The Mac LC was a nice computer. I immediately noticed that the graphics were much better than they were on a Windows machine. It had a cool, subdued feel to it that I associated with the interior of a Mercedes luxury sedan. Like a Mercedes, I couldn't work on the Mac by myself. I'd have to take it into the shop if I wanted to upgrade the memory or replace hardware. My Gateway was built like a big, heavy, American car. There was plenty of room inside the case to work on it: add cards, memory, or do upgrades. Compared to the Mac OS, the Windows interface had a gaudy, muscle-car-influenced feel to it: bright, enamel colors, no need for subtlety. I filled my Japanese Mac with English software--MS Office installed via 30-something floppies--and went to work.
It wasn't the Japanese operating system that detoured my first Mac experience; it was lack of memory. Certain programs, like Photoshop, demanded more memory than others. Memory allocations were had to be set manually and I soon realized I didn't have enough. I turned to a software solution, Ram Doubler. It worked by compressing RAM in memory and by using the hard drive to store memory. It helped a little. Back then I was blissfully unaware of the benefits of extra RAM, and it's power to improve performance and solve niggling problems. The Mac Mini I now use at my wife's discretion, has 512 MB. Sometimes when using iPhoto or iMovie, the beach ball of limbo appears and I know that the world would be better if only I'd installed a gig of ram.
My memory woes were exacerbated by conflicts caused by extensions and control panels. Conflict Catcher became my utility of choice. I developed 3 or 4 different sets of extensions that I would load at startup depending on what software I would run on my Mac. I had a standard set, one for Photoshop, one for playing multimedia. I yearned to upgrade to a Quadra or one of the Mac clones, but I didn't have the money. The school installed a Windows network. There was enough money in my budget to buy computer parts and build a computer around a Pentium MMX cpu. I gave the LC to my students and went back to using Windows. My feelings at that time were that Macs had gotten too expensive, that I could get more bang per buck by building and upgrading a computer. Things got better when overclocking entered the equation. I kept track of what was happening in the world of Apple, but didn't think I'd be purchasing an Apple computer anytime soon.
