Mr. Vieira
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
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Eugene made a comment in the October 16 event thread, referencing an older piece of software that many of us probably used (Connectix Ram Doubler). That started me thinking back on all that stuff from my early days (I used a Mac at school from late 1992-ish, but didn't get my own until early 1994, after we'd moved to SoCal).
So my introductory years to all this stuff was the mid-90's...pre-OS X, Jobs wasn't back, Performas were all over the place (even being sold in Walmart), RAM was about $18,000 for 2MB (I exaggerate, a little), etc. Everything - everything - was a complete time-wasting hassle...installing my first few versions of Adobe Illustrator (5.0, etc.) involved about 8-12 floppy discs(!), swapping them out as prompted. You couldn't plug or unplug your SCSI or ADB-based peripheral without shutting down, chaining multiple SCSI devices and having to set those little numbers (there was no "plug-and-play" anything). If you had a 15" monitor with thousands of colors, you had your act together (I had a 13" (14"?) for about five years...on a desktop. Colors all dotty and dithered all to hell). I think I had it at 800x600 (it could've been 640x480 and I wouldn't have known...probably was). If one program decided to act like a jerk, your whole machine joined in on the fun. I swear, there were days where I'd restart 5-8 times. There was no recovering or force-quitting a misbehaving program...your whole system would wig/freeze. From the time you sat down at your Mac until you stopped, it was just one goofy, pain-in-the-butt thing after another, some days. It's a wonder I even stuck with all this because I'm not known for my patience. At all. But, back then, we had nothing (like today) to compare it to, so it was just part of it. You got frustrated sometimes, but you didn't go into a murderous rage like you would today (having gotten used to all our conveniences and ease-of-use). This was all pre-Internet (mostly) for me, at least those first few years. So you just kinda worked in a "vacuum". If you wanted to give someone a file, you hoped it was under 1.4MB so you could fit it onto a floppy disc. I guess those Encarta guys really thought they had the world by the neck at one point..."everything you need to know is on this CD-ROM...bwhahhhahhahaaa!". Little did those poor bastards know what was lurking around the corner a few years later... When I finally did get online in mid-1997, it was via America Online ("You've got mail..." because my favorite sound during that time) and a USRobotics 28.8 dial-up modem (we all remember that connection sound...pssshhhh psssssh boing SQUEEAAALLLL psshhhhhh BLOINGGG BAWWNG BAWWG bloop). Steve Jobs wasn't at Apple. OS X wasn't out (still years away from 2000). No iAnything. It was all Quadra, Centris, Performa, II-this and II-that. You'd go into Walmart and there would be an Apple Performa Mac in a box. There were so many models, and so much crazy overlap. I don't think Apple could even keep it all straight, let alone the consumers...constant releases, updates, overlap, similar model numbers that might have one tiny little bit of difference, etc. Buying a Mac back then was a flaming pain-in-the-butt. Apple wasn't making it easy. They weren't selling them from their site, of course. So you had either the brick-and-mortar retailers (Fry's, Micro-Center, CompUSA, independent Mac shops, etc.) or all the catalogs like MacWarehouse, MacConnection, MacMall, etc. And I subscribed to every single one of 'em! This was the time of the clones...PowerComputing, Motorola and others making machines that ran the Mac OS but for less money (and often better performance) than hardware from Apple. PowerComputing was especially visible and vocal in their marketing. A buddy had one of their machines, and we had Motorola StarMax clone towers at my job. I remember buying 8MB of RAM for $259...and I was thrilled to have it! "Holy crap, that's about $40 cheaper than anywhere else I've seen it...I'm getting a deal!" I'll never forget that. I remember when Iomega Zip (and eventually Jaz) drives came along, we were thrilled..."holy crap, I can fit twice the amount of stuff on this Zip as I can those Syquest drives!". The Jaz drive's claim to fame, as I remember, was randomly corrupting pretty much anything you put on it, so they never seemed to grab a foothold like Zip did there for a while. I loved my little blue Zip drive and discs! I did, I did, I did...I thought they'd