IMac G3
The iMac G3 is a series of Macintosh personal computers designed and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1998 to 2003. Noted for its innovative enclosure via the use of translucent and brightly colored plastics, it was the first consumer-facing Apple product to debut under the returned interim CEO Steve Jobs, it was updated over time with new hardware and colors, until being supplanted by the iMac G4 and eMac in 2002. The marketing and sales success of the iMac G3 contributed to Apple's turnaround from financial ruin in the late 1990s and revitalized the Apple brand as design-oriented and simple, it was criticized for abandoning then-current technological standards like the floppy drive and the Apple Desktop Bus connector in favor of the emerging USB standard. Steve Jobs reduced the company's large product lines upon becoming Apple's interim CEO in 1997. Toward the end of the year, Apple trimmed its line of desktop Macs down from ten distinct models to four models of the Power Macintosh G3, which included the iMac's immediate predecessor, an educational market exclusive called the Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One.
Having discontinued the consumer-targeted Performa series, Apple needed a replacement for the Performa's price point. The company announced the iMac on May 6, 1998 and began shipping the iMac G3 on August 15, 1998. Internally, the iMac was a combination of Common Hardware Reference Platform. Although the promise of CHRP has never been realized, the work that Apple had done on CHRP helped in the designing of the iMac. One change from CHRP for example was to boot classic Mac OS using a 4MB Mac OS ROM file stored on disk; the original iMac used a PowerPC G3 processor, which ran in Apple's high-end Power Macintosh line at the time, though at higher speeds. It sold for US$1,299, shipped with Mac OS 8.1, soon upgraded to Mac OS 8.5. The iMac was continually updated after its initial release. Aside from increasing specifications, Apple replaced Bondi Blue with new colors. Throughout its lifespan, the iMac was released in a total of thirteen colors. A hardware update created a sleeker design; this second-generation iMac featured a slot-loading optical drive, FireWire, "fanless" operation, a updated shape, the option of AirPort wireless networking.
Apple continued to sell this line of iMacs until March 2003 to customers who wanted the ability to run the older Mac OS 9 operating system. USB and FireWire support, support for dial-up, wireless networking soon became standard across Apple's entire product line; the addition of high-speed FireWire corrected the deficiencies of the earlier iMacs. The iMac CRT model, now targeted at the education market, was renamed the iMac G3, kept in production alongside its iMac G4 successor until the eMac was released; as Apple continued to release new versions of its computers, the term iMac continued to be used to refer to machines in its consumer desktop line. The thirteen'flavors' of the iMac G3; the iMac was different from any previous mainstream computer. It was made of translucent "Bondi Blue"-colored plastic, was egg-shaped around a 15-inch CRT display; the case included a handle, the peripheral connectors were hidden behind a door on the right-hand side of the machine. Dual headphone jacks in the front complemented the built-in stereo speakers.
Danny Coster was the original designer of the product, Jonathan Ive helped further the process. The iMac G3's unique shape and color options helped; the iMac was the first computer to offer USB ports as standard, including as the connector for its new keyboard and mouse, thus abandoning previous Macintosh peripheral connections, such as the ADB, SCSI and GeoPort serial ports. A further radical step was to abandon the 3½-inch floppy disk drive, present in every Macintosh since the first in 1984. Apple argued that recordable CDs, the Internet, office networks were making diskettes obsolete, Apple's omission generated controversy. At the time of iMac's introduction, third-party manufacturers offered external USB floppy disk drives in translucent plastic to match the iMac's enclosure. Apple had announced the internal modem in the iMac would operate at only 33.6 kbit/s rather than the new 56 kbit/s speed, but was forced by consumer pressure to adopt the faster standard. Components such as the front-mounted IrDA port and the tray-loading CD-ROM drive were borrowed from Apple's laptop line.
