Remembering My Story of Owning a Macintosh LC — 1991-1992
The New Form Factor.
The Macintosh LC came into my life after becoming a graduate computer science student before starting my master’s degree in the same field. This Macintosh was part of one of the biggest launches from Apple with the introduction of the Macintosh IIsi and the Macintosh Classic1. It was an attempt by Apple to increase its market share by bringing lower-cost versions of the Macintosh Ilci. With these Macs came a new keyboard and mouse design.
The Macintosh LC was a significant upgrade for me: it came with a bigger and grey-scale monitor, where its size matched perfectly the computer case, which was somewhat acting as the monitor stand. I liked this combination. The monitor had a whopping 16 shades of grey, which could be upgraded to 256 by the addition of graphic memory (from 256K to 512K) in the Macintosh LC, which I did. I remember adding more memory to it to bring it to its max at 10 MB. How much did I pay for that? Can’t remember. What was the size of its internal hard drive? Probably 40 MB. I couldn’t afford a colour monitor, and I felt that grey-scale was already a big jump, keeping the original Mac spirit with a black & white display. The larger resolution display (640 x 480) provided a significant upgrade for the type of work I was doing, which mainly consisted of writing my master thesis.
Besides doing my master’s degree, I worked as an assembly and C programming language teacher for undergraduate students. I had to prepare for these classes and was working remotely from my student dorm room using a “fast” 14400 USRobotics modem with an emulation terminal application called Zterm. It was the future. For my thesis redaction, managing my bibliography was done using EndNote, an application surprisingly still available today. Strangely enough, I cannot remember which word-processing application I was using at the time. Was it Microsoft Word or MacWrite? I can’t remember. I remember losing some critical files in MacWrite in the past, and I couldn’t afford to lose any data. So it was probably Microsoft Word. Sadly, even after giving many thoughts, I can’t remember how I got rid of this machine and upgraded to the next at the end of my master’s degree. Nonetheless, all in all, I have great memories of the Macintosh LC and the role it played in my university years.
This article is part of the following series: Remembering The Story Behind Every Apple Computers I Ever Owned – Numeric Citizen Blog.
Links
- The Macintosh LC was the first of a series of Macintosh LC models that came after. I don’t remember liking the “LC” moniker. ↩
