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I had recently bought an Osborne 1 computer when I first saw a Mac. I wanted one. Being able to combine text with graphics was quite a concept for one who was just learning to write, text only, with a word processor. I couldn't afford the Mac, when a box of floppy diskettes was a major expense.
I used the Osborne for 6 years. I outgrew its 200K floppies. Tried an Atari 1040ST because it was cheaper than a Mac, and learned why. Not at all reliable. I wanted a Mac 2cx but couldn't afford that, so I bought a used Mac 512K enhanced and soon upgraded it to a Plus.
At the time the Mac came out, hard disks were about $1000 for a 10MB unit. By the time I bought mine, a 40MB drive was around $750 in an offboard enclosure. That made the machine much more usable, and, for a writer, 40MB was huge.
I did eventually buy the Mac 2cx. Color! 640X480. I got into doing graphics at work, so I took the machine there and bought an SE/30 for home use. I played "The Manhole" and "Cosmic Osmo" on that one. In 1997 I bought a brand-new Power Computing Mac clone. It had a CD-ROM drive, which enabled two things that led to major changes. One was, I played "Myst." The other was that I connected a set of speakers and used the computer to play music CDs. From there I moved to copying a song or two to the hard disk from CDs whose other songs I didn't care for. I played "Riven" on that one also.
For Myst 3 I had to buy a new Mac. That one worked fine but got displaced by a Powerbook I bought so that I could write when making a road trip. When Uru Prologue came out I couldn't play, and actually boycotted the game for a time because I felt Cyan had betrayed their Mac customers. In 2005, though, I caved and bought a PC. I was soon in the Cavern with the other Until Uru players.
The Mac now? It's a Mac Mini that is my all-purpose machine. Runs the 700GB music library, does the broadcasts. I use it for image editing, writing, Email, various other things. I still use the PC too. In the early days there was a clear difference but now, not so much. Macs have become more complicated, while PCs have become better integrated. The biggest reason I still use the Mac is for Nicecast, a very well organized Internet broadcast program that has no match on the PC that I know of.
When I upgraded my 512KE to Plus, a 1-MB Single in-line memory module was $150. That's about what it cost me to put 32GB in the PC. Some things in this world have gotten better.
Oh... I almost forgot. That illustrated story idea I had in 1984? I did a couple of them, and concluded that it was more trouble than it was worth. Then the Web came along, removing the need to print anything. So, now the closest thing I do to illustrated stories are the sculpture reports on my blog. Matching text with images is harder than I thought it would be.
_________________ Want to learn more about the D'ni? Look here: http://www.dpwr.net/
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