How to remove Rootkit malware from an Apple computer

In article , Scott Schuckert
wrote:

with a hard drive (internal or external), there's no need for a second
floppy drive (or even a first one).

(Chuckles) Well, usually. The first Mac for which a hard drive was
available, the Macintosh 512k, couldn't boot from the HD. You had to
start it from a floppy, which contained the boot code, and switch over
to the OS on the HD.

that's because the mac 128k and 512k were not designed to have a hard
drive and also had a 64k rom which only supported the mfs file system,
which was an issue for larger volumes.

the 'boot code' added hfs support after the fact and supported not just
the hd20 hard drive, but also 800k floppy drives (which could be used
as mfs without the hd20 init).

third parties had their own solutions, including the gcc hyperdrive, an
internal hard drive, or adding a scsi port for external scsi drives.

https://macgui.com/upload/gallery/f_0/user_2/regular/upload_5146.jpg

the 128k rom with both hfs and scsi support first appeared with the
512k/e and mac plus, which did not need to boot from a floppy, nor did
any subsequent mac.

Sounds awful, and was - but this WAS 1985.

actually, late 1984 for the 512k.

anything from 1986 onwards, or modified macs prior, did not need to
boot from a floppy.

BTW, this is pre-SCSI. The original 20 MB hard drive attached to the
external floppy port.

some did, including apple's. others used the serial port, which could
be clocked at 1 mbit, very fast for its day.

scsi appeared with the mac plus in january, 1986, obsoleting all of
that.

On 7/04/2020 12:02 pm, nospam wrote:
In article , geoff
wrote:

there was little slower than copying a file from floppy to floppy in the
first Macintosh's it was a real pain, and the worst feature, it could take
dozens of floppy swaps for a of a few k in size.


the same thing would have happened with a pc running off a floppy.

put apps and documents on the hard drive

They didn't exist for Macs and few could afford the first ones.
The first we bought was a Apple 20MB HD costing £500


Don't know about on Macs at the time, but on others was always a trivial
exercise to add an additional floppy to make copying from one to another
more straightforward.

it's trivial to add an external floppy drive on macs.

what ever gave you the idea it wasn't?

True to form extrapolation on your part. Did I suggest it wasn't ? What
I said was that I don't (didn't) know.

geoff

On 7/04/2020 12:02 pm, nospam wrote:
In article , geoff
wrote:


The most unintuitive POS I've ever used. Even for its basic function.

what about it do you find unintuitive and how would you improve it?


The implementation of drag-and-drop never seemed as straightforward as
it should have been,

how should it have been?

drag songs anywhere into the itunes window, a very big drop target, and
they are added to the library.

it doesn't get any easier than that.

and the Synching concept never seemed to avoid
generally stuffing things up, for me at least ...

how so?

create and edit whatever playlists you want with whatever music you
want in whatever order you want, or create a smart playlist based on
whatever criteria you want.

choose which playlists you want synced to the device, click sync and it
will update the device withe the changes. only the first sync takes a
while. subsequent syncs only copy the changes, which is typically not
that many songs and very fast.

syncing can also be configured to happen automatically any time the
device is connected to the computer or wirelessly when connected to a
charger rather than manually clicking a button.



Not interested in playlists etc.

Earlier versions it was not obvious where to drag from or too.

Synching is a pain if you have more that one device with applications
seemingly randomly being sucked off one when you least expect it.

geoff

In article , geoff
wrote:

Don't know about on Macs at the time, but on others was always a trivial
exercise to add an additional floppy to make copying from one to another
more straightforward.

it's trivial to add an external floppy drive on macs.

what ever gave you the idea it wasn't?

True to form extrapolation on your part. Did I suggest it wasn't ? What
I said was that I don't (didn't) know.

there's no reason why it wouldn't.

In article , geoff
wrote:

The most unintuitive POS I've ever used. Even for its basic function.

what about it do you find unintuitive and how would you improve it?


