We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
It was sometime in 1988 - I don't remember for sure when - that my
dad came home and announced we were getting a computer. I remembered
thinking that would be really cool, but I didn't know anything about
them, other than the little bit of playing with an Apple II-series
making a robot move at school back in 1986 or so.
I do remember asking if it was going to be colour, and my dad said
he hadn't wanted to spend twice as much (on a Mac II) to get colour. "Ah well," I thought, "No big
deal."
So one day he brought home a Macintosh
SE with a whopping 1 MB of RAM and a 20 MB hard disk, running
System 6.0.2. After a little breaking-in period in which he
familiarised himself with the computer, I finally got turned loose on
it. That is to say, I played hunt-and-peck with the keys and typed up a
few random school assignments.
After a year or two, I had progressed quite a bit, even to the point
where I used the draw functions of Microsoft Works 2.00a in some
letters I typed. (Yes, I really do remember the version.) I still
didn't use the SE for much more than word processing, though.
Sometime in '93 or '94 we upgraded the RAM to 4 MB for the
princely sum of $200 or so. (I think I've since bought about fifty
times that much RAM for significantly less money.)
During my freshman year of high school, in the Fall of 1994, I got
really interested in the Periodic Table of the Elements. A couple of
friends of mine had written a little program for the TI-85 graphing
calculator that would enable you to enter an element number or name or
whatnot and get a bit of information on the element. I took that
concept a step further - well, a lot more than a step, really - and
turned it into a nice point-and-click HyperCard stack. I think I must
have spent all my free time freshman year in high school doing the
research for that and getting it working, all on that SE.
Also around that time, the original Miniscribe hard disk died
(probably due to stiction, to which many Miniscribes have succumbed; I
didn't know enough at the time to give it a sufficient autopsy). We
replaced it with a 160 MB hard drive for "just" $89. (That was a good
deal in 1994-95! And 160MB - who could ever fill that up?) Soon after,
in early 1995, we began to talk about replacing the SE with something
better.
I did most of the research on that purchase, and I think I can
credit my cover-to-cover reading of maybe thirty consecutive
MacWarehouse, CDW, MacMall, MacZone, and MacConnection catalogs (that's
30 of each, not 30 total...) for a lot of my knowledge of Mac hardware
of the era. We settled on a Power Macintosh
7200/90 after considering the options (and, briefly, even
considering Windows boxes). Had I had a bit more foresight, I would
have encouraged my dad to put out the extra $300 and get the 7500/100 -- the 7200, with its complete lack of
upgrades (the only PowerPC-based desktop Mac to bear this
dubious distinction - even the Road
Apple 5xxx and 62/63xx machines can be upgraded to G3s) was just
not worth the small savings in the long run.
We ended up keeping the SE, mostly because my parents had too much
work on it that they didn't want to back up, and because they wanted a
second machine in case either of them need a computer at the same time
I did. Funny how that works out - I can't remember either of them ever
using the SE after we got the 7200. The SE now has an ethernet card
(upgraded in the summer of 2000) in it and that wonderful 160 MB hard
disk.
With a small fleet of some 25 Macintoshes in the house now and my
PowerBook G3 as my main machine, it's easy to forget how it all got
started. Every once in a while, though, it's nice to sit back and
reflect on my Mac beginnings.
