It was a shared computer with my ex-wife, acquired from Best Buy back in 1997. We were only two years married, in our second place, a duplex with baseboard heating and window unit a/c. Barely a step up from the moldy, bug-infested 2nd floor apartment we’d begun our time together inside an old Civil War-era house on the west side of Westminster, Maryland. The duplex had well water which left blue rings around our tub and the winters were especially brutal from the down winds. A tornado had ripped through the valley in which we were positioned, skipping over us by a miracle and touching down in a rural subdivision less than a mile down the road. As with everyone and every path taken, humble beginnings.

With very few dimes to rub together and minimal credit allotted at our twenty-something ages, Best Buy offered us a hot deal (so we’d thought) an Apple Power Macintosh G3 233 Desktop unit. Brand spanking new, an operating system now primitive, but for the times, a sparkly third-gen 233 megahertz processor stuffed with 34 megabytes of RAM, a 4 gig hard drive and a 512K backside cache.

We opened an account with Best Buy and, having been pushed by friend testimonials to go Mac instead of Dell back then, especially with my writing aspirations, we took one home, $1,400.00 deeper in the hole than when we’d arrived. Funny enough, I’d added Rush’s Test for Echo, a double-pack of The Cramps’ Songs the Lord Taught Us and Psychedelic Jungle and some techno mix CD to the purchase. Somehow I remember that anecdote down the minute details.

I can’t honestly say either of us were terribly happy with the Macintosh G3 233 and we quickly learned why the unit was discontinued nine months after its release in November of 1997. My ex used to play a lot of games on the Mac and I did too, Solitaire being our go-to. The few CD Rom games we bought for the Mac were a horrid disaster for loading and screen transitions. 

To the good, I wrote a ton of short stories, then 27 going on 28, usually in the evenings after work or right after Saturday morning cartoons loaded with Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain and the Batman and Superman animated shows. The Mac processor had its own internal 3.5 inch disk drive for storing all those tales which went nowhere and you can read a prior post of mine about those disks and what I found on them last year after ordering a new portable disk reader. The majority were written in these Mac days. The crunches inside the Mac were even more comical to think upon versus the whirring chunks of the portable reader.

The biggest pisser to Macs back then, and you know where I’m going if you owned one back in the day, is those confounded system errors and crashes, and Susan Kare’s taunting bomb icon which accompanied them. Seemed like Kare’s bomb had more onscreen time than actual processor applications. I often lost data not being able to save in time before the damned bomb struck. We lost an entire budget in process with the bomb blowing a digital raspberry at us more than an actual detonation. In other words, the Mac we’d put ourselves in hock for was a total P.O.S. Paying that bill down for a fritzed processor which ultimate froze to death in less than a year positively chapped my ass.

I never went back to Macintosh, despite so many of my colleagues and writer friends back then leaning on me to have a second go, especially when I proposed putting together my own ‘zine. Layouts being one of the Mac’s bragging rights over standard word processors of the day. It became a hard “no.”

Considering what Apple has engineered in modern times, sure, their products have become more reliable–genius level–even if TJ and I get ridiculed for being droid instead of iPhone owners everywhere we go. Perhaps it’s a latent thing, with me, anyway, since if I ever see that goddamn bomb icon again, I’m likely to haul whatever device triggered it against the nearest brick wall.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.