My First Mac

First and Second Macs

Kirk Lane - 2000.11.30

I don't even remember what year it was; I was about six or seven at the time (now I'm 17). It was Christmastime - seems that our new computers have always been purchased around December/January.

Anyway, it was our first long-term computer. We'd borrowed a TRS-80 for a bit before it and determined it to be a piece of junk. Anyway, it wasn't exactly a glorious machine - Mac Classic a Macintosh Classic (which the filled-out-but-never-sent registration card specifies as a 2/40 model), 9" black and white screen and all.

The computer bug, and almost as much, the Mac bug, bit me then and there, that Christmas. I still find it funny that while one of the first things I did on that Classic was try to "eject" the hard drive (he he, learned a new word then: reformat) the same way you do a floppy disk, I now can take a box of parts and turn it into a working PC in a few hours.

Not too long thereafter, we traded in the old Classic for our second computer (and what would be our last real Mac, at least so far), a Macintosh LC. Whoa, they have color computers????

I spent countless hours on that computer, namely on games like Spectrum Holobyte's Vette! and Falcon, and Ambrosia's Maelstrom, playing away with that poor little Gravis MouseStick.

A few years later, in 1994, we succumbed to the masses and traded in the LC for a Pentium 90 Windows 3.1 based machine. I'm still using the case, monitor, mouse, and sound card on the very machine I type this on! We've still never gone back to a real Mac, though we finally realized the benefits of multiple computers and networking (we have three PCs and a laptop now).

At any rate, the Mac bug has come back. Starting about two years ago, I found out about some Mac emulators and got Ardi's Executor. It was OK; I thought it rocked, because I had never tried any other emulator and I hadn't really touched a Mac since 1994. I used it solely to play Escape Velocity - that game still rules! Anyway, I recently found Basilisk II and promptly wiped Executor from my drive. I still play Escape Velocity though.

Every so often I take a look on eBay and see if I can't find another 68K Mac so I can have a real one again - and I sigh just a tiny bit inside whenever I see a Classic or an LC (there are quite a few at school, but they're all being used).

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