Inspired by Episode 496 of Upgrade, “40th Anniversary of the Mac Draft,” I got to thinking about my first Mac: the Color Classic. I came home from my senior class trip to Busch Gardens in the spring of 1993 to find that my Dad had purchased one for me to take to college, despite my saying that I didn’t really use computers and that it wouldn’t be useful. He knew better for sure.

I fell in love with the Mac in short order and found myself something of techie compared to my peers in college. It was still rare then for people to have their own computer; most students went to one of the labs on campus and suffered the degradation of using DOS and WordPerfect, writing to floppies. I found myself enjoying just using the Mac in my dorm, changing the wallpaper, playing Maelstrom, and installing Shareware my dad would send me on floppy disks. I had an app that played Oscar the Grouch sounds when you emptied the trash, and a another the played a vomit sound when you ejected a floppy disk. I wrote all of my papers in the comfort of my room in WordPerfect at whatever hour I needed, and printed to my StyleWriter II. People would come into my room to write their papers.

We updated the processor with some kind of DayStar accelerator board which must have cost a fortune. I replaced it prematurely with a 630 CD and an external SCSI hard drive in my sophomore year, mostly so I could play Marathon and Doom. It was faster and had a larger display, but never the charm of the Color Classic.