Ramblings of a Macophile.

A bit of personal history...

My first Apple was a //e setup purchased in 1983 for $1800 (that's about $4,000 now!!). Blazing speed of 1mHz, 128K memory, two 5.25" drives, Grappler+ and an Epson RX-80. Coupled with Applewriter II and Appleworks, it was a pleasure to use all the way into the early 1990's. DOS 3.3 was less than foolproof, but it had lots of personality. ProDOS was more stable, but required the user to follow a strict naming protocol. A voltage spike in the Language office at school blew out the power supply and the modem with a proper cloud of smoke.

Macs I have known and loved... a Mac Plus (1986); a Classic II (still have it; it works, and makes a great doorstop); an LC (the original, with the 86020 processor); a Quadra 610; a PowerPC G3 (beige, 266mHz); a Powerbook 520 (passive-matrix screen, great for working in full sunlight); a neat Powerbook 540c which succumbed to the dreaded hinge problem and was sold for parts; a Powerbook 1400c (donated), a Lombard (still use) and then a Pismo Powerbook, an iBook G4 1.33 mHz, which I suspect I fried by trying to install a new DC board. Present laptop is an ultra-fast black MacBook.

I scan my slides on a Nikon CoolScan III (scsi) at 2800 dpi. Only an 8-bit scanner, it sometimes leaves a bit to be desired, but it does a decent job. I'm still looking for a good way to clean old slides without scratching them.

I still use Adobe PageMill 3.0 (operating under OS 9.2 in Classic mode) and BBEdit's excellent free TextWrangler for OS X for generating this web site. TRANSMIT by Panic Software is an excellent OS X utility for FTPing very smoothly.

Favorite word game on OS X: Wordsmith by Dracosoft (www.dracosoft.com). On OS 9.2, Columns II. Having sought a similar game under OS X, I've found Cube Rise, a neat Tetris-style challenge.

Member of M.A.C.S., Asheville's MUG.

Back to main page