For the last five years of my life, I have been a Macintosh advocate. Curiously enough, this coincides with the amount of time I have been on the internet. This year, with my high paying corporate job (heh. Courtesy Clerk with the Safeway Corporation), I was able to finally buy my very own Macintosh. Well, last year I bought an IBM clone, and it promptly died. Hard. Curiously enough, my Macintosh is five years old. (August 24, 1995, 6:05 AM)
This is Natasha.
Original Specs (Macintosh Performa 5200):
MacOS 7.5 - It was either 7.5 or one of the many 7.5 updates. I went to www.apple.com and downloaded 7.5.3 and 7.5.5.
PowerPC 603 75mhz - I'm told that although it's a pretty good chip, it's slaved to a crummy motherboard which makes it go much slower than it should.
8 megabytes RAM - Now this is just absurd. I had to use Virtual Memory like nobody's business... There wasn't enough memory to load all of the system extensions under 7.5.3! And MacOS 8.0 just refused to install without 12 megabytes.
4 gigabytes Fixed Drive - Fixed Drive, Hard Drive, whatever. Natasha's previous owner was kind enough to have upgraded the drive (since it's IDE, I figure I could also upgrade it again to 40 gigabytes...) Formatted under HFS, file size is allocated in 65k chunks.
CD-ROM drive - an IDE hard drive but SCSI CD-ROM drive?!? Right. Works well, except when I deal with one audio CD ("The Return of The Aquabats!").
15 inch integrated monitor - It's good to go.
This is Boris.
Original Specs (LaserWriter Select 310):
Laser Printer - If I ever use a non-laser printer again, it won't be because I want to. Although it takes a while to print (transmission between Natasha and Boris happens at 9600 bps), I have superior print quality, as well as never having to think about wet ink again.
Toner / Print head - The print head was contaminated, so when I was printing, it made lines accross the page every so often. This was fixed with new toner; which at $89.95 isn't your cheapest road to hoe.
1.5 megabytes RAM - This printer was not designed to be intuitively upgraded. I plugged in four more megabytes, but I have no idea if it's working. I can't print pictures yet (big ones at least). It supposedly has 5.5 megabytes (I know you OCD nerds are wondering what kind of hell number is 5.5) which is as much as I can cram in there. Although I have another 52 megabytes I'd like to cram in there (52? What kind of number is 52? Shut up, OCD).
Various Upgrades (implemented or planned)
32 megabytes RAM - implemented...I have now 40 megabytes of RAM, enough to play around with Quark XPress and Microsoft Word.
Apple Video System - implemented I have a TV tuner and a video-in card, so I can watch television. Came with a remote control, which will turn the Mac on and off, as well as start the Video application, change channels, mute, adjust the volume, and various other functions. Rock on MacTV!
Power Macintosh 6100/66 DOS - planned, shipping Don't listen to Steve Jobs when he says that new PowerMacintosh G4s are the first computers Apple shipped that are multiprocessor. This baby comes with a 486/66... I hope to do some delphi programming, as well as play the best games of all time (Civilization and Crusader).
PowerBook G3 - dreaming I need a portable Macintosh. I figure I might as well get the one that says "Hey, I could eat you for breakfast, you puny weakling." A fourteen inch active matrix screen, FireWire, DVD, USB... Should I mention it looks sexy too?
