In the fall of 1997, users were running the new Mac OS 8.0 on what Apple called "the world's fastest personal computer," a 350-MHz Power Mac. Microsoft had just shipped Windows 95C OSR 2.5, the equivalent of Service Pack 2 1/2. Windows NT Server 4.0 had done serious damage to NetWare's server market share. Steve Jobs, who had returned to Apple a year earlier, had just been named Interim CEO "until a new CEO is named."

At that time computer news was highly segregated by platform: PC Magazine only covered Windows-based PC and Macworld only covered Apple products. Where there was any coverage of the other platform it was along the lines of "our platform is better than yours" comparisons. Users and administrators living with Macs in Windows environments had to fend for themselves.

MacWindows stepped in to provide information to help people use the two platforms together by providing tips, problem reports, and workarounds and fixes, product information. In reporting news, the idea was to find the overlooked cross-platform angle in product news, reporting what were often considered obscure features. MacWindows as inspired partly by the sharing of user know-how at Ric Ford's Macintouch site, and partly by the news focus of MacWeek and PC Week magazines, but without the rumors that the latter two often published. Added to the mix were listings of products that are cross-platform enablers (the Solutions department) and some basic tutorials.

The first news item is dated October 27, 1997, but MacWindows.com didn't go live until November 15. The inaugural lead story covered as big a cross-platform development that we could have asked for: Apple had shipped developer releases of two pieces of software for running Mac software on x86 hardware. One was called Rhapsody for PC Compatibles, a version for x86 of what was to later become Mac OS X. The other Apple release was Yellow Box for Windows, which would have eventually allowed a new generation of Mac applications to run within Windows itself.

(You can read the earliest MacWindows news items on our first news archive page. Scroll to the bottom for the very first news items.)

Rhapsody for PC and Yellow Box never got to a second developer release, as Apple soon dropped the idea of colonizing the Wintel platform. There was more interest in running Windows software on Apple hardware. In the fall of 1997, there were three ways to run Windows on a Mac. There was the new Virtual PC 1.0 from Connectix. Although by version 3, VPC became the top PC emulator for Mac OS, this first release was the slowest solution and had the fewest integration features. The most popular solution was an emulator called SoftWindows. But the fastest way to run Windows on a Mac was to put a PC inside of a Mac with a coprocessor card--a daughter card that contained an x86 processor and RAM, but which cost almost as much as an actual PC. Apple also sold its own line of coprocessor cards. An early MacWindows special report called Running Windows 95 on a Macintosh provided test results and comparisons of the different solutions.

Cross-platform networking was then, as now, a popular topic at MacWindows, though Macs were far less compatible with Windows networks than they are now. Basic file sharing was still cutting edge, including Mac file sharing on Windows NT networks and on NetWare networks, both of which featured (or even required) use of the AppleTalk protocol instead of TCP/IP. 10-Mbit Ethernet was standard in Macs, but you could also buy token ring and Arcnet network interface cards for Macs. (AppleTalk was already on it's way out at this point.)

In 1997, we were still in the age of floppies, and using the same floppy disk in Windows PCs and Macs was a hot topic at early MacWindows. There were also a lot more file compatibility issues than there are now, and products to translate between Mac and Windows file formats were some of the first MacWindows sponsors.

MacWindows.com would not be what it is without the contributions of readers. Within days of MacWindows' launch on November 15, 1997, readers began to send tips and reports of bugs or problems they couldn't solve. Soon, other readers offered fixes to the published problem reports. It's continued like this for ten years. We've published reader reports from every continent, including Antarctica. One reader took one of our early tutorial pages about setting up Windows NT and translated it into French.

Thank you for your help and support in making MacWindows a resource over the past ten years.

If you're interested in seeing the original home page design, check out this example from February 1998, three months after launch, courtesy of Archive.org's WayBack Machine.

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