Although the iMac did not have an expansion slot, the first versions had a slot dubbed the "mezzanine slot". It was only for internal use by Apple, although a few third-party expansion cards were released for it, such as a Voodoo II video card upgrade from 3dfx and SCSI/SCSI-TV tuner cards from the German company Formac; the mezzanine slot was removed from iMacs, though according to an article in the German computer magazine c't, the socket can be retrofitted on revision C iMacs. The keyboard and mouse were redesigned for the iMac with a Bondi Blue trim; the Apple USB Keyboard was smaller than Apple's previous keyboards, with white characters on black keys – both attributes that attracted debate. The Apple USB Mouse was mechanical, of a round, "hockey puck" design, derided as being unnecessarily difficult for users with larger hands. Apple continued shipping the round mouse, adding a divot to the button in versions so that users could distinguish proper orientation by feel. At the 2000 Macworld Expo in New York, a new
Power Macintosh G3
The Power Macintosh G3 is a series of personal computers designed and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from November 1997 to August 1999. It represented Apple's first step towards eliminating redundancy and complexity in the product line by replacing eight Power Macintosh models with three: Desktop and Mini Tower models for professional and home use, an All-In-One model for education; the introduction of the Desktop and Mini Tower models coincided with Apple starting to sell build-to-order Macs directly from its web site in an online store, unusual for the time as Dell was the only major computer manufacturer doing this. Apple's move to build-to-order sales of the Power Macintosh G3 coincided with the acquisition of Power Computing Corporation, providing telephone sales of Macintosh clones for more than two years; the Power Macintosh G3 is named for its third-generation PowerPC chip, introduced a fast and large Level 2 backside CPU cache, running at half processor speed. As a result, these machines benchmarked faster than Intel PCs of similar CPU clock speed at launch, which prompted Apple to create the "Snail" and "Toasted Bunnies" television commercials.
Magazine benchmarks showed the G3/266 CPU outperforming the 350 MHz PowerPC 604ev chip in the Power Macintosh 9600 as well. Two generations of the Power Macintosh G3 were released; the first generation, known colloquially as "Beige" was introduced at a special event on November 10, 1997. The second generation, known as "Blue and White", was introduced at MacWorld San Francisco on January 5, 1999, its replacement, the Power Mac G4, was introduced in August of the same year. Apple sold three beige Power Macintosh G3 models: a horizontally-oriented desktop, a mini tower enclosure, a version with a built-in screen called All-In-One; the All-In-One model was shaped like a human tooth, thus earned the moniker Molar Mac. Equipped with a 233, 266, 300, or 333 MHz PowerPC 750 CPU from Motorola, these machines use a 66.83 MHz system bus and PC66 SDRAM, standard ATA hard disk drives instead of the SCSI drives used in most previous Apple systems. A legacy Fast SCSI internal bus is still included with 10 MB/s speed, along with the proprietary out-of-spec DB-25 external SCSI bus which had a top speed of 5 MB/s.
Each bus could support a maximum of 7 devices. Apple developed a prototype G3-based six-slot full tower to be designated the Power Macintosh 9700. Despite demand from high-end users for more PCI slots in a G3-powered computer, Apple decided not to develop the prototype into a shipping product, leaving the 9600 as the last six-slot Mac Apple would make. Initial units were shipped with Mac OS 8; the G3 supports up to Mac OS X 10.2, although some devices will not work under Mac OS X, such as the floppy drive, the video features of the "Wings" personality card, the 3D graphics acceleration functions of the onboard ATI Rage series video. Support for newer versions is possible with the use of third party software solutions such as XPostFacto. Mac OS X 10.5 can be run. The Power Macintosh G3 was intended to be a midrange series, between the low-end Performa/LC models and the six-PCI slot Power Macintosh 9600, it is the earliest Old World ROM Macintosh model able to boot into Mac OS X, one of only two Old World ROM models able to boot into Mac OS X, the other model being the early PowerBook G3.
The Desktop model inherited its enclosure directly from the Power Macintosh 7300. The 233 and 266 MHz desktop models shipped with 4 GB hard drives, the 300 MHz with a 6 GB drive, all at 5400 RPM; this model, sometimes referred to as an Outrigger Macintosh due to its ease of access, was the last horizontally-oriented desktop model offered by Apple until the introduction of the Mac mini in 2005. The Desktop model received an update in August 1998, with the 233 MHz model being discontinued. Unlike the Mini Tower model, the Desktop model was not updated with 366 MHz CPUs; the 233 MHz Mini Tower model's enclosure is similar to the Power Macintosh 8600. It shipped with a 4 GB drive, the 266 MHz with a 6 GB drive, the 300 MHz variant shipped with two 4 GB drives in a RAID configuration; as with the Desktop model, the Mini Tower received an update in August 1998, with the CPU updated to 333 MHz and 366 MHz. These models shipped with a 9.1 GB 7200 RPM SCSI drive, attached to a SCSI/PCI card, as well as 100BASE-TX Ethernet, though this was in the form of a PCI card, which occupied another PCI slot.
