Hi!
I'm new to the list but not new to the Mac. Or even new to the old Mac :)
I cut my Mac teeth on the 512Ke's of the computer lab at SUNY / Old Westbury. These were the 512K Macs that had the 800K disk drives, and they were in fact very similar for most everyday purposes to the newer Mac Pluses at the front of the room. (Had half the RAM but for the apps I was using at the time that wasn't relevant; didn't have SCSI but again, who cared? The keyboards didn't have the numerical keypads that the Mac Plus keyboard had, but for the third time that didn't bother me much).
System 3 was the reigning OS. We traded fonts from one copy of the OS (on floppy of course) to another, using Font/DA Mover and swapping floppies back and forth, back and forth. I soon had an astonishing number of fonts, with many families present in a wide range of point sizes (bitmap fonts, of course). Later, I designed my own fonts in Altsys FONTastic.
When I had the money, I bought my own (used) Mac, an SE with the SuperDrive and a 40 MB internal HD. I'd upgraded to System 4 when it came out, and then went on to System 6 when I got the SE (although I also booted it in 4 some of the time). Got a 2400 baud modem to connect to the university's terminal and got hooked on BBS dialups in the area, downloading shareware like DiskInfo, SFVol, Compact Pro, GIFConverter... also had some commercial extensions like OnCue, a really cool launcher, and DOSMounter, which was infinitely cooler than that awful File Exchange program that Apple included for accessing files on DOS diskettes.
I didn't care for System 7 for a long time after it came out: I had a machine that maxxed out at 4 MB of RAM, was never going to do virtual memory, and I had a zillion macros in Apple's MacroMaker which wasn't System 7 compatible and neither was OnCue, and I just didn't see any advantage to switching to an OS that stuck you in MultiFinder full-time whether you liked it or not! So I used System 6 up until 1994 or thereabouts. By then my SE was my second-tier machine, playing second-fiddle to a PowerMac, and it had an Applied Engineering '030 accelerator card in it which they finally made good on (just before AE folded, in fact) and modified it to address up to 16 MB of RAM. So I had a 16 MB System 6 machine, finally used MultiFinder full-time, and eventually switched to System 7.
Jump to the present. Someone left behind an original LC and I rescued it from being tossed out. The LC lets me experience an era that I bypassed: System 6 in color!
I have the LC online and have some questions and advice-requests and whatnot that I'll be posting about.
Maybe I can help answer other folks' questions too :) -- Allan Hunter
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter>
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