In my youth, before ever knowing that I would one day feel the absurd and inexplicable urge to be a writer, I liked computers.� Such devices were only beginning to establish themselves in the home, and often were really too simple and strange to be of any practical use, other than for tutoring small children in the things they were busy ignoring at school, or for playing needlessly frustrating "games," or for nerds to learn to program with.� One merry Xmas I was given such a computer, a Texas Instruments 99/4A, and spent many hours delightedly teaching myself to program my very own needlessly frustrating game in BASIC.� For such a computer to have been practical in the processing of words, however, many hundreds of dollars more would need to have been invested in software, a printer, a disk drive, and so on.� And the interface for such a thing would have been anything but understandable to anyone other than a child (or a professional) devoted to learning its gobbledygook.
Early in 1984, Mother brought some work home for the weekend, and to do it with, a Macintosh.� Apparently her boss or bosses (who I'm quite sure were under-worked, overpaid, had enormous egos and couldn't spell to save their lives) wanted the latest, greatest toy to put someone else to work on.� I remember how strange it seemed for a computer to be designed for ease of use, not just for some dweeb to wield while lording his superiority over lesser beings.� Once I got past the initial moments of expecting a prompt to appear, I played with the mouse and cursor, and, being more interested in graphics than words, I skipped over MacWrite and started doodling with MacPaint, drawing a smiling face and spelling out "I (HEART) COMPUTERS," which I printed out and later hung from my desk at school, confirming my geekiness for anyone who had the temerity to doubt it.� I wouldn't use an actual Mac again for many years, but it left a lasting impression, with its tiny boxy shape, its unbelievably sharp little paper-white monitor, and the ease of using its mouse to simply point and click to get things done.
The problem with such an interesting new tool was that it was prohibitively expensive, and it was not in the cards for me to own such a computer until much later.� By then, Microsoft had (in craptacular fashion) copied the interface and jammed it down the throat of what were originally cryptic DOS-based computers, and, most importantly, had made it much cheaper.� And so I used word processors that were eminently functional, but were not anything I could get excited about.� It was not until Steve Jobs returned to Apple that sales increased and prices came down enough so that older model Macs became easily justifiable for a starving writer, often showing up on eBay for little more than the cost of shipping.� From this I have learned an important life lesson--should I desire something I cannot afford, all I must do is wait, let some upper-class twit spend a king's ransom on it, then watch him use it once and stick it in his closet for ten years, and it when it shows up on eBay for twenty bucks, buy it.� Capitalism, I love it!
Here are my favorite (cheap, secondhand) Macs:
Macintosh Classic II - has the original compact Mac shape; with PC Exchange can use DOS disks
PowerBook 540c - excels at running pre-PowerPC software; its keyboard is adequate, not great
PowerBook 1400c/133 - slow, but has the best keyboard ever made and lots of drive options
PowerBook G3 Series (WallStreet) - maybe the all-around best PowerBook, for any purpose
I can assure you I am old enough to have used typewriters (both electric and manual) for many things, work-related and otherwise, and it is precisely because of this that I find sheer joy in the use of word processors.� That said, there are times when it is comforting to know that I do not need electricity to write.� In furnishing my writing space I have prepared for such eventualities as biological terrorism (duct tape), The Great Flood (galoshes), global thermonuclear war (Ray-Bans), the zombiepocalypse (broken pool cue), and simple power outages.� Here are my old-fashioned writing tools of choice, should the juice ever dry up:
10MB RAM
500MB hard drive
System 7.1.1
Microsoft Word 5.1a
RH Webster's Dicitionary
Zip 100+ external drive
36MB RAM
1 GB hard drive
System 7.1.1
Microsoft Word 5.1a
Microsoft Bookshelf '95
PC card expansion slot
64MB RAM
1 GB hard drive
Mac OS 8.1
Microsoft Word 98
Microsoft Bookshelf '95
CD, Zip swappable drives
All contents, except where otherwise noted, are copyright Andrew Lee Hunn.