1992-1993: My Eternal September

The night before Apple unveiled bigger, more expensive versions of its products last week, I assembled and fired up my family’s first computer, an old and dear machine that made an indelible mark on my life: a Macintosh Performa 600. My parents purchased it 25 years ago this month. (I found the receipt a while ago but don’t know where it is, so I’m unsure of the exact date.)

My series commemorating the silver anniversary of 1992 and all the ways it shaped me fizzled last year. However, 1993 had as much of an impact on me, so I’m reviving and broadening the series. Not only do I intend to write a few posts I shamefully missed last year, I plan to cover the 25th anniversary of the quintessential autumn of my youth.

But back to the ol’ Performa 600.

Released in September 1992 and discontinued in October 1993, the Performa 600 is powered by a 68030 processor running at 32 Mhz (blazing fast!). It has 4 MB of built-in RAM and an 80 MB hard drive. (I swear the hard drive on ours is larger, something like 155 MB, but it’s not much either way. We used a lot of floppy disks because the hard drive is so small.) The Performa 600 features an internal CD-ROM drive, a first for Macs, and is used by Preston Waters in Blank Check.

I remember the day my parents bought it. Both of them were waiting on Grantwood Drive to pick up my sister and I after school—an unusual occurrence since Mom started work in the afternoon. I suspected something special. “We have a surprise for you guys,” Dad told us during the short trip home. Since he addressed both The Loud Sister and I, I suspected a computer and was quite blasé about the prospect. Computers must not have been special to me, or maybe I didn’t see the point of having one at home. As I suspected, there sat the Performa 600 on the big wooden desk in my room, the only place it would fit. Next to it was an HP DeskWriter C.

My family had officially entered the Computer Age.

I was indifferent at first. It was definitely a “meh” moment, and I distinctly remember thinking the monitor was ugly. (It’s not pretty, but it works.) However, I was very curious. I don’t remember what we did first, but after I learned the basics, our Performa 600 blew my tiny mind.

My parents’ purchase of our Performa changed my life. It is my personal version of Eternal September, a term I discovered a few years ago while falling down a wikihole. According to Wikipedia, it describes

a period beginning in September 1993, the month that Internet service provider America Online began offering Usenet access to its many users, overwhelming the existing culture for online forums. ... Since then, the popularity of the Internet has brought on a constant stream of new users and thus, from the point of view of the pre-1993 Usenet users, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

Amazing coincidence, huh? In its own way, September 1993 has never ended for me. Though I used computers at school, most notably the ubiquitous Apple IIe, having a computer at home—in my room, on my desk—changed my life forever. It sparked and enabled my creativity and connected me to the world.

Despite my fondness for the Performa 600, it is not the best computer ever made. It is number two on this list of worst Macs ever. While the computerese about the Level 2 cache and the system bus are beyond my knowledge, I understand this: “BYTE low-level benchmarks show the 20 MHz Mac IIsi outperforms the 32 MHz Performa 600 in five of six CPU tests – and the 16 MHz SE/30 even beat it in one.” Ouch! I will admit that my good ol’ Performa did not perform well at all times. SimCity 2000 was painfully slow even on the fastest speed (cheetah?), and the only version of Vette! I could play was the black and white version, so it had its shortcomings. We doubled the RAM to 8 MB, so that helped for a while, and my mom upgraded the operating system to Mac OS 7.5, but that was likely detrimental performance-wise.

The model’s faults did not bother me, though. The ClarisWorks office suite enabled me to write and draw to my heart’s content, stoking my love for writing and sparking an interest in graphic design. I wrote countless Fear Street knockoffs and the sequel to an alien-invasion story from fourth grade. (I found the disk with many of those files and read a chapter of the sequel last week.) I designed radio station bumper stickers when I was an aspiring disc jockey and fussed with fonts and clip art for book covers. I spent hours building massive cities with SimCity 2000, chased henchmen and (unsuspectingly) learned U.S. geography with Where in the U.S.A. is Carmen Sandiego, and perused subjects on Compton’s Multimedia Encyclopedia. (Compton’s featured a short video clip of a volcano spewing lava, which we proudly used to amaze guests.) I raced through the (black and white) streets of San Francisco in Vette!, gleefully causing traffic jams that I would admire in helicopter view. After we got a modem in 1995, I started surfing the internet and learned everything I ever wanted to know about sex ;-). I mastered hotkeys, was mystified by Myst (I never learned how to play it), and recorded lots of farts and burps with my sister, most of which we needed to delete because they used too much hard drive space.

Fun times!

The Performa 600 served us well. But, as is the case with all technology, we eventually replaced it with something faster, bigger, and better. In September 1998, I bought a Power Macintosh G3 with a 266 Mhz processor, 32 MB of built-in RAM, and a 4 GB hard drive—a huge upgrade. The Performa has been relegated to storage ever since.

I can’t remember the last time I used the Performa before last Monday. It could have been 20 years ago, shortly after I received my G3—which makes it even more impressive that the Performa started up effortlessly, as if I used it the night before. (I can’t say the same about my G3. It turns on but the system won’t boot. I consulted the internet and think I need to reset the PMU and/or buy a new PRAM battery.) The date was way off—August 27, 1956—but everything else seemed in order. The floppy drive did not eject a disk I inserted, so I ejected it manually using a paperclip. The CD-ROM drive worked, so I attempted to play SimCity 2000 (the scenario took forever to load) and sped through San Francisco in a Corvette, albeit in black and white. It was a welcome blast from the past, a joyous reunion that rekindled the thrill and passion I felt when I was a kid, when my life was changed forever.

However, I realized how much it sucks using a mouse with one button.