The Mac Plus didn’t have an Ethernet port, and things like WiFi were years from being invented when it was manufactured. Getting the Mac physically hooked to the network was a bigger challenge. It didn’t support niceties like DHCP, but MacWeb was happy to use it, and it installed without problems, so there was the TCP/IP stack. Likewise, MacTCP existed in a version just barely able to run on System 7.0. The stress of current after years of disuse had proved too much for one of the filter caps in the external drive’s power supply.Ī whole 4 MB of RAM to play with! Good thing, because MacWeb required 2 MB. It didn’t take much sniffing to find the source of the acrid odor: the external hard drive. Panicked, I slammed the power switches off and pulled the plugs. I was far down nostalgia lane playing a game of Glider when all of a sudden there was a loud *POP* and the smell of smoke. Sure, the hard drive gave a groan of protest when it first spun up, but that quieted down, and everything seemed stable with the data intact. I plugged it and its external hard drive in, flipped the power switches, and watched the happy Mac glow to life on the tiny CRT. It arrived in good condition, having been stored undisturbed in her basement since the mid-1990s. How hard could it be to right that wrong?Įverything went smoothly at first. It was always just a dumb terminal on the ‘net, never a full-fledged member. (There’s nothing quite like erotic literature at 2400 bps when you’re 13 years old.) What it never did was run a TCP/IP stack of its own. Yes, in a certain sense, my Mac has already been on the Internet, first via BBSes and later via Lynx through a dial-up shell sessions. It introduced me to C, hard drives, modems, and the Internet. Still, that Mac Plus was where I cut my computing teeth as a child. My current desktop PC is on the order of 200,000 times faster-not even including the GPU. The specs pale in comparison to even my Kindle: 8 MHz CPU, 4 MB RAM, 50 MB hard drive, and 512 x 384 pixel black-and-white screen.

How to use a mac plus computer