How many Mac geeks out there had a IIvi? (Quick show of hands, some nervous giggling in the peanut gallery). The Apple IIvi was a proud 16mhz 6830 machine. I had it ramped up with 32 mb of RAM and it could chug all day trying to get through one Photoshop filter operation.
The most memorable aspect of the machine was that it was completely obsolete the day it was manufactured. Slow, boxy and beige, the IIvi was one of the more unloved of the highly sexy Mac breed that has gone down the history hole with numerous Performas, IIfx’s and other machines remembered only in the collective unconscious of MacLand.
My remembrance of the IIvi only encompasses two things. One was the time I had tweaked the operating system, probably OS 7.0 or 7.1, with an improbable collection of hacks, extensions and Finder add-ons that created the tour de force that was my user experience. The other was the growing pile of floppy disks I used to back it up.
I was astounded at the increased productivity, the ease of use, and the incredible productivity I experienced from my computer. No, really! No joke. It was pretty cool for the time. Most it was shortcuts that I could use in the Finder dialog boxes to get places that otherwise I would have to traverse numerous directories.
Then came the Black Day. My OS dropped the bomb on itself and a clean install was the only alternative. In those barbaric days of yore, my backup was up to 40 floppy disks and going through that mess to retrieve my system was inconceivable.
It was a sad day because I had grown attached to the interface. It had become like an extension of my mind adding ease, comfort and the speed of familiarity to my Finder interaction. I never did recreate the same set of tweaks. If my IIvi OS had been sentient, it was like turning out the lights on a friend.
Still makes me tear up a bit. No really!
Thankfully those days are long past. The OS is now hardened against the intrusion of lowly extensions that crash the memory space of the OS kernel. OS X is highly resistant to crashes unlike its predecessor, the cooperative multiitasking OS 9. My first foray with tweaking the interface still reminds me that just because something is good, it can always be a little bit better.
Hmmm….did I install that latest Finder add-on yet?
