KTWV 07 Issue 08: Besides sharing an alma mater...

I recently had an email from 75er David C. King who resides in Toronto, Canada.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that besides sharing a common alma mater, we had another thing in common, our love for the Apple Mac computer. David has been a Mac lover since 1990 - me from 1984.

Here is the "mess" I work in. The headphones allows me to wander around the house and garden listening to the various US Liberal Talk Show programs for which I run a ratings blog and also the great collection of Oldies I have in my iTunes. The cheap Lexmark scanner cum printer helps me get things done quickly. Not visible is the second headphone assembly, a scanner for scanning slides and negatives and another printer for higher print resolution.



In my cellar I also have the first computer I ever used, when I joined the University as a Researcher, the Apple IIc which I later bought at a disposal auction for about Euro 80 along with the original Philips Monitor. I have my first computer purchase for myself, my Mac PowerBook 170, which still works and is great. I bought a second one and used it to repair the original. Then I acquired a couple of MacPlus computers (for about Euro 5 each) followed by an iMac and an eMac (which I got for Euro 120 under insurance when a Power surge burnt out my iMac). I was given a Performa 6400 for doing some work for a friend and I acquired another Performa 6400 as it is such an excellent computer of the past.

But I found David had outdone me. He reported that he has a Mac SE, a Mac Plus, a Mac SE 30 (perhaps 2, he says), an original Mac LC, a Mac IIvx, and assorted others of the same vintage. He also has a Performa 6400, a 9500 (2 of them) running the Mac OSX operating system, an original iMac Bondi, a G3 B&W (one of his daughters uses one at home and another uses her's in the University), and a G4 Sawtooth, and his son at University also has one of these. David thinks that he probably has a 185c as well. Besides, he has lots of hard drives and even a HP mainframe server that he got to work with his Macs.

What David is describing is almost the state of the Microelecronics Laboratory, University of Oulu, in 1992 when I left, where all the really good research work was being done on about 30 Macs of different flavours, in the laboratory. The oldest Mac was still managing the Xray Analsis equipment.

We did not have to ever employ a service engineer as the Macs never gave any trouble. I did a round on a Saturday morning to ensure that there were no problems - and it took me no more than about 2 hours to ensure the next week was smooth sailing for everyone.

I wonder how many of you also preserve your Macs with the due diligence that David and I do?

I know that Arundhati Roy wrote her first bestseller "God of Small Things" on a Mac (she s not a Stephanian but her husband and two kids were).