What is #MARCHintosh?

There’s not much to say about #MARCHintosh that you cannot read for yourself on the excellent #MARCHintosh event homepage but for me personally, jumped into this primarily because I love retrocomputing challenges and I always hop right on whenever there’s a chance for me to use and play on one of my retro computers. And this couldn’t drop at a better time than now, considering that last week I was thinking about taking my Macintosh Plus out of the retirement box (he is almost 40 years old though) and spend some quality time together.

Trying to daily drive* a Macintosh for the entire month of March.

Well, I’ve actually started a bit late on this one, so please forgive me if have a bit of catching up to do.

This will be my first day, so I will start easy, just by powering on the machine, open up a text editor, most likely Microsoft Works, because I already have that installed on this computer, and because I’m using it to write this right now.

But let me talk a bit about this computer, with all its ups and downs. This is a 1985 Macintosh Plus with 1MB of memory, running everything out of a Rodime Systems External SCSI Hard Disk, which I can honestly admit is VERY LOUD. Hope it doesn’t crash. I didn’t found out yet how to take screenshots on System 7.1, and I also have no idea how I will take the articles out of this computer and into my main machine, so I can eventually post these to my blog.

Update: Apparently, I haven’t tried the obvious. After doing a quick search on the internet, it seems that Cmd+Shift+3 will put a screenshot on you desktop, just like on the modern machines. That’s mind-boggling.

The first thing that really punches you when moving away from a modern machine is the screen. Man, these CRT tubes were something, but after about 10 minutes, you start to get used to the constant flickering of the screen. It really messes your eyes, especially the peripheric one, but it’s something that you can get used to if you take breaks every now and then.

The second really hard punch comes from the keyboard. While it’s mechanical and spring-powered, it’s like 5cm tall at its lowest point (that’s like 2 inches) and for my small hands, it’s actually painful to try and write on this. However, I made a really nice palmrest out of my Legend of Zelda-themed Nintendo Switch travel case, so that’s actually really nice to type on, with that mechanical springy sound really helping me to get in the writing flow. It reminds me a lot of my Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter.

The one button Apple Mouse is actually accurate, especially considering it has a tracking ball, but for my usage I’m not using it very much, so even if it’s not perfect, I don’t expect to need any kind of replacement.

Just as I shown in my initial post about this Macintosh Plus, I have quite a few games and tools to keep me occupied for the time being, but I need to find a way to take these files out of the computer. My best approach would be to use a floppy disk and a different Macintosh (probably the Powerbook 5300cs) as an intermediary computer. If you’re reading these on my site, it means I did it. If you’re looking at a photo of a screen, then tough luck.

That’s it until tomorrow, let’s see what this month brings us up to!

Happy MARCHintosh!