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The Odd, the Strange and the Wonderful: peripheral tidbits harvested from MacWorld & MacUser archives

To really make it work they should have put a candle in it and used a tall oil lamp glass for the chimney.

(I mean, why not? The candle would be hotter than anything inside the Mac and should make it draw a lot harder.)

 
:lol: Yeah but they tout its gentler, dustbin collector eradication of the fan model approach. But soot stains aimed with precision accuracy at the ceiling would rock! Even better, in oil lamp mode with recirculating carbon soot waterfall effects, I wonder how long it would take to burn the Mac's Logic board up and the cardboard chimney right down with it? :evil:

Here's another bit of strangeness about the thing. They advertise the bare data without revealing its 63.6363636363636363636363636363% airflow enhancement. 8-o

 
I know Lord Jobs hated the noise of the PC fans of the era. Why didn't they run it but at a lower voltage? Analogous example: I run a fan the era off a 9v and it's virtually silent... At the board voltage it's nearly as loud as the HDD.

Fun piece of history! I love the crazy inventions you saw during the PC revolution.

 
TheMuzzle.JPG

By far the trangest iteration of MacTilt and its ilk that I've seen.

Somebody linked MacWorld 11/87 earlier, that's where tha MacChimney pic was snagged. Same issue has a review of all the various cooling addons.

 
I had no idea the MacChimney was so reasonable. Despite it's incredibly simple construction, $17.95 seems very reasonable. If they really wanted to increase the flow rate, they should have had a small fan blowing across the opening of the chimney.

 
I was always interested in the security devices for Macs, having never seen an Apple-branded one anywhere in real life, one or any Macintosh-coupled security device for that matter. My dad's thinkpad had a key-secured hdd, and that was about it.

When I got to college, I (my parents) bought a lock for my iBook to ward off clepto floormates—thin loop of wire cable. I wonder how secure that would've actually been... I never resented it, as there was a legit compulsive thief in our dorm.

 
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$18 then is maybe $50 today, so many people made them out of cardboard and tape at the time instead of forking out for something so ridiculous -- but would you really have wanted anyone to see you with a dunce hat on your Mac?

 
$18 then is maybe $50 today, so many people made them out of cardboard and tape at the time instead of forking out for something so ridiculous -- but would you really have wanted anyone to see you with a dunce hat on your Mac?
I'm one of those people that couldn't possibly care less what other people think.

 
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$18 then is maybe $50 today, so many people made them out of cardboard and tape at the time instead of forking out for something so ridiculous -- but would you really have wanted anyone to see you with a dunce hat on your Mac?


I resemble that remark...

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Not terribly odd, but a nice (and expensive) full-spread Kensington ad featuring the system saver and a security set:
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I love the name on this one!
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He's just so proud of it. Don't know how to break it to him that it's, well, pretty darn silly.

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Haha! I was just about to upload that one. "Yeah, I'm totally comfortable with a slim edge of plastic holding 20 pounds inches from my face…"

"I'm ashamed of my printer…"

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I would believe you if you told me this did not sell well in the commonwealth regions…

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That is hilarious - all the years I spent in high school listening to an annoying bloody screech of Imagewriter (printing at glacial speeds in "HQ" mode - sometimes overnight!), means I wouldn't want a dot matrix printer placed 15cm from my head while working ...

I would believe you if you told me this did not sell well in the commonwealth regions…




I had a 240V Fanny Mac on our first Mac, a Plus in the day.  It did work quite well, but it always gave me a schoolboy smirk (made my think of Enid Blyton's The Faraway Tree, too) :)

 
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There was an odd, but really cool gizmo I wanted that I lost out on on eBay.  It was an automated floppy disk duplicator for Macintosh.  A mechanized hopper that partly inserted into the floppy drive and clipped onto the front of the Mac.  You could then load up a bunch of floppy disks into the hopper.  It would automate loading floppies into the Mac.  You just load up DiskCopy and press a button, then it'd do the rest.

Dang it if I can't remember who made it.  I think it was Central Point Software, but I'm not sure.  It was one of those companies that also made other hardware for copying copy protected floppies.

 
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