A few months ago I got back an old Mac Plus that my brother had been using as the family computer for several years. He upgraded to a Power Mac, so no longer had any use for it.
I brought it home neatly packed away in its original tote bag (remember those?) and put it away in the attic.
Recently, as I moved some boxes to the attic for my wife, I ran across the computer and decided to take it out of its bag and set it up. I carefully hooked up the small hard drive, mouse and keyboard, then switched on the buttons to give it life.
I soon heard the swirling of the hard drive as it booted the system software, which to my surprise, was version 6.0.8. Having seen old set of System 7.1 disks stored away in the office earlier in the week, I decided to see if the old Plus could run System 7.
Oops! The system software disks were high density and the Plus drive was 800K! I got around this by installing the software onto the external hard drive of the machine using my Power Mac; and then reconnected it to the Plus.
As I powered up again the familiar "Welcome to Macintosh" appeared, along with Balloon Help. The "old man" was running System 7.1!
With only 2.5 megs of ram, I wondered if I could move the machine to Word 5.1. Previously, Word 3.0 is all it had ever seen. I loaded it and everything ran smoothly.
I eventually dusted off old versions of software and installed them to run on the Plus. Everything worked fine--slow at times--but fine.
All in all, I realized the Plus is still a very usable computer. It supports graphics, a modem and other modern computer peripherals. I've read on the Web, where there are sites dedicated to classic Macs, that literally thousands of the computers are still in use today. As I worked with the Plus I wondered how many IBM XTs and ATs are still usable and produce the quality of output still attainable on an old Mac.
I long ago relegated myself to the fact that the Mac wasn't for every computer user. This is despite the fact that when the Mac was launched it was touted as "The Computer for the Rest of Us."
This is what the Mac has become. For those who don't care for the tin can-like feel of DOS/Windows machines, the Mac provides an elegant and intelligent interface. After all, do you buy a Porsche because everyone has one and you want to be like everyone else? Don't think so.
I joined the Mac bandwagon at a time when the Mac was clearly a different kind of computer. It was a time when you simply could not do on an IBM-PC what you could do on a Mac. I still recall the contrast between starting up a Mac and the cryptic amber screen featuring MS-DOS. Different worlds indeed.
Well, those days for the Mac are long gone, but as one who still uses DOS/Windows-based machine at work and a Mac at home, I still get a warm fuzzy from time to time when I see the familiar MacOS come to life.
Old-time Mac users must admit that we face a new day. There are millions of new computer users out there who believe the world begins and ends at Bill Gates' doorstep. They believe there is Windows95 and little else. The Mac is thought by this group to be an band of renegades that refuse to conform to "the system."
I kind of like being different, how about you?