The Macintosh Server G3/300Mhz shipped with a PCI Ultra Wide SCSI card and the 100Base-T Ethernet PCI card. The 333 and the 366 MHz model had only 6 MiB VRAM; the Macintosh Server G3 is identical to the Mini Tower model, but was sold with additional server software and different specifications. Software included AppleShare IP 5.0, Apple Network Administrator Toolkit, SoftRAID. Introduced March 1998: Good: 233 MHz, 512 KB L2 cache, 64 MB SDRAM, 6 GB IDE HDD. $2,919. Better: 266 MHz, 512 KB L2 cache, 64 MB SDRAM, 4 GB Ultra/Wide SCSI. $3,609. Best: 300 MHz, 1MB L2 cache, 128 MB SDRAM, Two 4 GB Ultra/Wide SCSI. $4,969. Introduced September 1998: 333 MHz, 1 MB L2 cache, 128 MB SDRAM, Two 4 GB Ultra/Wide SCSI. $4,599. The All-In-One model was introduced in April 1998 as a replacement for the Power Macintosh 5400 and 5500, it was available in two basic configurations: a 233 MHz version with a floppy drive and a 4 GB hard drive and a 266 MHz vers
DVD
DVD is a digital optical disc storage format invented and developed in 1995. The medium can store any kind of digital data and is used for software and other computer files as well as video programs watched using DVD players. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than compact discs. Prerecorded DVDs are mass-produced using molding machines that physically stamp data onto the DVD; such discs are a form of DVD-ROM because data can only be not written or erased. Blank recordable DVD discs can be recorded once using a DVD recorder and function as a DVD-ROM. Rewritable DVDs can be erased many times. DVDs are used in DVD-Video consumer digital video format and in DVD-Audio consumer digital audio format as well as for authoring DVD discs written in a special AVCHD format to hold high definition material. DVDs containing other types of information may be referred to as DVD data discs; the Oxford English Dictionary comments that, "In 1995 rival manufacturers of the product named digital video disc agreed that, in order to emphasize the flexibility of the format for multimedia applications, the preferred abbreviation DVD would be understood to denote digital versatile disc."
The OED states that in 1995, "The companies said the official name of the format will be DVD. Toshiba had been using the name ‘digital video disc’, but, switched to ‘digital versatile disc’ after computer companies complained that it left out their applications.""Digital versatile disc" is the explanation provided in a DVD Forum Primer from 2000 and in the DVD Forum's mission statement. There were several formats developed for recording video on optical discs before the DVD. Optical recording technology was invented by David Paul Gregg and James Russell in 1958 and first patented in 1961. A consumer optical disc data format known as LaserDisc was developed in the United States, first came to market in Atlanta, Georgia in 1978, it used much larger discs than the formats. Due to the high cost of players and discs, consumer adoption of LaserDisc was low in both North America and Europe, was not used anywhere outside Japan and the more affluent areas of Southeast Asia, such as Hong-Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.
CD Video released in 1987 used analog video encoding on optical discs matching the established standard 120 mm size of audio CDs. Video CD became one of the first formats for distributing digitally encoded films in this format, in 1993. In the same year, two new optical disc storage formats were being developed. One was the Multimedia Compact Disc, backed by Philips and Sony, the other was the Super Density disc, supported by Toshiba, Time Warner, Matsushita Electric, Mitsubishi Electric, Thomson, JVC. By the time of the press launches for both formats in January 1995, the MMCD nomenclature had been dropped, Philips and Sony were referring to their format as Digital Video Disc. Representatives from the SD camp asked IBM for advice on the file system to use for their disc, sought support for their format for storing computer data. Alan E. Bell, a researcher from IBM's Almaden Research Center, got that request, learned of the MMCD development project. Wary of being caught in a repeat of the costly videotape format war between VHS and Betamax in the 1980s, he convened a group of computer industry experts, including representatives from Apple, Sun Microsystems and many others.
This group was referred to as the Technical Working Group, or TWG. On August 14, 1995, an ad hoc group formed from five computer companies issued a press release stating that they would only accept a single format; the TWG voted to boycott both formats unless the two camps agreed on a converged standard. They recruited president of IBM, to pressure the executives of the warring factions. In one significant compromise, the MMCD and SD groups agreed to adopt proposal SD 9, which specified that both layers of the dual-layered disc be read from the same side—instead of proposal SD 10, which would have created a two-sided disc that users would have to turn over; as a result, the DVD specification provided a storage capacity of 4.7 GB for a single-layered, single-sided disc and 8.5 GB for a dual-layered, single-sided disc. The DVD specification ended up similar to Toshiba and Matsushita's Super Density Disc, except for the dual-layer option and EFMPlus modulation designed by Kees Schouhamer Immink.
