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Macintosh Plus celebrates 25 years by becoming ultimate DJ headgear (video)
Don't have $65,000 and / or seventeen months to build yourself a Daft Punk helmet? Here's the next best thing: crack open a Macintosh Plus, add an iPad, an old bicycle helmet and some electroluminescent gear, and get to soldering. Originally a school project for design student Terrence Scoville, this visualizer helmet now sits atop the cranium of DJ Kid Chameleon. Because there's nothing like a few digital fireworks to celebrate an old computer's birthday. Video after the break.
TUAW 1986
Luxo Jr. gets Academy Award nominationEven though Steve Jobs is no longer with Apple, we're still interested in what he's doing. You'll remember that he bought a computer graphics company from director George Lucas last year (for a rumored $10 million), which he named "Pixar."We don't know how many units of the $135,000 Pixar Image Computer they've sold, but Pixar animator John Lasseter has put it to good use. The short film he produced, "Luxo, Jr." has been nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Animated Short Film category. Good luck, Pixar!Lisa gets the axeAfter several revisions and price cuts, the Lisa has been officially discontinued by Apple Computer. When it was released three years ago with an astounding price tag of $9,995 (Heck, the Tandy 600 is only $1599!) we were blown away. Not only by the cost, but by the machine itself. The mouse, the icons on the screen, that awesome trash can!Sales have declined over the past 12 months, and even a re-branding as the Macintosh XL last January didn't help. The Macintosh has been selling like hotcakes since its introduction two years ago, even though it lacks many of the Lisa's features, like protected memory, expansion slots and support for an impressive 2 megabytes of RAM.Goodbye, Lisa! We'll remember you.The AppleColor RGB Monitor is totally awesome at $499There are now several monitors available from Apple, and the granddaddy of them all is the AppleColor RGB Monitor at $499. This 12" analog monitor was designed for the Apple IIgs, and supports a resolution of 640x480 (Nice!). Those of you with a Macintosh II can also use this monitor, provided that you have the Apple High Resolution Display Video Card. The Apple Monochrome Monitor was introduced earlier this year for $129. The Macintosh Plus rocksFinally, we've got to talk about the Macintosh Plus. With a 8MHz Motorola 68000 processor and 1 megabyte of RAM (expandable to 4 megabytes), we're excited about this machine. Of course, the big news is the SCSI (or "Small Computer System Interface") peripheral bus and the new 3.5 inch double-sided 800 KB floppy drive.The SCSI port will allow for a nice collection of new ad-ons, like hard disks and tape drives. Of course, the double-sided floppies have twice the storage capacity as their predecessors while the drive itself is backwards compatible with older disks. Customers will find the software programs MacPaint and MacWrite bundled with their Macintosh Plus, which is great! You can pick up your very own for $2,599.
