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Tag: Macintosh LC

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The teacher that oversaw the middle school computer lab gave me a fitting nickname: MacDaddy.

If anything, my nickname was inspired by Kris Kross, not by any definition you might find today by inadvertently including a space.

He even came up with a cool little ditty to go along with it: "I want to be a MacDaddy, MacDaddy." Unlike other nicknames I was given by classmates, I wore this nickname proudly.

I guess I still am a MacDaddy, because there's a good chance I can help you with your questions about the Mac.... I have to admit, though, that I have not been a continuous Mac user since middle school.

My parents bought a PC the summer before I started 9th grade. A Mac was simply not in the budget... But since the school system started switching to PCs while I was in high school, perhaps this was for the best.

I also continued to use a PC while in college. It would have been otherwise difficult to run the required software on a Mac.

Since the Intel transition didn't happen until several years after I graduated college, the only option at the time would have been to emulate x86 on PowerPC... a slow proposition, indeed.

But within six months of graduating college, I was back to being a Mac user. And I'm glad to say that, unlike my middle school days of using a Macintosh LC running System 7, the current macOS is a powerful and stable operating system.

And Catalina is on its way... The MacDaddy'll make you jump, jump. Uh huh, uh huh.

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In middle school, we had a computer lab of Macintosh LC computers, and a teacher that knew how to keep the lab running smoothly. Warranty issues, though, had to go through an Apple Authorized Service Provider.

I remember one of my classmates having an issue on the LC they were using. I don't remember what the issue was, only that it must have been a warranty issue.

A few days later, that LC was gone from the lab. Our teacher commented on the repair status: the technician said the computer needed a "Function Level Reset".

In the pause between his two sentences, I'm already thinking that sounded like a made-up repair.

Sure enough, our teacher continued commenting that he has never heard of a "Function Level Reset".

To this day, I've still never heard of a "Function Level Reset" in the context of computer repair. (I even checked the Macintosh LC service manual, it's not in there.) All I've been able to figure is that this technician came up with a fancy name for "software restore"...

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Students in the U.S. probably take it for granted that there are computers in each classroom, if not a computing device assigned to each student. That wasn’t always the case.

I attended a different elementary school in the fifth grade, so I am unsure if some district-wide change happened over the summer, or if it had more to do with the school and/or class I was in. Nevertheless, on the first day of fifth grade, I walked into class and saw them: not one or two, but three computers IN the back of the classroom!

The computers in our classroom were an Apple IIe, an Apple IIgs, and a Macintosh LC. They were arranged as if someone purposefully put them in chronological order.

I was immediately drawn to the Macintosh, though I'm not sure why. Perhaps because it was the newest of the three. Perhaps because the fancy GUI made it look hi-tech.

Perhaps it was just because you didn't need a floppy to run the installed software, which meant the floppy drive couldn't make loud, evil grinding noises.

I was also drawn to the Apple IIgs, because it was familiar and, like the LC, had a color monitor.

The Apple IIe wasn't so attractive. It looked old. It had a monochrome screen. It looked like it could do less than the Apple IIgs. But it was easier to get time to use it. Perhaps that's because all of the aforementioned reasons made it less attractive to most everyone else.

Yes, I realize that an Apple IIgs is more capable than an Apple IIe. But the school system had not licensed software capable of using its advanced features, at least not for the elementary school classroom.

But after one fortuitous trip to the public library, my opinions on the three computers in my classroom changed...