My Old Mac

My first computer was an Apple Macintosh Plus, all-in-one with a black and white 9 in. screen, a honking 1mb of RAM on board and a low density 3.5in floppy drive. I'd originally wanted an Amiga with color capabilities and games, lots of games. There was a store, a few blocks from our house that sold Amigas. Being older and wiser, dad insisted he knew better. So, we went to Macy's. If they sold it at Macy's, it had to be good, is what I'm thinking was my father's thought. We'd driven into the city and dad got a ticket making a right turn onto 6th Avenue from 34th Street. He'd managed to talk his way out of the ticket for the right turn (dad was registered and licensed in NJ) but he got a ticket for us not wearing seat belts.

After parking and heading into Macy's, we went to the upper level where computers were sold. They'd a nice little area set aside for Apple. The sales person was kind and convincing. I was a dejected. I couldn't/wouldn't plead my case to my father that I really wanted an Amiga. Not this black and white, archaic rock. But I respectfully nodded and smiled, and my father purchased the computer for about $2,000.

I wasn't 100% pleased with the purchase (more like 75%). I unpacked the Plus, set it up and went through the tutorial. This consisted of an audio cassette and floppy disks. Following the instructions from my Walkman®, I was using a mouse for the first time. It wasn't exactly thrilling to have to swap floppies often since there was no hard drive. One disk contained the system and one disk contained the application. The computer had to read from both, and you had only one floppy drive.

I eventually got the hang of a GUI (graphical user interface). MacDraw, MacPaint and MacWrite were the "suite" of applications available for the system. I learned to draw on the computer, pixel by pixel, black and white. I was hooked and the rest is history.

It was a pivotal moment. I'm glad my father made me "pick" the Macintosh because, well... where's the Amiga now? Not to mention, it spawned into a career for me. Father does know best.