They say you can’t go home again, but you can rekindle the flame of a lost love—your first Apple computer.
My first computer had all of eight colors. It was an Apple clone called a Franklin. I got a word processing program, a database and spreadsheet with it. I learned to write simple Basic programs to amuse myself. It was just a computer. When the Franklin went to the highest bidder I got the new Apple II GS.
The GS was a magical machine. It had 256 colors available, 16 at a time. It had a detached keyboard and a mouse. The first disk I fed into it was a color paint program. I sat with my paintbrush and entered an enchanted window to a new electronic world. Wow! Talk about getting hooked! All those brilliant colors, all the sounds, icons, and a whole aisle of software available at the much visited software store. There were plenty of bitmapped fonts available to share with friends.
The first time I ejected a disk by pulling it in the trash can, I had to put it back in to make sure that it hadn’t eaten up my precious data. More and more programs were coming out for this beloved little pre-Mac.
My friend Terry and I were soon into the latest versions of the high-end publishing programs for the Apple II world. We had a 51⁄4” and two 31⁄2” floppy drives, and had the little machine maxed out with memory. We had a fantastic collection of clip art, fonts, programs, and games. We were the envy of everyone at our Apple II User Group. We loved the GS until we realized that no matter how many system upgrades Apple came out with they could never turn this machine into a Mac. It was just too slow.
But it taught us a lot and opened up a whole new world, a world that wasn’t dry and lifeless like the word based computers, but a machine that fit into our visual world.
We saw the future and decided to put down our pens and do our art on computers. We needed a real computer, not a fantastic toy.
Terry got herself the only color Mac available, a Mac II. It had 256 simultaneous colors, real fonts, and professional drawing programs. The laser printer made it into a business machine. We took turns using this dynamo. It could do anything. We put our pens, triangles, templates and everything else in boxes that might never be reopened. We announced to our clients that “we don’t do board work anymore!” We pushed them into our new electronic world.
Soon we had too much work for one machine and I bought an SE. I scrolled around the little screen and soon had a large Radius monitor hooked up to the little computer. I even bought a carrying case for my little Mac and lugged my little “Nugget” around with me.
Even Mac-ers Get the Blues
Years went by and Terry upgraded her “Crystal” to an FX. I maxed out my SE with 4 megs of RAM. Terry drew her own colorful desktop patterns. Big Pat wouldn’t work on anything lower than a II. Color icons started showing up on her desktop. Flying Toasters flapped around her screen. It hurt to look over at her pretty machine and then return to my black & white world.
I publish a monthly family newspaper called the Spicey News. It started on the GS and now is Photoshopped, Quarked, and laser printed. The only problem is that everyone loves all the halftones. The SE gives only a vague representation of the pictures. When we got our new 11 x 17 printer the newspaper went to spreads. Nugget couldn’t even print the file. My Spicey News outgrew my Mac.
Terry got me ‘Prince of Persia’ for Christmas. I loaded it on my machine and it immediately crashed. I had to turn off all of my inits and fonts for it to run. Terry put it on her machine and it ran in Ooh-Ahh Color. It was an almost movie-like experience. Somehow games aren’t the same when rendered with crosshatching and patterns.
Terry was running system 7, which wouldn’t run with my accelerator board. I heard that Radius wasn’t going to offer an upgrade chip. I felt that the Mac world was passing me by and I would be left in the dust of the system 6 world. File sharing, print monitor, multifinder, and most important, pasting pictures of icons in the get info window would never be a part of my world. I spent less and less time at the SE — the magic was gone.
My ears perked up when I heard about the VX. It had a CD. It had a microphone. It had color. It had big problems. I settled down and figured that my little Nugget was still a fine machine. I would wait for the right Mac to come along.
The Centris had a terrible name but was housed in an interesting box, like the VX. Microphone, CD, thousands of colors, 040 chip and eight megs of RAM, and it was expandable every which way to the middle. We would just ‘go look.’ The first store we went to didn’t have one, could maybe get one in 10 weeks. They also didn’t have a 16” Apple monitor. We found a Centris 650 at Computer Warehouse. It was loaded with a demo program and not much else. It didn’t have a CD and there was no price posted for one that did. It was running a 14” monitor — they didn’t have a 16” either. No one came to offer any assistance. We left not knowing any more about the machine than when we had entered.
It was a week later that we decided to take a run into Pennsylvania to MicroCenter — just to look. They had one. It was loaded with Quark, Adobe Illustrator and other current programs. The perfect test was drawing starbursts in Quark. I was used to clicking on one and waiting while Nugget finally got all the points selected and then moving it jerkily around my page. I tried to choke the Centris and drew two and moved them around. The Centris didn’t even blink—it positioned them without any hesitation. “We’ll take two,” I said only half kidding. It was a bit of a squeeze to fit it in my car. The Mac box was ok; it was the monitor box that was really big.
It took us longer to get it out of the car than it took to plug in all the wires. I sat in front of the pretty little machine, pushed the power-on button and heard the happy chime of a post-SE Mac. Picking the proper color for your desktop takes almost as much time as selecting the perfect full color startup screen. The microphone was the next thing to get my attention and soon my voice was heard issuing warnings from my spell checker. The mysteries of file sharing were quickly resolved and Terry and I happily sent files back and forth. The Prince of Persia runs across the machine in all his animated color glory.
We discovered that the CD could run audio disks while you work and continues to run if you crash. It is the ultimate hedonistic experience.
I spent a whole day looking at one CD-ROM — Apple gives you eight. There is so much to explore. It is a hard machine to turn off. I stagger off to bed knowing that there is always tomorrow and another After Dark Module waiting. It is a wondrous machine. The magic is back.
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