I got my Mac Plus back yesterday from repairs, thanks to my Mac Guru, Jeff, who has been overseeing the health of my Macs for several years. Our love (okay, obsession) for Macs continues to bind us even after he has moved on from being a student to a full-fledged, well-paid programmer. He is my go-to guy for all things Mac at the Electronic Literature Lab.
The Plus (System Code Name: “Mr. T”) was produced from January 1986 to October 1990. Mine was manufactured in 1988, runs System 6.0.3, and has 2K of RAM installed on it. It came with System Finder 5.1 and could, if pressed, run System 7.5.5, but frankly, I would not put this little darling through such duress. At 8 Mhz, it was downright zippy in its day, but, alas, had no graphics card and its storage was limited to a 800K floppy. We thought, however, we had died and gone to heaven because it literally doubled the ROM from 64K to 128K and was the first Mac to sport a SCSI (re: “scuzzi”) port. This meant we could hook it up to an overhead projection system and show the information on our desktops to a roomful of people. What a revelation that was! The Plus sold for a mere $2600 and, not surprisingly because of its fine presentational skills, was sold to the educational market.
For all of you fellow Geeks out there, the design team for the Plus engraved their signatures into the case mold. One other cool piece of Geek trivia from my friend Jeff: “It was a Mac Plus mouse that USS enterprise engineer Scotty attempted to speak through in Star Trek IV.” It seems he mistook the mouse for a microphone. And, oh yes, the system designers were Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama.
My former tech support person, Aaron, named our Plus “Terak” after the Sanyassan warlord who was eventually destroyed (e.g. burned to a crisp) by the hero Ewok Wicket Warrick. I hope my Terak fares better. Certainly he seems more benign than the Star Wars version. See for yourself:
