You know, we got so wrapped up in discussing Mac the Knife's fate yesterday, we never got around to talking about what's actually in the latest NMR Report. NMR, of course, stands for "Naked Mole Rat," the current incarnation of the Blade formerly known as Mac-- and while we still hear the occasional claim that the Rat is not the One True Knife, we're now pretty secure in our feeling that the two are one and the same. And anyway, what if he is an imposter? In that case, the Rat does the Knife just as well as the Knife himself, so from a Turing Test sort of standpoint, what difference does it make?

But we digress. (Again.) What we really wanted to call to your attention is the Rat's speculation that Apple is not only working on multiprocessor G4 Macs, such as the Mystic box we've all been waiting for since last year, but also a far stranger beast. Rumor has it that Apple's mad genius lab gnomes are "seeking creative new avenues" in a zany attempt to build a multiprocessor G3 system, in part because the supply of G4 chips has been mighty sketchy in the past. Now, those of you who know a little about the G3 architecture may be making a noise like Scooby Doo when his sandwich gets up and walks away; the conventional wisdom has always told us that the G3 just isn't built for multiprocessing, consarn it, which is why there hasn't been a multiprocessor Mac since Apple discontinued the 604-based Power Mac 9500 line. (There's also that little issue about the Mac OS not supporting multiprocessing at a symmetric level, but bore us not with your petty details.)

But something about this rumor rang a teensy little bell in the back of our collective cranium. After a bit of rooting around through the Reruns, we managed to dig up an old episode from March of '98 which described a quad-G3 system that was actually sold for $4495. As it turns out, the system in question reportedly was able to get the four G3s all working together by running the Amiga operating system, which somehow found a way to do what the Mac OS can't. Or, should we say, can't so far? Could it be that Apple's learned by example and found a way to do what AmigaOS 3.1 reportedly could do over two years ago? Personally, we doubt it, but it's a fun thought experiment to kill time while we wait for that dual-G4 to see the light of day.