Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/07/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Larry- My sister had one of the first 128k Macs in Albany when she was a new state auditor minion, long before she became the Grand Pumbaa of the New York State Paper Clip Stash or whatever she is now there. She defected to the 'dark side' though. Has one of those plastic digicams too. Barbarian. The scary thing is that your then eight-year-old daughter is probably worried about her 401K. Charlie On Jul 24, 2009, at 5:38 PM, lrzeitlin wrote: > In response to both Marks: > > My 1984 Mac was the original 128 KB model that the girl in the track > suit with the hammer induced me to buy. I also got the absurdly > expensive add-on floppy drive. The computer was sold through the > Apple University Consortium. You paid your money up front, about > $2500 as I remember, and then waited several months for the computer > to arrive. Just like Hitler sold Volkswagens. Apple apparently used > the prepayment money to start up the assembly line. The Mac replaced > an Apple Lisa which was a nice but very unreliable desk hogging > computer and far too expensive. Later the Mac was upgraded to a mind > blowing 512 KB ram. > > My computer epiphany occurred when I first plugged the Mac in. > Everything worked the first time. No smoke! OS 1.0 was intuitive. My > 8 year old daughter was drawing pictures in MacDraw and writing > little stories in MacWrite in minutes. A far cry from every computer > I had used before. Just like an automatic P&S camera compared to a > Barnack Leica. I was forced to use IBM PCs at work. IBM gave us free > computers but I stayed with Macs at home, through just about every > model from the SE to the latest iMac. The increase in Apple stock > price has supported this addiction. From the initial purchase price > of $7 a share, through two 2:1 splits, to it's current level of > about $150 a share. It truly was the computer for the rest of us. > > For the couple of people who asked, the computer I worked with in > the 1950's was the Aiken Mark II, an electro mechanical kluge that > filled a large room and had the power of a modern pocket calculator. > But it was state of the art then. > > For those of you that care about such stuff, the absolute best work > processing program for older Macs is WriteNow. It is a blazingly > fast program that puts the word processing ability of MS Word to > shame. Unfortunately since it was written in machine language it > won't work on the Intel Macs. > > Larry Z > > Original message: > >> Twin floppies are a must have though $495 for the external floppy >> is a >> bit steep it will save days of disk swaps when you are loading >> programs like Lotus Jazz or Ashton Tate's Full Write Professional >> though for Full Write you might want to bite the bullet and spend >> $1200 to get 4 one MB sticks of 1120ns or faster RAM and the MacPlus >> Upgrade Kit for $1995 for the logic board and drive. And while the >> machine is apart you might as well upgade the flyback transformer. >> On Jul 24, 2009, at 11:31 AM, Mark Rabiner wrote: > ---------- >>>> Enough computer partisanship. I've been working with computers >>>> since 1950 >>>> (really) and ALL computers fail - usually at the most inconvenient >>>> time. Sonny >>>> may well have gotten a lemon but Apple laptops (except for the 5300 >>>> disaster) >>>> have proven unusually reliable. My 1984 era Mac is still working. >>>> > ---------- >>> >>> Twin floppies? >>> > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information > Charlie Meyer West Virginia Coordinator Basset Rescue of Old Dominion, Inc. (BROOD) Droolassic Park Keyser, WV Basset Hound Rescue: Work With Women. Pick Up Dogs.