Arc v' March 09, 2003

As my recent long winded posts have already proven, I've fallen in love with the Lisa Office System. I'm absolutely blown away by it. For years I had thought that the Lisa's operating system was pretty much the same as the Mac OS that followed, but with a slightly different look. But now I realize how different it was and why it cost what it did, and it's really too bad they couldn't have done it for the Macintosh price.

Anyways, I've found a couple of other similarities between the Lisa and Mac OS X:

1. As this animated screenshot of the menus in Lisa Write show, there were distinct shadows underneath the menus. Due to the two bit graphics of the time, the shadow on one side looks like an outline, but by looking at the shape on the bottom half of the menu you can see that it's intended to be a shadow. The Mac OS had small shadows too, but they're much less noticable.
2. The Lisa 2, released at the same time as the Macintosh, came with software called MacWorks, which was Macintosh emulation software (since the Lisa had considerably more hardware resources than the Macintosh, it could do this). Mmmm, smells sortof like Classic

Silly things. But, what can I say? I'm infatuated.

This Applecare document may fix the battery problem I (and others) have run into with iBooks and PowerBooks. Apparently the power manager circuit can get cranky and needs resetting. I'm about to try it. The downside is: my iBook (which I use a lot lately) will loose it's precious 73 day uptime.

Followup: The fix seems to have worked. Considering this lovely machine is about two years old, it's probably time to get a new battery anyways. Without the problem (where the battery goes to 0% with little or no warning), I still get an estimated hour - hour and ten minutes use. That's not too bad for a two year old battery, I think. The time is made worse by the machine having sat around unused for a few months, plugged in and always charged. The quest for the perfect battery is far from over...

Followup 2: Up for 47 minutes now without AC Power. I think my problem's definitely fixed, which means I can take my iBook out on the balcony again without fear!