My First Mac

A Quadra with ClarisWorks and Mathematica: All You Need for a Thesis

- 2007.08.27

It was early 1995, and I was a young graduate student in the Environmental Engineering department at Clemson University. I was finishing up my research and desperately needed a computer to produce my thesis on. There were quite a few Macs at the University, but the trend towards switching to Wintel was already picking up steam.

I, however, was quite sure that I wanted a Mac. I had enough problems in getting my research finished and my thesis produced - I had no desire to add to my workload by acquiring a non-intuitive and crash-prone Windows PC.

I knew I would need a good bit of CPU horsepower and RAM to pull together my thesis and crunch my research data. But as a starving student with a wife and small child, money was a definite obstacle. After a lot of research I decided that my best bet was a Quadra 605 with a whopping 8 MB of RAM, 14" Apple monitor, and a StyleWriter II printer. I scraped together my savings and bought a used system.

That little computer was all I imagined and more! ClarisWorks was used to produce all the graphics and equations as well as the finished thesis. I have never really found a program since that was as intuitive and full featured.

Towards the end of my thesis, I needed to solve a fairly complicated set of differential equations which described the chemical reactions I had investigated. A copy of Mathematica with it's wonderful symbolic engine came to the rescue. I set up my equations, pushed the button, and hoped for the best. The Quadra chugged all night on it, and the next morning I walked in to find the solution. I quickly verified that the solution was correct and let out a huge sigh of relief, as I could now see light at the end of the tunnel.

I've since gone on to use a lot of computers in my personal and professional life, but there will always be a fondness for the little pizza box Quadra that stuck with me during a challenging time.

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Low End Mac is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Entire Low End Mac website copyright ©1997-2012 by Cobweb Publishing, Inc. unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iPad iPhone, iMac, iPod, MacBook, MagSafe, Mac Pro, Apple TV, and AirPort are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.
  Advice is presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work for all. Please report errors to .
  LINKS: We allow and encourage links to any public page as long as the linked page does not appear within a frame that prevents bookmarking it.
  Email may be published at our discretion unless marked "not for publication"; email addresses will not be published without permission, and we will encrypt them in hopes of avoiding spammers. Letters may be edited for length, context, and to match house style.
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