68krazy
Well-known member
"Let me take ya'll back man, as I do so well..."
Back in 2013, I was bitten by an overwhelming wave of nostalgia for 90s Macintosh. Not any model in particular, just 90s Macintosh as an entity. Beige plastic; the Chicago typeface; whirring hard drives and errant "eep!" sounds accompanied by rigid error messages. The phosphorescent (and somewhat blurry) glow of tube monitors. The musky, sweet smell of old ABS plastic housing toasty circuitry.
You know what I'm talking about. You wouldn't be on this forum if you didn't.
I was in my early twenties at the time, living in my parent's garage as I deliberated what the next step should be. I had just dropped out of school and I was waiting tables. Totally lost. I needed a safe space to rest from the overwhelming confusion of life, and the warm confines of System 7 beckoned to me like a cup of coffee on a rainy day. I tried to resist, but (if I remember correctly) after a long night of drinking I went on eBay and commissioned this work of art:
Rest in pieces, old friend. You were too good for this world anyway...
It was my first vintage Mac, and its limitations made it difficult to appreciate the first time around. It (obviously) had no CD-ROM drive, and although I got a network card for it, I wasn't able to figure out how to FTP data to System 7. The motherboard had leaky capacitors that I wasn't equipped to deal with, and I didn't own anything else with a floppy drive at the time. I played for a bit with the software that came loaded on the hard drive, but after about a year, I felt that I had exhausted all possibilities. I put it back in its shipping box and off to its next owner it went.
I didn't think about it too much. Life went on, as it tends to do. I moved out of my parent's house. I restored the Color Classic's funky sibling, LC5xx. I left Southern California for the Sacramento region. I even disavowed Color Classic for a while:
Me three years ago, thinking Color Classic and I were better off as friends...I don't mean to offend anyone, but I found the Color Classic to be extremely overrated. The tiny screen, weird resolution, and lack of a CD-ROM drive really ruined it for me. I tried very hard to love that Mac and I couldn't. I ended up selling it for exactly what I paid for it, so no loss there!
To me, the LC5xx is like a color classic except better in every way!
I finished a degree. I moved again, this time to downtown Sacramento proper. I started a career. I got my own place. And it was then that old memories of Color Classic began to resurface.
"That was a pretty sweet little computer. I kind of miss it."
The memories felt warmer than I remembered. I started watching YouTube videos about Color Classic. There are quite a few on there these days! Back in 2013, there was very little about the machine on YouTube. I started looking at my writing nook and thinking, with more and more longing each time around, that a Color Classic would be a wonderful addition. While it'll never be the hardcore barebones writing workhorse that my SE/30 is, Color Classic has a strong emotional pull on me, and there's something to be said for that when looking for the ultimate writing tool.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized I want a Color Classic again. And the more I thought about that, the more I realized that my taste and approach to vintage computing has evolved a lot since 2014. The limitations of Color Classic aren't really a problem for me anymore. I've gotten a few DOS/Windows 95 computers, and I've found DOS gaming (with crunchy AdLib/FM synthesis as the soundtrack... yum) to be so much more fulfilling than Mac gaming. I don't really care that Color Classic can't game well anymore. I mostly turn to my vintage Macs as writing machines, and as a comforting presence that connects me with childhood. The lack of CD-ROM is no longer an issue, either. Not only do I now own an external Apple SCSI unit; I also have external SCSI2SD and have become much more proficient with networking and FTP. I also have several USB floppy drives for my modern computers, and have become expert at using "dd" in modern MacOS to write floppy images.
So I started browsing eBay for Color Classics again...
Stay tuned!
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