Philips and Sony decided that it was in their best interests to end the format war, agreed to unify with companies backing the Super Density Disc to release a single format, with technologies from both. After other compromises between MMCD and SD, the computer companies through TWG won the day, a single format was agreed upon; the TWG collaborated with the Optical Storage Technology Association on the use of their implementation of the ISO-13346 file system for use on the new DVDs. Movie and home entertainment distributors adopted the DVD format to replace the ubiquitous VHS tape as the primary consumer digital video distribution format, they embraced DVD as it produced higher quality video and sound, provided superior data lifespan, could be interactive. Interactivity on LaserDiscs had proven desirable to consumers collectors; when LaserDisc prices dropped from $100 per
AirPort
AirPort is the name given to a series of products by Apple Inc. using the protocols. These products comprise a number of wireless cards; the AirPort Extreme name was intended to signify the addition of the 802.11g protocol to these products. In Japan, the line of products is marketed under the brand AirMac due to previous registration by I-O Data. On April 26, 2018, Apple discontinued the AirPort product line; the remaining inventory was sold off, Apple only sells Linksys Velop routers. AirPort debuted on July 21, 1999, at Macworld New York, with Steve Jobs picking up an iBook to give the cameraman a better shot as he surfed the Web; the initial offering consisted of an optional expansion card for Apple's new line of iBook notebooks and an AirPort Base Station. The AirPort card was added as an option for all of Apple's product line, including PowerBooks, eMacs, iMacs, Power Macs. Only Xserves do not have it as a optional feature; the original AirPort system allowed transfer rates up to 11 Mbit/s and was used to share Internet access and files between multiple computers.
On January 7, 2003, Apple introduced AirPort Extreme, based on the 802.11g specification, using Broadcom's BCM4306/BCM2050 two-chip solution. AirPort Extreme allows theoretical peak data transfer rates of up to 54 Mbit/s, is backward-compatible with existing 802.11b wireless network cards and base stations. Several of Apple's desktop computers and portable computers, including the MacBook Pro, MacBook, Mac Mini, iMac shipped with an AirPort Extreme card as standard. All other modern Macs have an expansion slot for the card. AirPort and AirPort Extreme cards are not physically compatible: AirPort Extreme cards cannot be installed in older Macs, AirPort cards cannot be installed in newer Macs; the original AirPort card was discontinued in June 2004. On June 7, 2004, Apple released the AirPort Express base station as a "Swiss Army knife" product, it can be used as a portable travel router. On January 9, 2007, Apple unveiled a new AirPort Extreme Base Station, which introduced 802.11 Draft-N to the Apple AirPort product line.
This implementation of 802.11 Draft-N can operate in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz ISM bands, has modes that make it compatible with 802.11b/g and 802.11a. The number of Ethernet ports was increased to four—one nominally for WAN, three for LAN, but all can be used in bridged mode. A USB port was included for other USB devices; the Ethernet ports were updated to Gigabit Ethernet on all ports. The styling is similar to that of the Mac Mini and Apple TV. On January 15, 2008, Apple introduced an AirPort Extreme with an internal hard drive; the device includes software to allow any computer running a reasonably recent version of Mac OS or Windows to access the disk as a shared volume. Macs running Mac OS X 10.5 and which includes the Time Machine feature, can use the Time Capsule as a wireless backup device, allowing automatic, untethered backups of the client computer. As an access point, the unit is otherwise equivalent to an AirPort Extreme, with four Gigabit Ethernet ports and a USB port for printer and disk sharing.
On March 17, 2008, Apple released an updated AirPort Express Base Station with 802.11 Draft-N 2x2 radio. All other features remained the same. At the time, it was the least expensive device to handle both frequency bands in 2x2 802.11 Draft-N. On March 3, 2009, Apple unveiled AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule products with simultaneous dual-band 802.11 Draft-N radios. This allows full 802.11 Draft-N 2x2 communication in both 802.11 Draft-N bands at the same time. On October 20, 2009, Apple unveiled the updated AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule products with antenna improvements. On June 21, 2011, Apple unveiled an updated AirPort Extreme base station, referred to as AirPort Extreme 802.11n. Current AirPort base stations and cards work with third-party base stations and wireless cards that conform to the 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11 Draft-N and 802.11 Final-N networking standards. It is not uncommon to see wireless networks composed of several types of AirPort base station serving old and new Macintosh, Microsoft Windows and Linux systems.
