#adb mouse

The long-rumoured "IIx" or "Super II" materialized at last as the Apple IIgs, and this issue delved into its specifications (mentioning its "2.8 times standard Apple II speed" was a matter of guaranteeing "almost universal software compatibility"), glad the Apple II was no longer "The Computer That Technology Forgot" and supposing it would meet "the challenges of Atari, Commodore, IBM, and Tandy". In talking about the obvious suitability of the IIgs for small business, the magazine did briefly mention an "Open Mac" to be released next year. In "Sotto Voce" Margot Comstock offered suggestions on "how to get hooked on hacking" (for example, writing "a tiny adventure" without "a real parser"). One article further back in the magazine described the RLE picture format as a cross-platform standard; the type-in program included got me started not that many years ago delving into those antique images and attempting to move its logic over to Radio Shack computers.

With what I gather from the PDF was a foldout cover, this issue introduced the Apple IIgs and offered plenty of coverage inside. Taking over the editorial page, Frederic E. Davis did find his "only reservation" regarding the new computer's graphics being its speed, but supposed that clever programmers would find ways to improve performance and there were of course the expansion slots to add accelerator boards. He noted "Macintosh people are unhappy the IIgs is not a Mac; they wish it were faster, had a 68000, and ran Mac software"; Apple II users were of course happier. One detailed article on the making of the computer (adapted from an upcoming book) explained how it wasn't quite the "Apple IIx" Steve Wozniak had been leaking information about (given he was "a subscriber to the hacker ethic that information was for sharing"), and how "Woz" had, in the words of another engineer, "helped design the architecture, then—poof—he disappeared," now interested in creating a "little remote-control device" rather than working on a "productivity" machine.

The thirty-two hard drives examined in this issue were all one hundred megabyte models. Two laser printers and a scanner from Apple also squeezed onto the cover, and inside a new section devoted to the “Personal Macintosh” included a piece from Douglas Adams, returning to MacUser again, that took on trying to get his SCSI chain sorted out.

A Duo Dock showed up in Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment on TV, but that piece of expansion hardware was purchased in the real world as well. (I found the first frame in Rick Worley’s video “How to Watch Star Wars, Part One”; the second is from the bonus features disc of the Phantom Menace DVD.)

The limitations of “desktop publishing” as compared to more complicated and expensive systems of the moment were examined in this issue, although the president of Aldus, a software company closely linked with the field through the program PageMaker, was the subject of the regular feature interview.

With three Macintosh models available (although the “Macintosh 512K Enhanced,” which shipped with the arrow key-less original keyboard still on this issue’s cover, was just being removed from the market), this month offered a detailed look on how to select and configure one of them (with a distinct air of “equipping a major business” rather than “setting up a well-heeled home office,” although the serious-minded game “Balance of Power” was examined). External hard drives offering a formidable forty megabytes of storage were covered in their own article, and a new challenger in the desktop publishing field showed up in the form of Quark XPress.

Lower-cost printers from Apple (with better output than its old dot-matrix ImageWriter II) for the lower-cost Macs were previewed in this issue. So far as other cost-cutting notes went, there were also articles about making use of Hewlett-Packard printers and maintaining your computer yourself.

Home finance was the subject of this issue’s cover, but a lot of the other coverage inside seemed educational in scope, including an extended “advertorial” section where Apple seemed to be suggesting to educators they could start putting Macintosh LCs alongside their Apple IIgs machines.