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My First Mac

Mac LC III Still a Most Useful Machine

Jeff Gaskill - 2008.07.30

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My wife worked for a printing company, and in 1997 her boss thought that their Macintosh LC III was broken and asked me if I wanted to play with it. It turned out to be a simple repair to the video connector.

This began a love affair that will last as long as they make Macs.

Macintosh LC III

I bought a modem and used it for AOL 2.7 email. I loved the AOL content pages. As the Internet started to creep into AOL, the LC III started bogging down.

It was about that time that my daughter was going away to college. The LC III was my only rock solid computer with a printer (a StyleWriter II). Off it went to be my daughter's only computer, and the only desktop in her dorm room. Often made fun of, it had a keyboard with the best feel and was easier to type on than more expensive laptops.

That old computer and printer ended up cranking out a dorm room full of assignments and term papers flawlessly for three years until we broke down and bought our daughter a laptop for her senior year. I brought the LC III home and stored it away, only taking it out once in a while to see if it still worked.

A few years later I started to teach Sunday school at my local church. Looking for new and interesting ways to get the kids to focus on what we were going to learn that day, I thought of the LC III and HangMan to guess the word and memory verse for the day. The kids loved the cute old computer that was so different than the new ones that they used at home. I use the slideshow feature in ClarisWorks to "PowerPoint" the key points of the story on the screen. (I wish I could find the same feature in current software.)

I am now at the point that I don't know what I will do without the LC III. I may have to stockpile some to keep them going. The LC III will never run out of usefulness in our classroom. I have and still own many Macs, but the LC III will always have a special place in my family.

I have never had a more useful machine.

Share the story of your first Mac experience by emailing with "My First Mac" as your subject.

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