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For some reason, not really by design, I’ve often tended over the past decade to buy computers close to the turn of the year. My first Mac arrived just before Christmas in 1992 -- my first real computer, although I had a big old office model Wang word processor before that.

I bought the “platinum” Mac Plus used from a university professor friend on the other side of the country. The agreed upon price was Can$1,000, and the deal included an ImageWriter II dot matrix printer (which I still have and use), and an external 20 MB Seagate MacCrate hard drive.

The whole works came in the original shipping boxes with real print manuals for everything (many manuals) and a bunch of floppy disks for the software, which included HyperCard and Word 4.

I was amazed at how small the 9 in. screen was, but it was also exceptionally sharp and bright, and the Mac GUI was a revelation to after the hybrid command line and menu driven Wang software. The mouse was a new experience as well, and for the first bit, I missed controlling everything from the keyboard, but I soon got used to mousing.

The Mac Plus came with one whopping whole MB of RAM, and had a 8 MHz 68000 chip, which even in ‘92 was pretty slow. I soon got tired of having to quit one program in order to start up another, and upgraded to 2.5 MB of RAM, which involved removing two of the four stock 256 K. SIMMS, and replacing them with two 1 MB modules. That cost me nearly $100 as I recall, so I didn’t max out the RAM to the Plus’s limit of 4 MB. 2.5 MB let me run Word and HyperCard simultaneously using System 6’s “MultiFinder” mode.

A 20 MB hard drive seems quaintly small by today’s standards. A lot of applications nowadays occupy more hard drive real estate than that, but I never did completely fill the MacCrate up during the year that the Plus served as my main ax. And of course it was easy to back everything up on a floppy disks.

I upgraded the system software and from version 6.0.1 to 6.0.3 in order to support the upgrade to Word 5.1 that I purchased in early 1993, but actually, Ward 4 was better suited to the Mac Plus.

I found the Plus to be a very stable setup, and it virtually never crashed running under System 6. It was also not nearly as slow as you might imagine, at least when it was running contemporary software.

The Mac Plus was a faithful workhorse that taught me the basics of Mac computing. When I upgraded to a faster machine, I kept it around as a backup computer, and still used it a fair bit. It had the happy facility of being able to boot from a floppy disk, which allowed you to work in blessed silence with the hard drive shut down, since the Plus, like the second generation CRT iMacs and the G4 Cube, was cooled by convection and had no cooling fan. The fanless engineering was not can unmixed blessing however, and its inefficiencies probably contributed to the high failure rate of Mac Plus video power supplies.

The Mac Plus was conceived and designed before the Internet -- at least the public Internet -- was a reality, however, we eventually get the old machine online, using System 7.0, which was painfully slow, but facilitated his using Eudora Light 1.5 for email. There were also some primitive browsers (e.g.: MacWeb) that supported the 68000 Macs, a but I never had much luck with them, and the one bit black-and-white monitor was ill-suited to Web work in any case.

After a year working on the Mac Plus, I was ready for more performance, and thought a bigger, color monitor would be nice as well. I considered a Color Classic, which was essentially a 16 MHz 68030 Mac LC in a slightly enlarged compact Mac all in one case, with a tiny jewel of a 10” Sony Trinitron color monitor. However, an even bigger screen appealed, and reviews of the modular, 25 MHz, 68030 Mac LC III had been very approbative.

In the end, what I got was a sort of melding of the two initial candidates -- an LC 520, which was an all in one with a 14 in., 640 x 480 Trinitron display and an LC II motherboard.

I ordered the LC between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, 1993, MacBoutique in Montreal at the time was the first mail-order Mac systems reseller in Canada, and they offered the LC III for Can$1,795, with an 80 MB hard drive, or for Can$1,899 with a 160 MB hard drive. Adding a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and CD-ROM drive would bring the total damages to about Can$2,500 for an LC III rig, but they also offered the LC 520, which was targeted mainly at the education market, for Can$2400, including the built-in monitor, a keyboard, mouse, a 2X CD-ROM drive, plus built in stereo speakers, and a 160 MB hard drive.

The LC arrived in the first week of 1994. It was a lot bigger and faster than the Plus, and the Trinitron monitor seemed enormous after the little 9” unit. It came with System 7.1, which was a nice, stable build of the Classic Mac OS. I was pleased with my purchase. Having 8 MB of RAM was a luxury. I could keep all of my applications open! The 160 MB hard drive seemed cavernous, although I soon discovered how illusory that impression was. Having a CD-ROM drive was a whole new adventure in computing.

On the downside, the 520’s floppy drive seemed cheap and rough compared with the smooth and slick “slurp” 800k floppy drive in the Plus, although it did have the happy facility of being able to read and write 1.4 MB high-density floppies, as well as PC formatted disks.

