I have always had a thing for Macs since I first played with my good friend Ken Halls Macintosh 512KE back in 1986. Once I laid eyes on the GUI and started messing with the software, I was hooked. In the early 90’s after lusting after Steve Jobs masterpiece NeXT machines, I finally dropped a whole lot of cash on my first Mac, knowing that the NeXT was out of my league.
After months of stopping at the BYU Bookstore, scoping, preping and lusting after those Macs, Apple finally came out with one that I could afford…well loan myself into is more like it. It was a package deal, Mac IIsi, 14 inch monitor, Apple ADB keyboard and mouse. Oh this baby was loaded with all the best Apple could offer..and corners Apple could cut to keep the price down. 2 MB yes MB of juicy ram, 40 MB, yes MB of hard drive space, running a Motorola 68030, at a whopping 20 MHz –oh and yes. Macintosh System OS 6.0.7.
All the for educations goodness price of for $3100. Back then education discount actually meant something and I think I saved over $750 bucks over retail. Apple was one of those companies that knew to be popular, you needed to get your tools into the hands of the future working folks–that meant saturate colleges with your tools and once day they will take thier love of the Mac to the working sect.. and it worked.
I used my entire pPell grant fo that semester on this new Mac..and laser printer too. I was so jazzed. Did all my research and according to MacUser Magazine, the Qume CrystalPrint Publisher II was the laser printer to get with genuine Adobe PostScript. None if this ink jet crap using QuickDraw, I needed true Adobe PS for real desktop publishing horsepower! This thing was fab..btw, it cost be a cool $2100. Oh but I’m not done yet. Who can do anything with only 2 MB fo ram? Not me either. So I maxed out my Citibank credit card with 4 – 4 MB SIMMS fo this bad bot, so now I was sporting 17 MB RAM! Oh $700 for the RAM upgrade. Too bad the OS could not access that much RAM and I had to use the rest of the RAM as a RAM disk.
Who remembers Connectix Virtual?
Aaaaa the good old days.