A collection of the weird, interesting or funny sites I've come across while conducting internet archeology
Most "to the point" website I stumbled across. This website is entirely dedicated to hosting PowerMac themed images, icons, buttons and bars.
So if you need any "Made with MacOS" buttons, this is the website for you
There is one downside, all the gifs on this site are compressed (for faster loading according to the site), and some of them look pretty bad. I had to clean up the ones I got from there in Photoshop before using them here.
Speaking of Mac advocacy, I was trying to do some research on the quantative performance difference between the PowerPC G3 and equivalent Pentiums of the time. This led me to an article here complaining about Intel consistently missing their shipping targets (10nm anyone?).
As I did further investigation I found an incredibly interesting website entirely dedicated to playing the role of "Mac Defender" in an era where Apple was seriously struggling. There is a lot of coping going on as you might expect, take this example where the author argues that memory protection is only really necessary because Windows programmers are bad.
There's also an entire article dedicated to how "Copland wasn't a real failure because some features were brought to OS8.
That said though, despite the obvious bias in the articles discussing PPC CPUs (which I also love and would defend against their equivalent Intel chips, THAT INCLUDES THE G5), you can tell the author does have a generally good grasp of the principles of computer architecture.
Here the author correctly identifies the problem behind Intel's (at the time) upcoming Itanium architecture. Later on describing it as "unproven".
He is optimistic about its performance potential later in the article, which was somewhat surprising given his staunchly anti-Intel position. Basically, betting Intel could pump enough money into it to make it perform better than most RISC based CPUs at the time. Which, to be fair, wasn't an unpopular opinion of the time, with companies such as SGI buying into the nonsense, effectivly killing the first RISC revolution...
Now I grew up with the Classic MacOS and hold a lot of love for it and how it functions. Using it fairly regularly up until high school; however, it's impossible to deny it had a lot of fundamental structural problems. I'd say it was flawed software running on good hardware (as opposed to the x86 based Macs which were good software running on flawed hardware).
This site taught me about pop-up windows, I've been using Mac OS 9 for 20 years now and I never knew that was a thing!
Sites to write about soon...
BMUG Japan JoshMeister's Apple Evangelist Site