Cheesy as it may sound, today is one of the happiest days of my life.
After saving pennies for a year, I got my insanely great Mac Plus in 1990, from Solutions Unlimited. It had an 8 MHz processor, 1 MB of RAM, and a single floppy disk drive. No hard disk! I learnt everything I know about the Mac OS on that Mac Plus, using a single 800K floppy disk. One disk for System 6 and the apps (MacPaint, MacDraw, MacWrite) and another disk for saving data. Pity today’s brats born into a world of terabyte storage - you’ll never know the joys of infinite disk swapping! Or the sweet, sweet sounds of Quack and Sosumi.
Anyway, after a couple of years, I traded in my Mac Plus for the finest Mac e.v.e.r. made - the Mac SE. Many tears were shed but the uber coolness of the SE and the awesomest keyboard and mouse Apple ever shipped, made it okay - after a while.
Since then, I have used and owned dozens of Macs - my current computer is a 15″ MacBook Pro. It runs Leopard, has gigabytes of hard disk space, a DVD burner, an aluminum exterior, a glossy screen, a built-in iSight camera, blah, blah, blah. It’s a fantastic Mac and I adore it.
BUT … nothing can compare to the original ‘computer for the rest of us’.
My Mac Plus was never resold by Solutions Unlimited. For a decade and a half, it travelled from one office storage cabinet to another, and finally ended up in Zak and Nuz’s kothri where it rested in dignity for 10 years.
Today, the 6th of May 2008, after 16 years, I have been reunited with the Mac Plus that changed my life.
I can’t stop the tears.
And now, off I go to polish my beautiful Mac Plus back to its original lustre.
The Macs I’ve Owned Over the Years:
