The Dream System of 1986

A bit over a year ago now, I ordered a new piece of hardware that plugged into the back of the old Macintosh Plus I'd managed to get several years before that and served as a floppy drive. Instead of having to load the programs that can be found in various corners online onto a handful of old 800K disks through a multi-stage process, I could just copy disk images to a thoroughly compact camera memory card and load them in... one at a time. Even with part of the Plus's four megabytes of memory devoted to a RAM disk to hold some system software arranged with care to fit into one startup disk image, loading new programs still meant going around to the back of the computer and pushing small buttons attached to a seemingly vulnerable circuit board. What with needing the dining room table for other things and the awareness the computer is getting close to three decades old and might not last forever being turned on and off (especially since the fan pack that had come with it had a damaged power cord which made me reluctant to try and cool the "beige toaster"), I suppose I wound up not trying out the new setup that much more often than I'd tried using what floppies I did have.
( Upgrades do happen, though )