to announce the recent acquisition of a used machine?

It's a B&W tower (I've used one at work for, geez, four years this May, and it's been a warhorse) tricked out w/1GB RAM and a 500mhz G4 upgrade card. A SCSI card permits the use of my legacy storage devices (a Zip 250 and a Fujitsu 640SE magneto-optical drives), and an obscure orphaned "Dayna EtherPrint-T" box permits my trust HP LaserJet 6MP to talk to the tower. I've upgraded from one of the more obscure Mac models, the G3 AIO (a heroic, albeit lavishly ugly machine--think of the original Mac form factor injected with growth hormones and styled by the chap who prepared Karloff for camera in 1931), and am using OS X day-to-day for the first time. If I can get the USB scanner to speak to the system and get the ethernet router to get past the PPPoE my service provider appears to require...why, then, I'll be a happy camper.

cordially,

...'cause it's a really, really ugly box--ugly enough that one's aesthetic meters reset themselves. Because it seemed like a "Bizarro" prototype for the original iMac, I glued a glass eye above the screen and dubbed it "eyeMac."

This being said, it was the best Mac, in terms of price/performance, I've ever owned up until now. Mac #1 was the original 128K model, purchased 09/84 for $2500, subsequently tricked out with a $700 10MB HD. Mac #2 was a IIx with 1MB RAM (later 5MB) and a 20MB HD (later 155MB), purchased 06/90 for $2300. Mac #3 was a PowerBase180 clone (180mhz PPC 603e) with 24MB RAM and a 1.2GB HD, purchased 12/96 for $1600. The AIO was purchased in mid-2000 for $500 with a G3 400mhz upgrade card already installed and 80MB RAM. I ramped that up to 384MB RAM, added a USB/Firewire card (supplementing the serial/SCSI/ADB outputs), replaced the 6GB HD (and burnt-out internal Zip drive) with two internal HDs adding up to 50GB, and installed a video card that supported a flat-panel 1280x1024 display alongside the AIO's built-in 1024x768 screen--yielding me more pixel real estate than the original Aple Cinema Display. The AIO functioned heroically until an ill-advised upgrade to OS 9.2.2 several months back: ths proved disastrous, and a reinstall of 9.2.1 never quite served to retrieve the original system stability.

I'm committed now to the new machine and to OS X, but ugly old AIO will remain my fondest memory of Macs to date. I'm exerting great effort to secure for it a more honorable retirement than the 128K (in the basement), the IIx (dropped off the stern of the SF-to-Larkspur ferry ca. 3/97) or the PowerBase 180 (stashed next to my bookcase here).

cordially,

Burial at sea. I probably oughtn't have done it, but it was a satisfyingly extravagant gesture at the time.

cordially,