I found what had to be the worst poem I ever wrote: It seems useful to remember one’s old tech as well as one’s old poetry. I picked over the applications and played with the calculator. My first computer I used primarily as a word processor. Truly, I had a computer well before I ever used email. That was where I used my first email account. My second personal computer was a Mac Performa, a much more conventional (and brand-new) sort of desktop, with a color (!) display. If I hadn’t given it away to someone who had absolutely no use for it (a street musician, albeit a brilliant one–he certainly could have used it, but wasn’t all that interested in learning how), I might have sold it to a museum or on eBay and made some decent money.

It did have a small hard disk…the earliest versions ran on a floppy-disk system.) It looked rather like your grandma’s kitchen radio with a little TV screen on one side. ( Correction: I did not remember correctly after all. See Dean’s comment below.) The computer had a black-and-white display and if I remember correctly, it did not have a hard drive. (Correction: It had LISA hardware and used emulation software to mimic the Mac Plus. The shells were refurbished with the internal workings comparable to more reasonably priced Mac Pluses. That personal computer that was sold for around $10k and was a failure because people aren’t completely insane, all the time. Yes, that fiasco of Steven Jobs, named after the daughter that he refused to claim…you all saw Pirates of Silicon Valley. It was a reconfigured Mac Plus inside a Mac LISA. I bought it off my officemate for five hundred dollars. I got my first personal computer in graduate school. Fact is that for ten years I used this program and I believe I typed my entire dissertation in it and now I cannot retrieve the name from the folds of my brain.

It would be easy to Google but that would be beside the point. The files are text and they were typed in Applewriter or whatever that *amazing* word processing program of long-ago Macintosh computers was called.

How to use a mac plus computer