Nice.
What's the make and model of the third party external floppy drive? I remember those, but can't remember who made them.
Thanks!
I honestly don't recall and this hasn't made it home from work yet(I don't know when that will be-probably after I get back from vacation next week). For the time being it's a great curiosity and I'm still having people drop by to play with it. The HD20 makes it a LOT more convenient to use.
The floppy is a bit interesting. It actually looks like a conventional PC floppy drive from the front-it's manual insert and has a big mechanical eject button. It's a Macintosh drive through and through though, complete with the ability to read and format 400K and 800K disks. It also has software eject that works just like the internal drive-something that came as a bit of a surprise to me the first time it happened(I was expecting to have to push the button after unmounting the disk).
just curious, what makes you enjoy this over a modern computer?
I'm typing this post from a mid-2012 Macbook Pro(the last "classic" 15" with the high resolution matte screen). I dearly love this particular computer and not only enjoy this computer but also get a lot of real work done on it. I also get a lot of real work done on my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 and my G5 Quad-plus a few other assorted computers(I keep a couple of higher end legacy systems around for older software and hardware).
Others have given the appeal of this computer so I won't rehash their points. All I'll just say is that it's fun to play around with it, play games like they were meant to be played, and I love even being able to do day-to-day tasks on what is a roughly 30 year old computer.
If I need a quick document, I can type it up and spit it out on the Laserwriter in my office faster than I can type if up on my laptop/Mac Pro and then walk upstairs to get it off the main laser printer. For basic documents, MS word honestly hasn't changed that much in 30 years, especially since I have most of the same(relevant) fonts installed on 512Ke HDD as I have on my other computers. As long as I don't need any especially fancy formatting, I think you'd be hard pressed to tell where I typed a particular document. Granted, my B&W G3 can do the same thing even faster and better, but there's something appealing about the use of old hardware.
Most of the students in my current Chemistry 201 class were born around 1997(the year before the first iMac was released) and have minimal to no experience with floppy disks. The fact that I can boot and run programs from a floppy disk only(no hard drive) is so completely out their comprehension that I get a kick out of demonstrating it.
Yes, by modern standards this is a crummy computer with a 9" monochrome LCD and-as shipped-has an incomprehensibly small amount of RAM(512kb). The fact that I can actually still do stuff with it is amazing to me. For that matter, it boots as fast as my SSD-equipped Mac Pro and I can go from a cold boot to a typing something in Word probably faster than I can on my Mac Pro. I get a lot of satisfaction out of that.
And, yes, this is the collectors forum
