Tough crowd. I can only imagine the hate if it had been a tangerine one.
I never had one of these (I spent an appalling sum on a PowerBook c. 1999), but I always had a soft spot for the oddball looks and family resemblance to the buttoned-down PowerBook and garish iMacs.
Seriously whose idea was it to make a power adapter that looks like this
Considering Sir Jony Ive was made head of Apple’s design in ‘97, I’m guessing that design is ultimately his responsibility. And really, compared to the massive bricks of the era, that was a positively small and well designed power supply (though the plug sucked, since the thin sheet metal outer ring always bent in time, hence the invention of the MagSafe that iJustine lamented the loss of to USB-C).
Maybe the same person who thought this was a good design for a mouse:
ETA: I am not saying there’s anything wrong with that power adapter (being able to wind up the cord that way is sure better than how every other laptop I’ve ever owned just expects me to provide my own zip ties or deal with a snarled mess of cable), just that it seems someone in Apple’s design labs had a serious hard on for hockey pucks around this time.
Honestly? I actually liked this mouse. If you turned the sensitivity way up and rested two fingers on the button it was very comfortable.
It would never have worked with two buttons (which were quickly becoming necessary in the Mac world) and if you did anything other than the above it was horrible. But I remember it fondly.
Yep. Gotta keep 'em emulated.
The puck mouse: a device so ergonomically offensive that we wished oblivion upon it rather than a mere return back to hell.
Core memory? You had core memory? In my day, we had acoustic delay, and we were happy to have it!
I first saw an iJustine video a few days ago when she did a co-promotion with Bentley the Bulldog, who flies around the mountains in British Columbia with his friend Bradley Friesen. I thought “great, get some more views for Bentley, endive ain’t cheap!” . So, I looked at the views for the video: about 60K, all her other recent videos are 300K to 1.5M. Perky YouTube personality and dog and great scenery, and all you get is 60K? I guess Apple folks are cat people? (my apologies if posting this video is not cool) https://youtu.be/OB3yT2fO_IU
ResEdit! ResEdit! Damn, I forgot all about that… Good times!
I used to just love screwing around with my macs. Now, not so much 
Do you remember At Ease?
It made life difficult, because you couldn’t mange your own files?
Luckily, I could launch the only word processor available, Microsoft Word 5.1. And because Word believed that it catered to “power users”, there was a Delete File menu item.
Guess which file you could delete with Microsoft Word!
That’s Right. “Bye bye, At Ease!”
Man, I’d totally forgotten about those. It seemed like the whole idea was to invent inexpensive laptops and then give them away to schoolchildren in poor countries, and suddenly great things would happen. But there didn’t seem to be any explanation as to why spending money on inexpensive laptops and giving them away was a better use of money than training more teachers, paying their salaries, or building more schools.
That friend of mine who fixed Macs always said that working in the industry ended his hobby of playing with computers at home. 
Mostly this. Sure, I tech on my own systems, and the occasional project, but in this day and age, I just want the damn thing to work.
I’ve been playing around with arduino and a couple raspberry pi boards to build a halloween prop, which is certainly more interesting that dealing with the charlie foxtrot that is windows.
When I was in college, many teachers were “in love” with Mr. Nicholas Negroponte and his ideas. I read one of his books and found it all so optimistic, as in a tale of Isaac Asimov. But I think it was the zeitgeist, right? The digital world was popping up right there on the horizon and it looked like we’d have to wear sunglasses because it was so bright and full of promises.
Never bothered to check out what At Ease could do because it looked totally unappealing to me. Oh, btw.: there always was an alternative to MS Word: Wordperfect which has been discontinued at some point and then went open source and is now OpenOffice/LibreOffice.
You don’t choose to use At Ease; the choice is made for you.
I used Wordperfect 3.5 for a bit in college. Nice program. I forget why I chose it over Nisus. probably price.
WriteNow was another excellent word processor back in the first few years of the Mac era, before Microsoft went all Borg on us. I don’t remember WordPerfect ever having a lot of traction in the Mac realm. More of a DOS and Windows thing (but especially DOS), but maybe my memory fails me.
It was briefly considered to be quite good.
Not so long ago, there were two giants in high-end Mac word processing - Word and WordPerfect. Back in the mid-1990s, Novell, which then owned WordPerfect, managed to beat Microsoft in getting the first PowerPC-native word processor out the door - WordPerfect 3 for the Mac.
For a while during the Word 6 debacle, Macworld magazine even rated WordPerfect 3 the “editors choice” in Mac word processing applications.
High-End Word Processing for a Low-End Price: Free
Thanks for jogging my memory. I don’t remember ever using WP personally, but I sure do remember how godawful Word 6 was. shudder
