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.
The 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.
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.
