When was the last time that you got a cassette tape with your new computer?
I found this tape – A Guided Tour of Macintosh — while cleaning out the basement today, and it came with our shiny new Macintosh in 1984. The Mac also came with printed manuals, quick start guides, and countless floppy disks.
That computer, which is still in the basement, didn’t have a hard drive, but we bought an external floppy drive, so we could have two disks available for copying and pasting.
It was way overpriced, compared to the other computers of the time, but we loved it, spent hours staring at that small built-in black and white monitor. Good times!
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We had a Mac Plus, purchased in 1986 with a substantial student discount, meaning it only cost twice what a state of the art IBM compatible was. Wow, I haven’t said “IBM compatible” in years.
We had the external drive, so we were able to run MS Word from one 800kb floppy and save thesis-related documents on the other.
It’s still in the basement, but I doubt we’ve had it out of the case since we moved into this house eleven years ago.
My Dad still has our original 1984-vintage 128k (later upgraded to 512k!!) . A few years ago we discovered my wife’s old Mac Plus with the original 10 MB “Hyperdrive” in a box in our basement. It had been there for something like 20 years, and the box was visibly damaged from one of the 2 minor floods the washing machine had caused in that room over the years. Well you can’t throw away a Mac so we resolved to try eBay, which meant checking the Mac for functionality. That little bugger fired up like it was still 1984. Zero defects, baby!! We started the auction text with “If you’re reading this, you are hands-down one of the coolest people on the planet”, told the story about the flooding….and sold her for over $60. Try THAT with a 20+ year-old IBM compatible!
Brian, my 1984 Mac still fires up too (well, it did when I last checked), and the Mac Book from about 1989(?) still works fine too. Someday I’ll clean out the basement, and try to get $60 for mine too!