be around forever, as the held "the perfect amount...who the hell needs to shuttle or store more than 100MB?" (as I type this, I glance over to my $20 Lexar 32GB USB thumb drive, which is smaller than a squashed ChapStick tube)... Oh, my first software purchase when getting my first Mac in February 1994 was Adobe Illustrator 5.0 (what else would it be, really?). A love affair was born (and has recently soured, and I've been straying a bit, sad to say...but it's Illustrator's fault, as it got all bloated, hard to deal with and expensive to keep up). But my second software was After Dark's Disney screen saver package (again, in a box and on floppies). I loved this thing. Those little animations that took over your screen, I thought were the funniest/cutest things ever. Our cat loved them...he'd just sit there and watch Mickey flying across my screen in his biplane, swatting at the screen. Looking back, it's amazing we got anything done. Nothing worked right, all these third-party workarounds and utilities that either kinda worked or completely did a number on your system. We all had to set aside about 12 square feet of space to hold all our software boxes (Adobe was particularly hell-bent on putting all their titles in boxes the size of an Igloo or Coleman ice cooler...in fact, if you owned three or more Adobe titles, you had to rent a storage facility to keep the boxes/packaging. They wouldn't fit in you house). Seriously, you opened them up and in addition to the 8-16 floppies, you'd get a small manual...so the packaging for this stuff was about 98.4% air. But, again, we didn't know. We didn't care. Everyone was doing it. Even stuff like Ram Doubler, which was just a single floppy, came in a box that was 4x bigger than it needed to be (and 2" thick, for no apparent reason). Good times. Funny stuff. Syquest. Iomega. After Dark. America Online. US Robotics. SCSI. ADB. CompUSA. Performa. Speaking of which: my first Mac (Quadra 610) was $1,799 (go look up the specs, because it hurts to much for me to type them ). But that was just the CPU. I got an Apple CRT 13" (or was it 14"?) RGB display for $429 (I know...). And my B&W Apple Personal Laserwriter 320 printer? $899. Over $3,000 for just the basic setup. Add in the software, utilities, peripherals (Zip drive, modem, etc.), and there's another $1,000-1,500. Now think of all you can with a $500 iPad mini. What are your memories - good or bad, funny or serious - about those pre-OS X/iEra days of being a Mac user in 80's and 90's? |
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Dark Cat of the Sith
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I remember the After Dark Star Trek edition, and how happy I was with the trivia quiz. I used to kick its ass. Or the tribbles that just wandered all over the screen. And I remember the little bomb icon that would sometimes happen if you fucked up.
"A blind, deaf, comatose, lobotomy patient could feel my anger!" - Darth Baras twitter ; amateur photographer ; fanfiction writer ; roleplayer and worldbuilder |
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Mr. Vieira
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
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I have this hazy, funny memory of people "skinning" their Macs, and putting these crazy-ass interface themes in place of OS 8 or 9(?) default "Platinum" UI. Just atrocious, mid/late-90's takes on "edgy graphics" or "cutting-edge style". Weird, obnoxious colors, shapes, fonts, changing the buttons/scroll bars to all these nutty things, etc.
It's probably the reason Steve returned to Apple. He probably saw these, vomited about three dozen times and thought "I gotta get back there and straighten this shit out...this, the clones, etc. WTF are they doing?!?" I tried to Google some examples and couldn't find any. Odd. If somebody finds some, you gotta post them here (or at least a link). |
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Less than Stellar Member
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Hotline and Carracho. Stealing IP adderesses from computer lab machines to get online. Those were (not) the days.
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Yarp
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Road Warrior
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I forget the exact context but sometime around 2000 on a bondi blue iMac running OS 9.2 I tried to do too many things at once and an error message popped up that just said "can't" with an option to click okay to close the box.