Apple's software drivers for AirPort Extreme support some Broadcom and Atheros-based PCI Wireless adapters when fitted to Power Mac computers. Due to the nature of Draft-N hardware, there is no assurance that the new model will work with 802.11 Draft-N routers and access devices from other manufacturers. On Thursday, April 26, 2018, Apple discontinued all AirPort and Time Capsule lines. An AirPort router is used to connect AirPort-enabled computers to the Internet, each other, a wired LAN, and/or other devices; the original AirPort Base Station features an Ethernet port. It employs a Lucent WaveLAN Silver PC Card as the Radio, uses an embedded AMD Elan processor, it was released July 21, 1999. The Graphite AirPort Base Station is functionally identical to the Lucent RG-1000 wireless base station and can run the same firmware. Due to the original firmware-locked limitations of the Silver card, the unit can only accept 40-bit WEP encryption. Aftermarket tweaks can enable 128-bit WEP on the Silver card
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Francisco and has been in publication since March/April 1993. Several spin-offs have been launched, including Wired UK, Wired Italia, Wired Japan, Wired Germany. Condé Nast's parent company Advance Publications is the major shareholder of Reddit, an internet information conglomeration website. In its earliest colophons, Wired credited Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan as its "patron saint." From its beginning, the strongest influence on the magazine's editorial outlook came from techno-utopian cofounder Stewart Brand and his associate Kevin Kelly. From 1998 to 2006, Wired magazine and Wired News, which publishes at Wired.com, had separate owners. However, Wired News remained responsible for republishing Wired magazine's content online due to an agreement when Condé Nast purchased the magazine.
In 2006, Condé Nast bought Wired News for $25 million. Wired contributor Chris Anderson is known for popularizing the term "the Long Tail", as a phrase relating to a "power law"-type graph that helps to visualize the 2000s emergent new media business model. Anderson's article for Wired on this paradigm related to research on power law distribution models carried out by Clay Shirky in relation to bloggers. Anderson widened the definition of the term in capitals to describe a specific point of view relating to what he sees as an overlooked aspect of the traditional market space, opened up by new media; the magazine coined the term "crowdsourcing", as well as its annual tradition of handing out Vaporware Awards, which recognize "products and other nerdy tidbits pitched and hyped, but never delivered". The magazine was founded by American journalist Louis Rossetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe, along with Ian Charles Stewart, in 1993 with initial backing from software entrepreneur Charlie Jackson and eclectic academic Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, a regular columnist for six years, wrote the book Being Digital, founded One Laptop per Child.
The founding designers were John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr, beginning with a 1991 prototype and continuing through the first five years of publication, 1993–98. Wired, which touted itself as "the Rolling Stone of technology", made its debut at the Macworld conference on January 2, 1993. A great success at its launch, it was lauded for its vision, originality and cultural impact. In its first four years, the magazine won two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and one for Design; the founding executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, was an editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth Review and brought with him contributing writers from those publications. Six authors of the first Wired issue had written for Whole Earth Review, most notably Bruce Sterling and Stewart Brand. Other contributors to Whole Earth appeared in Wired, including William Gibson, featured on Wired's cover in its first year and whose article "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" in issue 1.4 resulted in the publication being banned in Singapore.
Wired cofounder Louis Rossetto claimed in the magazine's first issue that "the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon," yet despite the fact that Kelly was involved in launching the WELL, an early source of public access to the Internet and earlier non-Internet online experience, Wired's first issue de-emphasized the Internet and covered interactive games, cell-phone hacking, digital special effects, military simulations, Japanese otaku. However, the first issue did contain a few references to the Internet, including online dating and Internet sex, a tutorial on how to install a bozo filter; the last page, a column written by Nicholas Negroponte, was written in the style of an email message but contained fake, non-standard email addresses. By the third issue in the fall of 1993, the "Net Surf" column began listing interesting FTP sites, Usenet newsgroups, email addresses, at a time when the numbers of these things were small and this information was still novel to the public.
