grogo@crunchy-frogs.ai.mit.edu (Gregory Rogalski) (06/28/91)
If you're easily annoyed by novice questions, press 'n' now... OK, if you're willing to listen and help, here's my story. I'm not a novice to the Mac--I bought the original Mac 512K in 1985, and eventually added the 800K floppy and ROM, and installed 2meg of memory, and got buttloads of programs and little accessories (do they still make those little "mouse feet"--the ones which rolled the original beige Mac mouse on little ball-bearings?), and had a great time at it. I even did a bit of assembly, C, FORTH, and Pascal programming. Then, when I became a student at MIT in 1988, I fell in lust with the Sun, Vax, IBM workstations, X, networks, huge storage, UNIX, and the whole bit, to the point where I considered my little Mac unnecessary. That's why I gave it away to my little sister, who for the past few years used it mostly for MacPainting, word processing, and Crystal questing. As I'm preparing to leave MIT, the prospect of leaving all this wonderful hardware strikes me with terror. Naturally, I want to get a computer of my own again, and naturally, I can't take my old Mac back, and of course, I won't settle for anything other than a Mac. But when I started looking at recent MacUsers and MacWorlds, I couldn't recognize anything, except new versions of the programs I used a long time ago! I don't even know what all those letters after the Mac names mean! Could some kindly soul e-mail me with a brief explanation of how Mac SEx differs from IIcfxilcs*%#? A one-liner explaining the porcessor, # of NuBus slots, memory, drives, etc for each of the newest Macs would be very helpful in making a decision which one to buy. What seems to be the "sweetest" deal right now? (i.e. most power for a reasonable price, good upgrade paths, expandability). If I don't decide to buy one of the new-fangled Macs, I am probably going to hack something together. I have a Mac 128K available, which I could relatively easily upgrade to something useful. Can anyone comment on the availability/price of memory, ROM, drive upgrades? Do I absolutely have to get the Apple ROM to use 800k drives? How can I add 1 meg to the 128K? How can I add a SCSI port? How expensive will that be? Can I still get one of those early Apple hard drives which connected to the disk drive port? And most importantly, how can I do all this for the least amount of money? (remember, I went through the most expensive university in existence; I don;t have much money left:). Thanks in advance. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Greg Rogalski 71 Fulkerson St. #208 Home:(617)577-1247 grogo@ai.mit.edu Cambridge, MA 02141 Work: " 253-3482