The future of the Mac is bright-but don't forget the pains of the past

Old computers make you appreciate what we have today.

- JASON SNELL

When I started working for MacUser magazine in W 1993, I was assigned to a gray cubicle with an old Mac Ilci (fave.co/3vrQs6U) inside. (The summer intern didn't get the latest and greatest.) I don't know how that was nearly 30 years ago, but here we are.

Over the last few years, I've spent a little time buying a few old Mac models and getting them up to speed. Within five feet of me as I write this are a working G4 Cube, G4 iMac, Mac Plus, PowerBook 170, and even a Power Computing Mac clone.

As much as using old computers can be a fun nostalgia trip, it also makes me appreciate what we have today all the more. You remember the good times, but forget the bad! As someone who recently had to figure out how to boot a SCSI drive, let me tell you how good we've got it.

Oh, the horror of SCSI. The horror.

HOT PLUGGING

A decade or more ago, I got an email from someone I knew saying that he had an old SCSI drive, and did I want it? (For those of you who don't know what SCSI is, get off my lawn. Pronounced "scuzzy," it was the high-speed peripheral connection standard for the Mac for most of its first decade, used primarily for hard drives but also by scanners and all sorts of high-end hardware.) I apparently agreed, thinking I might get around to attaching it to an old Mac Plus I had lying around my house. Since the person who sent it to me no longer had a Mac with a SCSI port, he asked me to send him any stray files that I found on it.

A decade passes, and I'm finally spending some time getting a couple of old Macs working when I find that SCSI drive, which I have never connected to anything. So I set about trying to see if I could figure out what was on it. And this is when I am reminded of the horror of SCSI, and how happy we all were to see its back when the iMac brought USB onto the scene in 1998.