January 16 is the 20th anniversary of the Mac Plus, which some consider the
first real workhorse Mac - the first with SCSI connectivity, the first
with RAM expandability, the first that supported double-sided floppies,
the first that shipped with a numeric keypad on the keyboard, the first
to support LocalTalk networking. And for me personally, it was my first
Mac.
My first "computer" wasn't a Mac, but rather a big old Wangwriter II
dedicated word processor that a cousin of mine obtained surplus from
the telco he worked for which was switching to 386 PCs in its office
operation.
The Wang was actually a very decent tool, with the most
user-friendly command line/menu-driven interface I've ever used and an
excellent keyboard. It had a decent daisywheel printer built in. I
still have it, and it still works, running off 5-1/4" floppy system
disks.
My First Mac
However, in 1992, in one of those life-transforming watershed
coincidences, I got a magazine writing and editing gig with a publisher
that had an all-Mac shop, so a reasonable requirement was for me to get
a Mac in order to be able to file stories on 3-1/2" floppies and also
handle graphics, which the Wang couldn't do.
As it happened, a university professor friend was going through a
divorce at the time and had a 1988 "platinum" Mac Plus rig for sale,
including a whopping 20 MB Seagate MacCrate external hard drive and an
ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer, which I agreed to buy for a bit less
than the price of a new iBook today.
The whole works came in the original shipping boxes with real
printed manuals for everything (many manuals) and a bunch of floppy
disks for the software, which included HyperCard and Microsoft Word 4.
Upgrades
The old Mac Plus had a whole megabyte of RAM and an 8 MHz 68000
Motorola processor. It was running Mac system 6.0.1, which I soon
upgraded to System 6.0.3 in order to support Microsoft Word 5.1 (when I
bought the Word upgrade).
I soon got tired of having to quit one program in order to start up
another, so I had the RAM upgraded to a luxurious 2.5 MB, which
involved removing two of the four 256 KB SIMMs and replacing them with
two 1 MB modules. That cost me nearly $100 as I recall, so I
didn't max out the RAM to the Plus's limit of 4 MB, but 2.5 MB
allowed me to keep my two main production applications, Word and
HyperCard, open simultaneously using System 6's MultiFinder, which was
what I had been after.
Stability
With its little 9" 1-bit monochrome screen, you had to scroll to
read a single page of text, but the display was satisfyingly sharp. I
found the Plus to be a very stable setup, and it virtually never
crashed running System 6.
It was also not nearly as slow as you might imagine. Using the
software of the day, performance was pretty decent. Word 5.1 was a bit
sluggish, but Word 4 ran very nicely, and I fell in love with
HyperCard, especially it's bitmap graphics module.
Zen-like Simplicity
I was amazed at how small the Plus' 9" screen was, but it was also
exceptionally sharp and bright, and the Mac GUI was a revelation after
the hybrid command line and menu driven Wang software. There was
something almost magical about it, an aura enhanced by the lovely (some
have suggested "Zen-like") simplicity of the System 6 interface.
Another analogy would be the the "purity" of old, black & white
movies or first-rate black & white photography. I still think
System 6 is probably my favorite version of the Mac OS appearance-wise,
and I'm serious when I say I wish there were a System 6 "skin" for
OS X. I'll bet it would be really fast.
The mouse was a new experience as well, and for the first bit I
missed controlling everything from the keyboard, but I soon got used to
mousing. The Apple keyboard, however, was pathetic compared to the
lovely one on the Wang - which is still nice by today's standards.
A 20 MB hard drive seems quaintly small by today's standards. A lot
of applications nowadays occupy more hard drive real estate than that,
but I never did completely fill the MacCrate during the year that the
Plus served as my main axe. And, of course, it was easy to back
everything up on floppy disks.
Old Faithful
The Mac Plus was a faithful workhorse that taught me the basics of
Mac computing. When I upgraded to a faster machine, I kept it around as
a backup computer and still used it a fair bit. It had the happy
facility of being able to boot from a floppy disk, which allowed you to
work in blessed silence with the hard drive shut down, since the Plus,
like the second generation CRT G3 iMacs and the G4 Cube, was cooled by
convection and had no cooling fan.
One of the things I used to love about the Plus was that System 6
and a text editor fit on an 800K floppy disk, so I could boot the
machine from that and work in silence, disturbed only by the clicking
of the keys and occasional grunts from the floppy drive. The fanless
engineering was not an unmixed blessing, however, and its
inefficiencies probably contributed to the high failure rate of Mac
Plus video power supplies.
The Mac Plus was conceived and designed before the Internet - at
least the public Internet - was a reality. However, we eventually got
the old machine online using System 7.0, which was painfully slow but
facilitated using Eudora Light 1.5 for email. There were also some
primitive browsers (e.g., MacWeb) that supported the 68000 Macs, a but
I never had much luck with them - and the 1-bit black & white
monitor was ill-suited to Web work in any case.
After a year working on the Mac Plus, I was ready for more
performance and thought a bigger, color monitor would be nice as well,
so I bought a new LC 520 with a
really nice 14" Trinitron display - a machine that served me well for
nearly three years, until it took a back seat to my first
PowerBook.
Mac a Revelation
The little Mac with its Graphical User Interface was a revelation,
although I didn't much like the mouse at first, and the Apple keyboard
was pathetic compared to the lovely one on the Wang. However, the
graphical user interface displayed on the Plus's sharp little 9" black
& white CRT was wonderful, and I was able to submit stories on
floppy disk in MS Word format (first 4.0, later 5.0).
I still had to mail my story disks (no Internet yet), but it sure
saved a lot of printing and retyping at the other end. However, a lot
of the publishers I sold to in the mid-80s weren't equipped to handle
digital submissions, so I gave the old dot-matrix ImageWriter II a good
workout for a few years as well, even long after I upgraded to a brand
new LC 520 in January '94.
I still have both the Mac Plus and the LC 520, and they still work
fine, although they don't get booted up very often. The last time I had
the Plus out of its box was in the summer of 2003.
It has both System 7.0 and System 6.0.8 installed (with 6 on a
second partition - yes, I even partitioned a 20 MB drive!), the latter
being much better suited to the Plus's modest power.
Incidentally, even with two partitions, two operating systems, a
couple of word processors (including Microsoft Word 5.1), email
software, a graphics program or two, and sundry archived document
files, there it still about 5 MB free on the 20 MB drive. That
shows how bloated today's software is by comparison.
I still think that the razor-sharp monochrome displays that Apple
used in these early compact Macs are cool, albeit not up to the job of
Web surfing and the like today. It does bring back pleasant memories of
my early adventures in the Mac world.
The conundrum is what to do with the old Plus. We're trying to cut
down on clutter in the house, and as cool and nostalgic as it is, I
can't imagine ever actually using the old Mac for work again. I'm only
a computer "collector" by default, not avocation.
I'm thinking that perhaps I should sell the Plus, if I can find it a
good home. So, if anyone out there is interested, make me an offer
(highest or any not necessarily accepted).
