Word: macintoshes
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...BEGINNING WAS THE BEEP -- simple, utilitarian and sufficient to alert a computer user that his machine had been turned on or that a floppy disk had failed. Then came the Macintosh, with its built-in sound chips and an onscreen control panel that enabled Mac enthusiasts to replace the beep with a boing, a clink-clank or a monkey's chirp. Finally, last spring Microsoft put sound- control software in the latest version of its Windows program, extending the power to customize a computer's noises to the 90 million owners of IBM PCs and compatible machines...
...corner of the customization market is booming quite like the one for booms, zooms and wisecracks. There are already more than a dozen programs offering a wide variety of sounds for Macintosh computers and Windows-equipped PCs, and more are on the way. Most follow the same basic format: they display a menu of dozens of prerecorded sounds and, next to that, a corresponding menu of "system events" the sounds can be linked to, from start-up to shutdown and everything in between...
...granddaddy of custom audio software is SoundMaster, a piece of "shareware" for the Macintosh that can be downloaded free from CompuServe and other computer networks (a $15 contribution for the programmer is encouraged). SoundMaster can instruct a computer to cough whenever the machine requests a floppy disk, burp when it ejects a disk or bark when it launches a program. Soon after it was released, a lively trade sprang up at user-group meetings for bootleg sounds tape-recorded from the TV and digitized in home computers, from Bart Simpson saying, "Thanks, man" to Porky Pig stuttering, "That...
EXECUTIVES AT APPLE COMputer's Japanese subsidiary are still laughing about the time a shipping-company employee drove up in a refrigeration truck to pick up crates filled with Macintosh computers. He had seen the company's rainbow- hued apple logo on the boxes and assumed they contained fresh produce. The irony was fitting: in the first few years after the 1983 entry of Apple into Japan's $7 billion personal-computer market, its Macintoshes, unsold, were gathering dust on the shelves of computer shops in Japan...
...Japan would have spoken so flatteringly of the U.S. firm four years ago, when Apple was doing nothing right in that market. The company had priced its best-selling equipment too expensively -- a Macintosh Plus at $2,842 in 1989 had a tag more than 60% higher than the U.S. price. Apple left marketing and distribution exclusively to a subsidiary of Canon, which saw little point in exerting itself on behalf of a lazy American client. Worst of all, Apple had not taught its computers to speak Japanese. In early 1989 only six software programs were available in Japanese...