68000 Revivification

One day after a certain thirtieth anniversary, I got around to trying out a small piece of hardware I hoped would bring me back to the earlier days of the Macintosh. A few years ago, I went to a sort of "estate garage sale" at the house of a late member of the local Apple users' group, and there saw the distinctive cardboard box the first Macintoshes had been in. Most of the original manuals were still inside, along with a computer that had been upgraded from 512K to a Macintosh Plus. Getting to buy the whole package for less than I'd been ready to spend, I took it back to my own place, confirmed the computer still worked and could still load the handful of floppy discs included, and then found myself wondering just what else I could do with it. While nowadays the Macintosh Plus is described as "the first really capable Macintosh" (with, perhaps, an implicit dismissal of the two years preceding its introduction as just a handful of early adopters battling the constant frustration of limited memory and storage), it could still only load 800K discs, not the higher-density 1.44 MB discs that followed. Heading back home and looking for more 800K discs turned up just a handful of them, and to get software on them from the disc images I'd found online that worked with the "Mini vMac" emulator would mean using an intermediate computer as a bridge. I wound up keeping the Macintosh Plus in my basement and only taking it to special sessions of the user group for people to try MacPaint on if they wanted, aware that "DriveWire" made my family's old Color Computers more connected to modern computing.
( Then, not that long ago... )