Wired was among the first magazines to list the email address of its contributors. Associate publisher Kathleen Lyman was brought on board to launch Wired with an advertising base of major technology and consumer advertisers. Lyman, along with Simon Ferguson, introduced revolutionary ad campaigns by a diverse group of industry leaders—such as Apple Computer, Sony, Calvin Klein, Absolut—to the readers of the first technology publication with a lifestyle slant; the magazine was followed by a companion website, a book publishing division, a Japanese edition, a short-lived British edition. Wired UK was relaunched in April 2009. In 1994, John Battelle, cofounding editor, commissioned Jules Marshall to write a piece on the Zippies; the cover story broke records for being one of the most publicized stories of the year and was used to promote Wired's HotWired news service. HotWired spawned websites Webmonkey, the search engine HotBot, a weblog, Suck.com. In June 1998, the magazine launched a stock index, the Wired Index, called the Wired 40 since July 2003.
The fortune of the magazine and allied enterprises corresponded to that of the dot-com bubble. In 1996, Rossetto and the other participants in Wired Ventures attempted to take the company public with an IPO; the initial attempt had to be withdraw
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA plays a major role in developing and collecting modernist art, is identified as one of the largest and most influential museums of modern art in the world. MoMA's collection offers an overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, painting, photography, illustrated books and artist's books and electronic media; the MoMA Library includes 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, over 1,000 periodical titles, over 40,000 files of ephemera about individual artists and groups. The archives holds primary source material related to the history of contemporary art; the idea for the Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, they became known variously as "the Ladies", "the daring ladies" and "the adamantine ladies". They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash.
Abby had invited A. Conger Goodyear, the former president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, to become president of the new museum. Abby became treasurer. At the time, it was America's premier museum devoted to modern art, the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism. One of Abby's early recruits for the museum staff was the noted Japanese-American photographer Soichi Sunami, who served the museum as its official documentary photographer from 1930 until 1968. Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Frank Crowninshield to join him as founding trustees. Sachs, the associate director and curator of prints and drawings at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, was referred to in those days as a collector of curators. Goodyear asked him to recommend a director and Sachs suggested Alfred H. Barr, Jr. a promising young protege. Under Barr's guidance, the museum's holdings expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing, its first successful loan exhibition was in November 1929, displaying paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat.
First housed in six rooms of galleries and offices on the twelfth floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the museum moved into three more temporary locations within the next ten years. Abby's husband was adamantly opposed to the museum and refused to release funds for the venture, which had to be obtained from other sources and resulted in the frequent shifts of location, he donated the land for the current site of the museum, plus other gifts over time, thus became in effect one of its greatest benefactors. During that time it initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists, such as the lone Vincent van Gogh exhibition on November 4, 1935. Containing an unprecedented sixty-six oils and fifty drawings from the Netherlands, as well as poignant excerpts from the artist's letters, it was a major public success due to Barr's arrangement of the exhibit, became "a precursor to the hold van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination"; the museum gained international prominence with the hugely successful and now famous Picasso retrospective of 1939–40, held in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago.
In its range of presented works, it represented a significant reinterpretation of Picasso for future art scholars and historians. This was wholly masterminded by Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, the exhibition lionized Picasso as the greatest artist of the time, setting the model for all the museum's retrospectives that were to follow. Boy Leading a Horse was contested over ownership with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1941, MoMA hosted the ground-breaking exhibition, Indian Art of the United States, that changed the way American Indian arts were viewed by the public and exhibited in art museums; when Abby Rockefeller's son Nelson was selected by the board of trustees to become its flamboyant president in 1939, at the age of thirty, he became the prime instigator and funder of its publicity and subsequent expansion into new headquarters on 53rd Street. His brother, David Rockefeller joined the museum's board of trustees in 1948 and took over the presidency when Nelson was elected Governor of New York in 1958.
