[Leica] Apples vs. Dells vs. Lenovos, vs. etc

[lrzeitlin at aol.com (lrzeitlin)]

In response to both Marks:

My 1984 Mac was the original 128 KB model that the girl in the track suit 
with the hammer induced me to buy. I also got the absurdly expensive add-on 
floppy drive. The computer was sold through the Apple University Consortium. 
You paid your money up front, about $2500 as I remember, and then waited 
several months for the computer to arrive. Just like Hitler sold 
Volkswagens. Apple apparently used the prepayment money to start up the 
assembly line. The Mac replaced an Apple Lisa which was a nice but very 
unreliable desk hogging computer and far too expensive. Later the Mac was 
upgraded to a mind blowing 512 KB ram.

My computer epiphany occurred when I first plugged the Mac in. Everything 
worked the first time. No smoke! OS 1.0 was intuitive. My 8 year old 
daughter was drawing pictures in MacDraw and writing little stories in 
MacWrite in minutes. A far cry from every computer I had used before. Just 
like an automatic P&S camera compared to a Barnack Leica. I was forced to 
use IBM PCs at work. IBM gave us free computers but I stayed with Macs at 
home, through just about every model from the SE to the latest iMac. The 
increase in Apple stock price has supported this addiction. From the initial 
purchase price of $7 a share, through two 2:1 splits, to it's current level 
of about $150 a share. It truly was the computer for the rest of us.

For the couple of people who asked, the computer I worked with in the 1950's 
was the Aiken Mark II, an electro mechanical kluge that filled a large room 
and had the power of a modern pocket calculator. But it was state of the art 
then.

For those of you that care about such stuff, the absolute best work 
processing program for older Macs is WriteNow. It is a blazingly fast 
program that puts the word processing ability of MS Word to shame. 
Unfortunately since it was written in machine language it won't work on the 
Intel Macs.?

Larry Z

Original message:

> Twin floppies are a must have though $495 for the external floppy is a
> bit steep it will save days of disk swaps when you are loading
> programs like Lotus Jazz or Ashton Tate's Full Write Professional
> though for Full Write you might want to bite the bullet and spend
> $1200 to get 4 one MB sticks of 1120ns or faster RAM and the MacPlus
> Upgrade Kit for $1995 for the logic board and drive. And while the
> machine is apart you might as well upgade the flyback transformer.
> On Jul 24, 2009, at 11:31 AM, Mark Rabiner wrote:
----------
>>> Enough computer partisanship. I've been working with computers
>>> since 1950
>>> (really) and ALL computers fail - usually at the most inconvenient
>>> time. Sonny
>>> may well have gotten a lemon but Apple laptops (except for the 5300
>>> disaster)
>>> have proven unusually reliable. My 1984 era Mac is still working.
>>>?
----------
>>?
>> Twin floppies?
>>?