In commemeration of it’s 10-year anniversary the WSJ online is being offered free for ten days. You can see the front page of the WSJ on April 26, 1996 right here. The Yen was trading at 105 U.S. Dollars and 30-Yr Treasurys were 6.79%.
Particularly entertaining is the Walt Mossberg technology page. It announces the start of Mossburg’s mailbox, now a popular column, particularly with Apple fan-boys. The title of the story is “How Mac Worshippers Can Survive In an Increasingly Windows World.” Here are some zingers.
Tip #4: Use PC floppies to swap files. You don’t need to run Windows software in order to share word-processor files between your Mac and a Windows machine.
Ah, the joys of floppies. I remember being elated with the arrival of the 3.5 inch floppy, which could be jammed into a backpack without fear of destruction- and it had a whopping 1.44M capacity.
Tip #5: You can even run Windows on your Mac. Apple is offering more Mac models that actually carry inside of them — in addition to Mac hardware — the hardware guts of an IBM-compatible PC. On these models, if you push a couple of keys, your screen changes to Windows or even DOS and you can run PC software. The dual-purpose Macs don’t cost much more than regular models.
With all the hoopla recently about BootCamp and Mac’s running Windows, you would have never known that this was a common capability back in 1996, part of Apple’s push to stay corporate.
One more suggestion for you Mac owners: drop that air of cultish superiority. Macs are great machines. I’ve owned them for years. But they’re just computers, not religious icons — so chill out.
Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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