My interest in the Mac began in May of 97, when I bought my first Mac(s) at the Dayton Hamvention: a Mac Plus with 1 Meg of RAM, two 512K's, and an original 800K disk of Microsoft Word 1.5. Naturally, used SCSI hard disks, RAM upgrades, sleepless nights, and much enjoyment ensued.

Prick up your ears to the voice of experience: the Mac Plus rocks. It was the first real Mac -- the first to sport a SCSI port, and hence the first to support a (reliable) hard drive (or CD-ROM, or scanner, or...). The Mac Plus first appeared in January of 1986, and had 1 MB of RAM standard, which, at the time, was a pretty extraordinary amount of RAM (PCs in 1986 typically having about half that). Moreover, all Mac Pluses are capable of taking up to 4 MB of RAM, which was a respectable endowment well into the 90's.

While my first Mac Plus had only 1 MB of RAM, I landed one with 2-1/2 MB of RAM a year later, and eventually scored one with the full 4 MB. At this late date, you really have no excuse for not having at least 2-1/2 MB of RAM in your Plus -- any business selling one with only 1 MB of RAM is either technically incompetent or just plain cheap. This is a difference that makes a difference, since a Plus with only 1MB of RAM can run System 6, but not System 7. More recent software sometimes only runs on System 7, so there's an obvious advantage to running it on your Plus. On the other hand, System 6 runs a lot faster than System 7 on that humble little 8MHz 68000 processor, so there are advantages the other way too. The choice is yours, and on these web pages I try to cover both sides, by specifying which software requires System 7,which not. (And, in the spirit of Retrocomputing, I try to emphasize how much can be done while sticking with the earlier system.)

Either way -- if you're impressed with what a mid-80's DOS box can do, A Mac Plus will knock your socks off: a 1986 Mac Plus with 2-1/2 MB of RAM does about 75% of what my 1995 enWindowed 486 could do, from Word, Word Perfect, Excel, PPP dialers, web browsers, POP-mailers, telnet and FTP, phone books with dialers, arcade, card, and board games, image viewing and editing, running a Zip drive, assigning sounds to system events, animated cursors, custom Startup screens and desktop pictures -- you name it, my Mac Plus does it, and all in a graphical interface impressive enough to be lifted by Microsoft.

Don't believe me? Well, here's all that Mac Plus stuff I've been talking about, just to prove it.