My first first Mac was an original Macintosh (128K), which my parents purchased for me back in 1985. My second Mac was a Mac LC which I got in late ’91. After about a year, it was Amigas and PC’s for me exclusively until I was lured back to the Macintosh camp by Apple’s purchase of NeXT (read: NeXT’s takeover of Apple) and their decision to use the NEXTSTEP operating system as the basis for the future Mac OS. I made this decision during late summer of ’98 and from there it was a matter of waiting for Apple’s new, rumored Power Macintosh which would feature styling aking to the recently introduced iMac. After a five month wait, the “Blue & White” Power Macintosh G3 was released at MacWorld Expo San Francisco in January of ’99.

The unit’s ‘Yosemite’ motherboard was housed in the ‘El Capitan’ tower enclosure, a most stylish and striking mini-tower case that was the same color as Apple’s “blueberry” iMac, released at the same event. The ‘El Capitan’ was the first of the swing-open style towers, a design that carried into all following G4’s and offers arguably the most accesibility of any tower case ever designed. I ordered one the day it was introduced. I got the top of the line unit, featuring a G3 processor running at 400MHz with 1MB of 200MHz L2 cache. It was a notable upgrade from my Windows 95-running, AMD K6 233-based PC. Anticipation of the unit caused me to setup a “PC to Mac” website, which I later molded into Blake’s Blue & White Page (which I never took very far). The machine ran OS 8/9 wonderfully, if proving a bit lightweight when it came to running the first versions of Mac OS X when it finally arrived (though I hear the B&W’s run Panther quite nicely). It served me well for two and a half years, when we parted ways as I moved up to the top-end machine announced at MacWorld Expo New York in the summer of 2001, a “Quicksilver” dual G4 800. The trusty B&W G3 fetched $1,100 on eBay (monitor not included)—try to find that kind of value retention on a two and a half year old PC….

At any rate, the point of this post is that I stumbled across an eBay auction for a mint condition, still-in-tube Apple poster promoting this great machine and I had to grab it given the special place in my heart for this machine. I think the framing turned out great. It now hangs in my own “byte cellar,” the basement computer room. Have a look for yourself!

It finally happened. HyperCard is gone.

More than 16 years since its original debut, HyperCard was pulled from Apple’s site towards the end of last month (March 2004). Created by Bill Atkinson of the original Macintosh team, HyperCard was a kind of easy-to-use, visual database system / programming environment that put custom application development into the hands of the average person. It was one of the very first applications to implement the concept of hypertext / hyperlinking / hypermedia. Originally offered freely to all Mac users, HyperCard was embraced by so many and became the vehicle of so much custom development that even the author was taken aback.

Many may recall the popular games by Macintosh development house, Cyan, who used HyperCard to create the landmark titles: The Manhole, Cosmic Osmo, and MYST.

Though many years had passed since Apple last updated HyperCard, version 2.4.1 (from 1998) has been available as a free download on Apple’s site until a few weeks ago. While the product was in great need of modernization, lacking many features that would be obvious additions today, there is no real, equivalent alternative for would-be HyperCard users/developers to turn to, which, I believe, speaks volumes as to the creative genius that went into the product. Many lament the passing of this old friend, and will not let its ride into the sunset go unnoticed.

During its life, HyperCard was ported to the Apple IIgs

In the middle of a regular session of googling for some vintage hardware info, I ran across a rather unique and notable site: The Mac Plus Web Server. Clicking that link will take you to a rather small site that is served on a 17+ year old Mac Plus, entirely from floppy disk. And not only is there text, but also graphics and a QuickTime movie as well. Not the fastest site you will ever have encountered, but an impressive effort. While I do put my Mac Plus to use every so often (frequently, of late), it has not been used in such a novel way.

Almost two years ago now, I purchased an original Macintosh 128K (model M0001) from a vintage Macintosh listserv. The serial # tells me it was teh 1901st Mac produced during the 38th week of 1984. Interestingly, I had never plugged it in to verify its operation. I mentioned recently finding a keyboard for the original Mac 128K to go with this unit as it came to me with a Mac Plus keyboard, and the keyboard on my in-use Mac Plus died, so I’ve commandeered the Plus keyboard from the 128K to use with my Mac Plus. Having received this keyboard, I decided to hook it all up and see what happened.

After plugging it all together and crawling about under the desk for a bit in search of a free outlet, the switch was flipped and it fired up fine and seemed to boot perfectly into Finder 5.1. I also discovered that it’s got 512K in it, apparently having been upgraded at some point in its life. After a few minutes of playing around, back in its Willow Mac carrying bag it went, off to spend a few more years in deep hibernation, doubtless.

I did take a picture while it was up and updated The List accordingly. The photo makes for an interesting “then to now” piece noting in the shot the edge of one of the 20″ Cinema Displays hooked to my dual processor G4 running Mac OS X “Panther” v10.3.