Made me laugh for hours. |
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Yarp
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Road Warrior
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I had forgotten about Carracho, but I definitely remember hotline. It wasn't even so much about stealing software(though no one I knew actually *owned* photoshop) as much as it was just the tinkering and many steps it took to get it all to work that was compelling. I remember to get onto certain servers you'd have to visit like 5 different websites, click on X amount of ads and/or look for codes hidden in the ads text. I also remember when BitTorrent first debuted and it was just like 'oh wow, this is far and away the better solution for this stuff' (Although somewhat ironically, back then people had a delusion BitTorrent would be used for legal distribution primarily. |
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Veteran Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Promise Land of Trustafarians
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My second grade teacher used to fix old Apple I's and II's. This was around 1996. Often people would just give her their old Apple machines for free. She'd fix them up and bring them to our classroom. We had maybe 20 old Apples in the back of the room, plus one Mac. This was at an elementary school in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Definitely not the kind of place you expect to find this!
If you did well on quizzes or whatever, you earned computer time. This is definitely what sparked my passion for computers. If you were really good, she'd let you play on the Mac. I can't recall much of what was on the machines. Definitely a few games, no clue which ones though. |
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Right Honourable Member
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I've got no experience of the pre-OS X era other than fiddling with emulators. Pretty late to the Apple game compared to many of you guys here. My computer history is as follows though:
I then moved over to the fruity side. |
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Space Pirate
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
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I still have my 7100/80, a Bondi Blue iMac that I used to bring my parents kicking and screaming to the age of the Internet, and several other fine OS8 and OS9 machines.
I'm currently doing a clean-out of software documentation, and while I wish I could hang onto all of it for posterity, I need the space and I know that there are plenty of other tech hoarders out there who will preserve these things for future generations. Mac OS9 "featured" something called "startup items" that would load in at boot up. Boot up would typically take SEVERAL minutes, but you'd know things were proceeding properly because your screen would display icons for the various startup items as they loaded. The more junk that filled your screen, the closer you were to getting down to work. You often faced conflicts between custom startup items associated with different programs, often leaving your machine unable to proceed with boot-up. Fortunately, one company sold a program (we called them programs, not apps) that would help you manage the order in which these startup items were loaded, thus avoiding the conflict(s). (It was nearly as bad as playing SCSI chain voodoo, but that's a different story altogether) Now, I do recall one delightful book full of OS9 pranks, and it came with a disk that allowed you to sneak onto a friend's computer and install special startup items. One of these startup items would reduce the amount of usable screen space by a ONE pixel border increment on every startup. This was an insidious joke that might take MONTHS to pay off, as your victim's viewport slowly, slowly, slowly headed toward a smaller and smaller and smaller area with a larger and larger and larger black border. Evil. ... |
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¡Damned!
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
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Oh man. Oh man. I lived through all of these things as well. Looking back, it was a total nightmare, but while in the thick of it it was a challenge and we were cutting edge.
re: packaging & floppy disks - My version of Painter 2 came in a paint can. Inside the can was also a poster to put on your wall and a sticker to put on your car. Fractal Design was the shit back then. I also had Sketcher, but you can do all that stuff on your phone now. On my advice, Anna's first MacOS machine was a Motorola. Kind've dates us, I guess. I don't even want to say what I paid for RAM. It hurts to think about. Zip! Oh my god I loved iOmega and the Zip drives. Back then I was kind've a storage freak. I had tape drives, SyQuest, an optical that I forget the name of…. damn. But holy shit iOmega. I still have both Zip and Jaz (2GB !!! ) in the basement somewhere. [edit: Magneto! That's the name. 230MB of super-slow-writing glory.] Apple PowerShot(?) Was that the name of that? An Apple camera. I had it. It was as big as my head. And I had a slide scanner on my desk at the time for, you know, "old" media. I was so cool. Apple laser printer. Workhorse extraordinaire. Mine had an aqua translucent handle on the front that mimicked the handle on my G3. SCSI. Gah. If I had a nickel for every time I had to wave a decapitated chicken as sacrifice around my SCSI chain to get it working, I'd be on an island sipping a mojito for breakfast right now. Kai's Power Tools. 'Nuf said. Konfabulator! HOLY SHIT. That software felt like the future when it was introduced. And it was, apparently. I still hold on to older machine stuff. Like, someday when I have the time I want to gut my Cube and put in modern Mini internals, but I also want to use that sexy clear-plastic CRT that I have too. Together, they are the best looking kit I've ever had. So it goes. Last edited by 709 : 2014-10-05 at 07:59. |
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Space Pirate
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
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I bought that sexy clear-plastic LED that was made to go with the Blue & White G3 tower. It cost something like $1200 and I knew that it was a crazy expensive but was young and stupid... or rather forward-looking. Still have it, and still love it whenever I have time to fire up the old machine. Love seeing those pixels, screw Retina!!