The implementation of drag-and-drop never seemed as straightforward as
it should have been,

how should it have been?

drag songs anywhere into the itunes window, a very big drop target, and
they are added to the library.

it doesn't get any easier than that.

and the Synching concept never seemed to avoid
generally stuffing things up, for me at least ...

how so?

create and edit whatever playlists you want with whatever music you
want in whatever order you want, or create a smart playlist based on
whatever criteria you want.

choose which playlists you want synced to the device, click sync and it
will update the device withe the changes. only the first sync takes a
while. subsequent syncs only copy the changes, which is typically not
that many songs and very fast.

syncing can also be configured to happen automatically any time the
device is connected to the computer or wirelessly when connected to a
charger rather than manually clicking a button.


Not interested in playlists etc.

why not?

playlists are very powerful and flexible and a lot less hassle.

you can always just create one big playlist with everything in it and
select by song, artist, album, genre, etc. on the device.

or, you can choose manually manage music, but that's a huge pain in the
ass to manage. computers are there to do work for you, not create
additional work.

Earlier versions it was not obvious where to drag from or too.

that hasn't changed.

Synching is a pain if you have more that one device with applications
seemingly randomly being sucked off one when you least expect it.

itunes supports multiple devices without any pain whatsoever (even if
they are all the same model with the same name), and it's not possible
for an app (or anything else for that matter) to be removed without the
user initiating its removal.

In article ,
Whisky-dave wrote:

Don't know about on Macs at the time, but on others was always a trivial
exercise to add an additional floppy to make copying from one to another
more straightforward.

it's trivial to add an external floppy drive on macs.

what ever gave you the idea it wasn't?

with a hard drive (internal or external), there's no need for a second
floppy drive (or even a first one).

So why did it take until 1998 to remove the floppy drive.

it didn't.

Most relied on floppies from magazines for system updates and even installing
software which other companies supplied, such as photoshop and Word excel and PP.

magazines didn't include floppy disks. updates were mailed or
downloaded.

there was a product where a magazine could 'print' an app and the user
could scan it with a reader, but it was a dismal failure. i don't even
remember the name of it.

In article ,
Whisky-dave wrote:

there was little slower than copying a file from floppy to floppy in the
first Macintosh's it was a real pain, and the worst feature, it could take
dozens of floppy swaps for a of a few k in size.

that's what a second floppy drive is for.

If you could,afford the extra cost most PCs we had were cheaper and had 2
floppy drive.

they didn't do anywhere near as much.

for one, they were stuck with dos versus a powerful gui and wysiwyg
apps, plus they were a *lot* harder to manage.

but at least you *could* copy files between floppy disks using only one
floppy drive, something which was not possible at all on a pc.

I'm pretty sure it was possible.

it is not.


put apps and documents on the hard drive

They didn't exist for Macs and few could afford the first ones.
The first we bought was a Apple 20MB HD costing £500

so they did exist.
Not for the first year or so, after the first Apple Macintosh was released.

there were several third party options towards the end of 1984.

it takes time to design and manufacture something.

And again at much higher cost partly due to having to be external and SCSI.

scsi didn't exist for the early macs, however, it was *much* better
than ide on pcs.

and then there is no need to
use the floppy drive anymore,

Plenty of reasons for students in a lab and even researchers.

no there wasn't. sharing files can be done far more easily and much
faster over the network, which every mac had built in since day one.

Not between separate labs and building. Although I was the 1st person to use
appletalk between two floors.

yes between separate labs and buildings. even across cities and towns.



one reason why it was removed with the first imac.

That took over a decade to happen.

no.

When did Apple first remove the 3.5" drive then, why not remove it
from the first Macs with built in HDs if they weren't required ?

whoosh.

On 4/9/20 8:28 AM, nospam wrote:
In article ,
Whisky-dave wrote:

Don't know about on Macs at the time, but on others was always a trivial
exercise to add an additional floppy to make copying from one to another
more straightforward.

it's trivial to add an external floppy drive on macs.

what ever gave you the idea it wasn't?

with a hard drive (internal or external), there's no need for a second
floppy drive (or even a first one).

So why did it take until 1998 to remove the floppy drive.

it didn't.

