My parents bought a Mac 128K in 1984 (pictured below). The screen stopped working in 1993, and it hadn’t been reliable at that point for a number of years–my dad upgraded to a pair of Mac Pluses when they came out and then later he upgraded again to the Mac II.
There were lots of frustrating things about the Mac 128. Almost no software worked on it, since it was outdated almost immediately with the Mac 512. MacWrite didn’t have a spell check or much of anything else. Only one program could run at a time–no Multi-Finder. A 1mb Mac Plus was a significantly better computer, especially if you had an external hard disk that conveniently fit under the Mac–thus increasing speed, storage capacity, and the height of the monitor. Even the headphone port on the 128 was mono, if I recall correctly.
Yet there was something deeply magical about computing in that era. I spent hours goofing off in MacDraw and MS Basic. At one point, my dad had the system “maxed out” with an Apple 300 baud modem, an external floppy drive, and the ImageWriter I printer. At some point, the modem went away and we were modemless for a number of years, but one day he brought home an extra 1200 baud modem he had at his office and I spent hours sorting out the Hayes AT command set to get it to work–a lot of registers had to be set on that modem; it wasn’t just a simple matter of ATDT555-1212.
That reminds me, I need to call Comcast. It seems that they cut their pricing on 100 Mbit connections.
