I had no problem with the mouse.
Although I had thousands of hours ‘in’ on this mechanical word processor called a typewriter, when I first started using a computer it was 1984.
I recall that it was in September of 1984 that my friend Pilch hauled The Macintosh out of a closet and gave it to me. At the time it was about a $2,400 gift, and, in 1984 those many hundreds of dollars was an unimaginable sum for mw, Pilch’s slack-to-a-fault long haired pal. But he had no use for it. He was a programmer doing project work for Burroughs and I have no idea what he was using for a computer. Still, his setting the Mac 128k given to him aside soon enough became my unbelievable gain.
It’s hard for me to relate to what the original Mac platform offered–me–even though I used it for eight years. As a user you would stick the system floppy into it, load in the system into temporary memory and follow on with the program disc, do the same, do your work, and save to a third floppy. The 128k ram is one eighth of a megabyte, and the Mac floppy had a capacity of 400k. On this machine you could process words, draw, paint, play the first version of Sim City, and, a few years later, desktop publish on Adobe Pagemaker and print to a laser printer. One would shuffle floppies in and out with a satisfying click and whir and sound of the drive stylus.
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