Mac Daniel's Advice

Flea Market Mac #2: The Plus Strikes Back

Manuel Mejia Jr - 2002.02.11

Just as the Mac world marvels over the newest iMac, I came across a Mac that almost single-handedly got the Apple mothership off the ground - the Methuselah of all Macs - the Mac Plus.

I did my regular weekend visit to the flea market and found a Mac Plus. This one was built in 1988. Along with its small, mechanical keyboard and its boxy mouse, it works like a new Mac. The years have done little to this air cooled survivor.

Mac PlusThe vendor was happy to sell it to me with a 20 MB external hard drive. The cost of the Plus with its external hard drive: $17. Try buying a good pair a shoes for that amount of money!

I also had a spare external 800k floppy drive and a box full of blank 800k floppies and "period software" at home. After loading System 6.0.7 and nine different fonts, my wordprocessor of choice for this old timer was the first one I installed on my first Mac - Symantec GreatWorks 1.02.

I also installed MacPaint 2.0, PageMaker 2.0, and a few other items. I was ready to go!

It has been ten years since I touched a compact Mac. As a young freshman in college, I got my first project done on a computer in 1988. The new Student Government Computer Lab had just opened, and it sported two Pluses, a Mac II, and one ImageWriter printer. The programs included MacPaint, HyperCard, and MacWrite.

As limited as it was, the lab was the most advanced on the campus. All of the other labs were still using TRS-80 Model 4 computers!

Since the demand for the Macs was relatively high, I stuck to my typewriter for most of my work. It was not until 1991 that I bought a Mac Classic and StyleWriter printer. It was working with those old Pluses that convinced me to buy a Mac as my first computer.

In the years since my first Mac purchase, I have sold, sent to repair, and worn out several different Macs. While this went on, this Plus (the one that I used to write this article) seema to have defied time itself. It still runs long after its successors bit the dust.

Under System 6, the Plus is a fine computer. It runs period software quickly. It would run faster if it were not for the leisurely pace imposed by the 20 MB external hard drive. The Plus waits while the hard drive stores files and loads instructions onto the RAM.

Editor's note: You can improve hard drive performance on the Mac Plus with SCSI Accelerator 2.1 (on System 6) or SCSI Accelerator 7.0 (for System 7.x).

While experimenting with the Plus, I determined that the error messages of System 6 were a bit better than on more modern Macs. Instead of getting a message that reads, "Could not complete command due to -11 error," the Plus sends a message that says, "Could not complete command because image was too complex to process without 32-bit QuickDraw."

I was surprised to read an error message that was in simple English. Now I know why the Plus was so popular.

I will eventually add an ImageWriter II and a modem to the Plus (now named Chancellor Gorkon, from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country). I will probably paint the Mac Plus so that its sun-discolored case will not continually detract from the Chancellor's grace.

At a time when Macs are sporting flat panels and OS X, it's nice to see that the iMac's ancestor from the decade before the World Wide Web is still running like a machine fresh from the factory. LEM

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