonts installed; that directly affects the time it takes to open the panel. It also slows loading of many applications, especially Microsoft ones.
I have an old 512K Mac from 1985, and some disks of software for it. Nothing will run on my PowerMac. What should I do with this old beast?
More and more of these antiques are turning up in garage sales and of course there is nothing current that will run on it, outside of a handful of shareware programs. I have been wanting for one of these people to join PMUG and start an Antique Mac SIG so people could get together and trade software and system disks, and organize our library so these would all be in one place. A lot of once-commercial applications are just floating free in the vacuum now, dropped by the developer and never upgraded. As far as I am concerned, these are free for the trading. Interested? Email me or call PMUG at 228-1779.
My keyboard just died. Although I can start up with the power button, and the mouse works fine (it's plugged into the keyboard), I can't type anything. Help!
Shut down your Mac and unplug the keyboard cable from both ends. Replug and unplug it a few times and things should be fine. Over time, minor corrosion can interrupt the contact between a pin and its socket, preventing keyboard signal from reaching the Mac. The mouse and power-up still works because that information flows through a different pin. The corrosion is very subtle; it doesn't take much to interfere with the data stream. This is especially common in coastal areas.
If you move the keyboard around a lot, or frequently plug and unplug the cable, then the problem may be a break or weakness in one of the wires within the cable. First look at each end for bent pins (it's obvious), and if everything looks fine you will probably need a new ADB cable.
Never plug and unplug that cable while the Mac is powered up. Even though nothing will probably happen (after all, since the plugs are merely pressure-fit one will sometimes accidentally fall or be yanked out without problems), you run the risk of frying the ADB chip, which will require a board swap from your Apple dealer. It's rare, but don't take chances.
I just bought a used Performa 475. It has hardly been out of the box since the previous owner bought it. It has some odd system features I have never seen before (I used to have an SE). There is no set of system disks with it. Can I upgrade to a newer version of the system or am I stuck with a strange Mac?
Strange is a good word for it. Early Performas were assumed to be for the children/family market, people who could never learn how to operate the proper Mac interface. Hence the 7.1P system's "idiot-proofing" features that were, at best, annoying. And no, they did not provide a proper set of system disks that would allow you a custom install.
By all means, upgrade to System 7.5. Do a "clean install," that is, create a fresh System Folder following the instructions that come with the upgrade. If you don't have a CD-ROM player, get one. The 475 is really the Quadra 605, a nice, peppy little machine that does quite well with multimedia. Just be sure you have at least 8 megs of RAM, and you might think about upgrading to a half-gig internal hard drive for under $200 as well. Then read my previous column on making backups for software/hardware recommendations.
Can I install a color monitor/accelerator card in the slot of my SE?
Nope, SE-30s only. The SE does not have color QuickDraw, needed for that Mac to understand color. (Slight exception: that Mac can deal with eight colors, thanks to some experiments at Reed College in the mid-'80s, and can print out specially colorized documents with a color Imagewriter ribbon. Good luck finding one!) Forget color on the SE. Used Q-605s and IIsi's are cheap; if you really want color for not much money, go that route instead. You can always get around $200 for your SE. Trivia: The SE-30 was released shortly after the IIx and IIcx. The internal name for the unit at Apple, and the logical release name would have been the SEx. Can't imagine why they chose SE-30 instead...
FINAL NOTES: Even though the new Telecommunications bill stalled in Congress and didn't pass before Christmas break, there is a good chance that it will have been passed and signed into law in January or February (thanks, Congress and Clinton for devoting all your time to the budget bill mess). Included are provisions from the infamous Exon (D-Neb, now retiring for reasons suspicious) Amendment that restricts "indecent" material from the Internet, with fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars for any providers that let such material pass through their systems. "Indecent" is defined, of course, by Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition, a worthless batch of degenerates at best. Unless you want that lot defining what you can read or see online, I suggest you send in some money to the much-maligned ACLU, which is poised to fight this Draconian provision all through the courts. Also, the American Reporter, an online magazine, has suggested that it will pursue that course by publishing an intentionally "indecent" article written by a judge and then pursue the litigation process to the highest level.
Even though hundreds of thousands of Netizens showered their political reps with protests the provision went through anyway. So much for the Repubs desire to "keep government off our backs," and Newt's early opposition. After the great "Cyberporn Scare" Newt became strangely silent when the "family values" crowd began pressuring him. Oh, and no credit to the Demos; Clinton, Gore and the other duly elected disappointments were just as much in favor of net censorship as the Xist Right. Do, however, credit our own Rep. Ron Wyden, now running for Senate, for the Cox/Wyden amendment which would have stripped the censorship provision (which his slick, rightwing opponent Gordon Smith wants included), even though the amendment did not succeed in becoming part of the bill. By now, one of them has won election and will be representing Oregon to the rest of the country. I await the results with a deepening feeling of fear and dread.
Meanwhile, at the end of the year, Compu$erve had folded in the face of an inquiry from ONE Bavarian prosecutor and closed access to 200 Usenet newsgroups to all its subscribers. Included were not only the alt.binaries, wth decodable photos of actual humans without clothing, but various discussion groups that included the recovery groups, breast-cancer groups, and others that can be defined as obscene smut only by the weakest, stupidest minds on the planet. CI$ claimed that they can't make country-specific filters. Then, a week later they announce that they can indeed make country-specific filters, and reinstated the newsgroups. Well, comments I received via the Cypherpunks mailing list told me that any CI$ subscriber can get whatever newsgroups desired by finding the list of open NNTP servers from http://dana.ucc.nau.edu/~jwa/open-sites.html and pointing any one of several shareware or free newsreaders to one of the open sites. Bingo, the missing newsgroups, viewed via CompuServe.
"The Internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it." Don't tell the Bavarians.
No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.
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