David subsequently employed the noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the museum garden and name it in honor of his mother, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. He and the Rockefeller family in general have retained a close association with the museum throughout its history, with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund funding the institution since 1947. Both David Rockefeller, Jr. and Sharon Percy Rockefeller sit on the board of trustees. In 1937, MoMA had shifted to offices and basement galleries in the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center, its permanent and current home, now renovated, designed in the International Style by the modernist architects Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, opened to the public on May 10, 1939, attended by an illustrious company of 6,000 people, with an opening address via radio from the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. On April 15, 1958, a fire on the second floor destroyed an 18 foot long Monet Water Lilies painting (the current Mone
Poly(methyl methacrylate)
Poly known as acrylic, acrylic glass, or plexiglass as well as by the trade names Crylux, Acrylite and Perspex among several others, is a transparent thermoplastic used in sheet form as a lightweight or shatter-resistant alternative to glass. The same material can be used as a casting resin, in inks and coatings, has many other uses. Although not a type of familiar silica-based glass, the substance, like many thermoplastics, is technically classified as a type of glass hence its occasional historical designation as acrylic glass. Chemically, it is the synthetic polymer of methyl methacrylate; the material was developed in 1928 in several different laboratories by many chemists, such as William Chalmers, Otto Röhm, Walter Bauer, was first brought to market in 1933 by German Röhm & Haas AG and its partner and former U. S. affiliate Rohm and Haas Company under the trademark Plexiglas. PMMA is an economical alternative to polycarbonate when tensile strength, flexural strength, polishability, UV tolerance are more important than impact strength, chemical resistance and heat resistance.
Additionally, PMMA does not contain the harmful bisphenol-A subunits found in polycarbonate. It is preferred because of its moderate properties, easy handling and processing, low cost. Non-modified PMMA behaves in a brittle manner when under load under an impact force, is more prone to scratching than conventional inorganic glass, but modified PMMA is sometimes able to achieve high scratch and impact resistance; the first acrylic acid was created in 1843. Methacrylic acid, derived from acrylic acid, was formulated in 1865; the reaction between methacrylic acid and methanol results in the ester methyl methacrylate. Polymethyl methacrylate was discovered in the early 1930s by British chemists Rowland Hill and John Crawford at Imperial Chemical Industries in England. ICI registered the product under the trademark Perspex. About the same time and industrialist Otto Röhm of Rohm and Haas AG in Germany attempted to produce safety glass by polymerizing methyl methacrylate between two layers of glass.
The polymer separated from the glass as a clear plastic sheet, which Röhm gave the trademarked name Plexiglas in 1933. Both Perspex and Plexiglas were commercialized in the late 1930s. In the United States, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company subsequently introduced its own product under the trademark Lucite. In 1936 ICI Acrylics began the first commercially viable production of acrylic safety glass. During World War II both Allied and Axis forces used acrylic glass for submarine periscopes and aircraft windshields and gun turrets. Airplane pilots whose eyes were damaged by flying shards of PMMA fared much better than those injured by standard glass, demonstrating better compatibility between human tissue and PMMA than glass. Civilian applications followed after the war. Common orthographic stylings include polymethyl polymethylmethacrylate; the full IUPAC chemical name is poly. Although PMMA is called "acrylic", acrylic can refer to other polymers or copolymers containing polyacrylonitrile. Notable trade names include Acrylite, Lucite, R-Cast, Optix, Oroglas, Altuglas and Sumipex.
PMMA is produced by emulsion polymerization, solution polymerization, bulk polymerization. Radical initiation is used, but anionic polymerization of PMMA can be performed. To produce 1 kg of PMMA, about 2 kg of petroleum is needed. PMMA produced by radical polymerization is atactic and amorphous; the glass transition temperature of atactic PMMA is 105 °C. The Tg values of commercial grades of PMMA range from 85 to 165 °C. PMMA is thus an organic glass at room temperature; the forming temperature goes up from there. All common molding processes may be used, including injection molding, compression molding, extrusion; the highest quality PMMA sheets are produced by cell casting, but in this case, the polymerization and molding steps occur concurrently. The strength of the material is higher than molding grades owing to its high molecular mass. Rubber toughening has been used to increase the toughness of PMMA to overcome its brittle behavior in response to applied loads. PMMA can be joined using cyanoacrylate cement, with heat, or by using chlorinated solvents such as dichloromethane or trichloromethane to dissolve the plastic at the joint, which fuses and sets, forming an invisible weld.
Scratches may be removed by polishing or by heating the surface of the material. Laser cutting may be used to form intricate designs from PMMA sheets. PMMA vaporizes to gaseous compounds upon laser cutting, so a clean cut is made, cutting is performed easily. However, the pulsed lasercutting introduces high internal stresses along the cut edge, which on exposure to solvents produce undesirable "stress-crazing" at the cut edge and several millimetres deep. Ammonium-based glass-cleaner and everything short of soap-and-water produces similar undesirable crazing, sometimes over the entire surface of th