I also was not smitten with the LC 520’s angular styling, and it never grew on me. The sound quality from the built-in speakers was a disappointment, with very pour bass response, and distortion at more than moderate volume.

Back in the positive column, the 520 had a comprehensive complement of Mac ports, including modem and printer serial ports, a SCSI port, two ADB ports, mic and sound out ports. The motherboard could slide out of a hatch in the back like pulling a drawer out in a cabinet, making things like RAM upgrades or PRAM battery replacement a breeze. There was also a PDS slot, but I never figured out anything useful to do with it.

I eventually upgraded the RAM to 20 MB, with a 16 MB upgrade (which involved removing a 4 MB SIMM from the RAM slot), and added a U.S. Robotics 28.8 modem for Internet use. I eventually upgraded through Systems 7.5, 7.5.3, 7.5.5, 7.6, 7.6.1, and ultimately “downgraded” back to 7.5.5 after I discovered that my scanner software wouldn’t work with System 7.6.x. However, I retained the Open Transport from 7.6 for Internet support.

The LC 520 served as my main workhorse Mac for nearly three years, and is still working fine as my wife’s word-processing and e-mail machine at 9 years old. It has been very reliable, the only serious problem being when the sound output became erratic at about eight months into its first year, at which time the cooling fan also became very noisy (a coincidence). Apple replaced both the motherboard and the fan under warranty, and the LC has been as dependable as an anvil ever since.

The Mac that replaced the LC wasn’t really a Christmas computer, but not far off. I bought the PowerBook 5300 in November, 1996. By Christmas, I was a complete laptop convert. I am partial to small computers, and the fanless PowerBook also facilitated the return of silent computing, booted from a RAM disk, with the hard drive spun down. Bliss.

My 5300 was a base model, with a 100 MHz 603e processor, a 9.5 in. grayscale screen, a 500 MB hard drive, and 8 MB of RAM. I paid Can$1,799 for it, and added a 16 MB RAM upgrade module for another $225.

While the PowerBook 5300 has one of the spottiest reputations of any Mac ever made, mine, which has belonged to my daughter since early 1999, has been a reliable and mostly trouble-free machine, now entering its 7th year of service. The only hardware failure has been a broken trackpad button, and that was repaired gratis under Apple’s REA service extension program for the 5300, at which time the entire case plastics were replaced as well, although the original case was still in good condition. I continue to have great affection for the 5300.

My next Christmas PowerBook wasn’t really mine. In 1998, and my son was running a mac service and support business, and we signed on as sales agents for one of the Nova Scotia Apple resellers, to promote Macs in our end of the province. We were issued in a demo “MainStreet” G3 Series PowerBook -- one of the 233 MHz cacheless models to with a passive matrix 12.1 in. display, and that November Tristan bought a WallStreet/“PDQ” 233 MHz model with a 512 MB L2 cache and an active matrix TFT 12.1” monitor.

I liked Tristan’s PowerBook, and even 233 MHz of G3 power was mighty impressive after two years on a 100 MHz PowerBook 5300, so I decided try working on the MainStreet demo for a while over the Christmas season. It didn’t take long to get me hooked. I really didn’t mind the passive matrix display, and the cacheless G3 seemed very lively compared to what I was used to. I loved the keyboard, and still consider the WallStreet/MainStreet/PDQ keyboard as the best I’ve ever used on any computer for feel and comfort. Shortly after Christmas, I ordered a machine identical to Tristan’s.

Until the first of August this year, I would have said that WallStreet was the best Mac I had ever owned. I used it as my main workhorse for three and one-half years, upgrading from the original 2 GB hard drive to a 10 MB unit, upping the RAM from the 96 MB I bought with it to 192 MB, and adding USB and FireWire PC Card adaptors.

Unfortunately, after never giving a hint of trouble from the time it was new, my WallStreet suddenly died last summer. I suspect that the Power Manager Unit failed, but I don’t know for sure. I may get around to repairing it someday.

The three other Macs I’ve bought since the WallStreet don’t really have much of a Christmas connection -- a new, leftover UMAX S-900 in May 2000, a G4 Cube in May, 2001, and the Cube traded for a 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook in October, 2001.

This Christmas season, I’m deliberating over whether to purchase a new iBook, before Apple pulls the plug on OS 9 nine dual-booting next month. I haven’t made up my mind yet. My budget has been taking some health-related hits recently, and the Pismo is working great, albeit not a very fast in OS X.

However, the new, lower price and Quartz Extreme support on the latest iBook are enticing, so we’ll see. I won’t have one for Christmas, but possibly not too long after.

Charles W. Moore

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