My first Mac was a new IIsi 5/80, which I bought in the Fall of 1990. But let's go back a bit before that, to the Fall of 1989 when I entered UC Berkeley for my Freshman Year. One of my roommates had a Macintosh Plus, a neat little machine that had its own integrated screen with good resolution. Before this I had seen TRS-80s and I had a Commodore 64, good machines but the TRS-80 screen was nothing to brag about and the Commodore 64 was not cute. This was my first experience with a Macintosh (and an Amiga that my other roommate had), first time I used a mouse (although I still would have liked a joystick option for games. Neat thing about the Commodore computers was the Atari-standard joystick ports.) So when it came time to buy a computer I only had two choices, and the cuteness factor won out over dazzling graphics and sound.

My uncle gave me $3000 to buy a computer, which I promptly went over by another $1000 when I bought the IIsi along with a keyboard, monitor, and a modem. Back then the choice was either a IIsi or LC. I chose the IIsi since it was the higher end of the new color machines. The only other machine with built-in color was the IIci, which had come out a few months before. I couldn't get my mind around the concept of buying a card for video output, isn't your computer supposed to come with everything?

To think back on System 6.07, which came with the computer, I can remember fondly my first experience with it. The icons were all 2-d, and changing the label of an icon only changed its outline color. 5 MB RAM was a lot back then, and a good thing too since I don't recall there being a Virtual Memory option. My 80 MB hard drive quickly became filled with shareware that I downloaded incessantly. Good thing I bought the bigger model and not the 3/40 version of the IIsi. The 2400 baud modem could do about 800 Kb an hour, so the practice was to queue a few downloads and let it run overnight, tying up our one phone line.

The IIsi came with a microphone. Then as in now I rarely used the microphone. I think I recorded some alert sounds and some music before I got bored with that feature. But sounds, there were many. I installed Finder Sounds, which had melodic little tunes which played for just about any Finder action, with different ones based on the action. Not like the current OS which just has sound effects, these also had real melodies (although very short). Opening up the About This Macintosh box produced a harp melody. But Finder Sounds wasn't supported after System 6.07, so I resorted to Sound Machine, which could add most sounds to most of the Finder actions and was much more customizable too.

Then as now, there were games that pushed the hardware requirements. Games like Solarian and Diamonds, which required color and a 640 x 480 screen, something you didn't have on an SE/30. Another game I played was Dungeon of Doom, a simple square-based game that was mostly mouse-based. Which reminds me that the IIsi mouse was quite light and comfortable. I remember the SE/30 that Jim had had a bulky mouse that could really get tiring if you clicked it all day.

I didn't have a printer at first, although eventually I bought a StyleWriter. Most of the time I could just print from the campus laser printers, and I did not need to do that many reports and essays anyway. I used the computer to log into the campus system and do my homework. But other than that it wasn't used for much more than games and Internet access (although back then that was mainly for UseNet and ftp, not the Web).

By the time I replaced it with a PowerMac 6100 in April of '93, it was already quite slow, as I had skipped the 68040 machines. I kept it around in the closet for a few years, eventually throwing it away since the only thing it may have been good for was as a NetBSD machine and I didn't want to bother with another OS.