Most relied on floppies from magazines for system updates and even installing
software which other companies supplied, such as photoshop and Word excel and PP.

magazines didn't include floppy disks. updates were mailed or
downloaded.

Magazines did include floppy disks; most of them labeled either "AOL" or
"Compuserve". Some of the "geek" magazines in the early days did include
a disk of the software they published.


there was a product where a magazine could 'print' an app and the user
could scan it with a reader, but it was a dismal failure. i don't even
remember the name of it.


One of the magazines in the TRS-80 days ran an early bar-code of the
software they published; the idea being to relieve the nuisance of
typing in the machine-language code. The bars were substantially wider
than the bar code we now see every day. They also published a
do-it-yourself reader wand to scan in the bar code through the serial port.

--
Ken Hart

In article , Ken Hart
wrote:

Most relied on floppies from magazines for system updates and even
installing
software which other companies supplied, such as photoshop and Word excel
and PP.

magazines didn't include floppy disks. updates were mailed or
downloaded.

Magazines did include floppy disks; most of them labeled either "AOL" or
"Compuserve". Some of the "geek" magazines in the early days did include
a disk of the software they published.

aol disks were distributed everywhere, including airline meals and
sometimes magazines. that's called *advertising* and *not* what he was
referring to.

the point is that normal everyday software was *not* distributed via a
floppy disk in a magazine, nor could it, as it would be impractical and
cost prohibitive. software was distributed as a boxed copy (sometimes
just a shrinkwrapped package for low budget titles) or available online
to download, even in the early days. btdt.

On 4/9/20 8:28 AM, nospam wrote:
In article ,
Whisky-dave wrote:

there was little slower than copying a file from floppy to floppy in the
first Macintosh's it was a real pain, and the worst feature, it could take
dozens of floppy swaps for a of a few k in size.

that's what a second floppy drive is for.

If you could,afford the extra cost most PCs we had were cheaper and had 2
floppy drive.

they didn't do anywhere near as much.

for one, they were stuck with dos versus a powerful gui and wysiwyg
apps, plus they were a *lot* harder to manage.

In the early days of home computers, DOS was what we had.
In an educational setting (such as Whiskey-Dave's case), if the student
found DOS a lot harder to manage, his grades would have reflected his
difficulties. DOS was what we had, and it was what we used.

but at least you *could* copy files between floppy disks using only one
floppy drive, something which was not possible at all on a pc.

I'm pretty sure it was possible.

it is not.

diskcopy a: a:
Assuming the floppy is the a: drive.



put apps and documents on the hard drive

They didn't exist for Macs and few could afford the first ones.
The first we bought was a Apple 20MB HD costing £500

so they did exist.
Not for the first year or so, after the first Apple Macintosh was released.

there were several third party options towards the end of 1984.

it takes time to design and manufacture something.

And again at much higher cost partly due to having to be external and SCSI.

scsi didn't exist for the early macs, however, it was *much* better
than ide on pcs.

If SCSI didn't exist, how could it be much better than IDE?


and then there is no need to
use the floppy drive anymore,

Plenty of reasons for students in a lab and even researchers.

no there wasn't. sharing files can be done far more easily and much
faster over the network, which every mac had built in since day one.

Not between separate labs and building. Although I was the 1st person to use
appletalk between two floors.

yes between separate labs and buildings. even across cities and towns.

Networking electronically is not *always* faster; it depends on the
infrastructure available at the location.

In 2010, a carrier pigeon carrying a USB stick with a 300MB file made
the 120Km from Yorkshire to Skegness in 75 minutes, while British
Telcom's "high speed service" had only managed to transfer 24% of the file.
In 2009, Winston the carrier pigeon in South Africa carried a 4GB USB
stick 60 miles in 2 hours, while the ADSL service managed to transfer 4%
of the data.

Sometimes, even today, "sneakerNet" is faster.



one reason why it was removed with the first imac.

That took over a decade to happen.

no.

When did Apple first remove the 3.5" drive then, why not remove it
from the first Macs with built in HDs if they weren't required ?

whoosh.


Seems like a valid question for someone with your historic and
voluminous knowledge of Apple.

--
Ken Hart