MacMemories From 1984

November 2, 2020November 2, 2020 Timothy Price57 Comments

I’ve been cleaning out shelves in my office area and I came across the media packets that came with the first Macintosh we got in 1984 followed by the first Macintosh Plus we got in 1986. The Macintosh had 128K of RAM and one 3.5 inch diskette drive, no hard drive. The process for using it was 1) you booted the computer with the System diskette. 2) You ejected the system diskette and inserted the Program diskette and opened the program, such as MacPaint. 3) You MacPainted to create your graphics. 4) You selected Save to save your graphic file, which ejected the Program diskette. 5) You inserted a diskette to save your file. 6) If the diskette wasn’t formatted, then you would have to click on Yes to format the diskette, and 7) save your file.

I’m trying to remember if when you quit the Program and Shut Down the Macintosh if it asked you to put the Program diskette and then the System diskette back in before it shut down, or if it simply ejected whichever diskette was in the drive before it shut down. I think there was a lot of ejecting and inserting the different diskettes before it shutdown.

We got an external disk drive with the first Macintosh Plus, which meant we could have a program diskette in the computer and a file diskette in the external drive. Our next Macintosh plus had two disk drives. We got external hard drives for the Macintosh Pluses before the SEs and SE/30s came out with internal hard drives. When we got one Macintosh Plus and a Macintosh Laserwrtier in 1986, the pair cost over $10,000 — around $3K for the Macintosh Plus and $7K for Laserwriter. That’s around $23,700 ($7.1K and $16.6K respectively) in 2020 dollars. Macintosh computers always came with the system software and at least a sample of programs.

Those were the really expensive, bad old days of computing. The first IBM PC we got, with similar specs (it had two 5.25″ floppy drives) was around $3K in 1981 (~$8,600 today) plus you had to buy whichever DOS you wanted to use, plus buy the programs, the drivers, etc. Nowadays you can easily pay $7,000 or $24,000 or more for a new Macintosh Pro. However, you get a lot of CPUs, RAM, and disk space for the money and a lot of powerful programs included in the price. But most computers today cost a fraction of what they did in the bad old days of computing.

Tire Ironed

November 1, 2020 Timothy Price29 Comments

One way to get your shorts ironed.

Blue

October 31, 2020October 31, 2020 Timothy Price37 Comments

Happy Blue Moon and falling back to standard time from Blue.

Happy Halloween!

October 30, 2020October 30, 2020 Timothy Price61 Comments

From Glenda & Gwendolyn

On The Eve Of Recovery?

October 29, 2020October 29, 2020 Timothy Price41 Comments

Waxing Gibbous Moon at 97.8% full

One would think a Blue Moon on Halloween would foreshadow a coming disaster. However, perhaps the Blue Moon on Halloween 2020 portends restoration and recovery after an already strange and disastrous year.

If you recall, there was a full moon on October 1, 2020, and the moon will be full again on October 31, 2020. As with all notable astronomical events, the world as someone knows it comes to an end, but, then again, a new world opens up for someone else and their self, their being is restored to begin life anew.

As with the few notable astronomical events I can witness, I try to document the events near the day or on the day they happen to keep my own record of each time the world ends and begins again.