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¡Damned!
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
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Holy shit I forgot all about that kit. That's a good one. You could tell that Apple was starting to shift in its seat back then. There was a time of "let's try this little thing (aqua handles, wut)" and then BOOM. iMac WTF.
I failed to post in the SJ 3 year thread, but maybe this is better here. I loved the SJ Apple because they took chances with design. Apple nowadays is all about taking their current design and making it it slimmer (while allowing for faster/better internals, of course), but it leaves me wondering if we're at a point now where every needed part is so small that the only natural design decision is to go thin. I mean, look at the graphite iMac for example. Look into it. It's gorgeous, the layout. Look at the G4 iMac. Who in the world could've done such an astonishing thing (technically, too!) and at the same time just plain weird design other than Apple? Nobody. Not ever. So I wonder if we're at the end of awe. If we expect everything to just get thinner, with internals that are faster by [x], then there's no more anticipation. Me, I could not have given less of a shit about all the iPhone 6ish stuff. I tuned in to the keynote to see the design (and, of course, if the rumors were real). I'm not a fan. Yes, I said it. The lines on the back are janky. So it goes. |
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Which way is up?
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boyzeee
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"Whaddaya mean it ain't got no floppy drive? How the hell am I gonna install software on that? I tell ya, Apple is too early on this. What's that? I can buy an external floppy drive? Man, Apple is really raking us over the coals. They just do that so they can sell us another damned adapter! Forget it. I'll go to CompUSA and get a Gateway. At least they know how to build a computer!"
- AppleNova is the best Mac-users forum on the internet. We are smart, educated, capable, and helpful. We are also loaded with smart-alecks! :) - Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. (Mat 5:9) |
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Which way is up?
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boyzeee
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Mr. Vieira
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
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Yeah, that might be my favorite. Every iMac since, while nice and certainly a better performer, is exactly what Jobs mocked/pooh-poohed during the iMac G4 introduction ("a flat display with the guts glommed onto the back").
I always got s kick out of that. |
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Ninja Editor
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Bay Area, CA
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Back in around 2003-2004, my mac-hating college roommate saw me playing EV Nova once, and spent the rest of his life looking for a PC equivalent... Until I got my Power Mac G4, when loaned him my old Power Computing 210 so that he could play it. Drove him nuts that he was allowing himself to be in the same room as a mac, but he loved that game.
I haven't played that game in forever... Did they ever make a OS X version? When I was a kid, people who did wrong were punished, restricted, and forbidden. Now, when someone does wrong, all of the rest of us are punished, restricted, and forbidden... and the one who did the wrong is counselled and "understood" and fed ice cream. |
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Yarp
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Road Warrior
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Funny. I had a wave of nostalgia for EV nova a few months ago. There really hasn't been any game that fills its niche, though there is a project called NAEV that is a self-professed Escape Velocity clone, and it's pretty good and it'll run in OS X just fine, but it didn't grab me the way EV nova did. Not sure if it's still under development though, I think it was a small-scale/free time sort of open-source thing that fizzled out. But it will run in OS X at least.
Kind of seems like a glaring omission in gaming that there aren't more games like it. I guess EVE is conceptually similar but it's just too intimidating in scope and size and much more hostile feeling in general. I want a zippy top-down space trading and combat that doesn't take itself too seriously and is buttressed on thousands of lines of clever writing |
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@kk@pennytucker.social
Join Date: Jan 2005
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I was never in the Apple world pre-OS X, so I've got nothing.
Although, I've always wanted one of those tangerine clamshell iBooks. I tried looking for one a while ago, but gave up. Maybe I should get back on that rack again. I love how those things look. No more Twitter. It's Mastodon now. |
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Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472 Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
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Check colivigan(Formerly UncleJohn) for one. If he still has them. a while back me an him got a bunch and worked them. I have a blue one and the legendary Line one too. I upgraded mine to the best motherboard they made for the lime and even replaced the battery.
Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.” Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it. |
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Mr. Vieira
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
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I'd love to have a tangerine iBook but with modern, MacBook Air guts.
Or, even better: rig up my iMac DV with Mac mini guts/graphics. How awesome would it be to have a little jellybean iMac fully running the latest OS X, iTunes, iCloud stuff, iLife and iWork, etc. A modern processor (whatever's in the current mini lineup), 256GB SSD, USB 3, latest AirPort and Bluetooth, Angry Birds-friendly graphics performance (I'm not demanding), SuperDrive (the slot's already there, why not?) I'd just put the display on 1024x768 and call it a day. I'd definitely go from this 20" display back down to 15" if the performance was there. Honestly, I'd make that my daily machine again. I really would! Dang, now that's all I'm going to think about the rest of the night... |
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Making sawdust
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Minnesota
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I had a mac clone running 7.6.1 (umax c500 )
The harddrive died in it before the warranty was up, so umax was kind enough to send someone to my house to fix it, but that was going to be several days later. The board had 16MB of RAM soldered on it, and I had installed a 64MB stick on top of that. I managed to get myself up and running on a 40MB RAM disk dialing up to the internet and being able to do basic internet / email / chat while i waited for the repair guy to come. I think about how i managed to do that sometimes and wonder if it would even be possible to do something similar with my rMBP. |
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Dark Cat of the Sith
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Ninja Editor
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Bay Area, CA
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You can boot off a USB thumb drive, but they tend to be s---l---o---w (or maybe that's just what I get for buying the one of those cheap generic Micro Center sticks). When I was a kid, people who did wrong were punished, restricted, and forbidden. Now, when someone does wrong, all of the rest of us are punished, restricted, and forbidden... and the one who did the wrong is counselled and "understood" and fed ice cream. |
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Member
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Vancouver, BC
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I had a little widget on my Mac Classic that had Oscar the Grouch pop out of the trash can when you emptied it. He would sing "...And I Love Trash".
Found a sample on Vimeo. Won't go back |
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Formerly Roboman, still
awesome Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
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CD caddies were the shit. I was so excited when they were about to make a comeback with Blu-ray Discs, but in the end they developed harder coatings. Bah!
Not technically Apple, but my old local library ran their book database off of a NeXT Computer. I can't imagine many other libraries could have had that kit, considering how poorly it sold. I guess the person in charge of procuring tech for the library was a bit of an Apple nut…they eventually had a bunch of iMacs and iBooks and even that weird pre-iMac AIO G3. The funny thing is, a few years back they started switching to Windows, which struck me a particularly bone-headed, giving the timing. I was like, really? Everyone in college has a MacBook, and Windows is stuck in their post-XP malaise, and now you decide to go all 1995 and switch to PCs? It was just weird. They probably just have a bunch of iPads now. Which is great, but it also kind of makes me sad…kids these days won't ever get to check out a CD (in a caddy, of course) of Myst or Putt-Putt or Zoombini. Ahh, the era when CD-ROMs and "multimedia" was going to do everything the internet ended up doing instead. and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong |
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Space Pirate
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
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Though it seems fairly new when compared to all our truly old machines, my 2005 iMac (first Intel model) recently saved my bacon when my 2011 MacBook Pro took a dump 8 months after Apple repaired it under warranty for a bad logic board, with me on a deadline for a big proposal. That thing is a CHAMP!!!!
... |
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Member
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Vancouver, BC
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In 2011 I was applying for a job as a help desk manager. Their application portal was an SAP module and was so out of date that it would only work with IE8 or below and FireFox 3.6 or below. I had to dust off my 2003 iBook to submit my application.
That was the first sign that all was not well in that organization. Won't go back |
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Veteran Member
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Initially it was Dark Castle, but Crystal Quest and Lunatic Fringe were two of the games of the time. Robowars (Maxis?) was cool too. Angels bleed from the tainted touch of my caress |
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