Originally purchased by son, Nate, at Oberlin College for $1,390 in September of 1993, it became my first computer in August of 1995. He needed some traveling money during a stint in the Peace Corps and I needed a computer for a new teaching assignment in Bouse, AZ. A svelte laptop it wasn't, but I lugged it (in its nifty shoulder bag) back and forth to our home in Tempe each weekend for almost two years. Despite it's pokey 16 MHz processor and 9-inch screen, it ran Clarisworks 3.0 just fine and that was all I needed to make classroom materials, keep student records, and create templates used to turn all of my IEPs (I was a Special Education teacher) into computer documents way before the Windows users at my school figured out that this was an advantageous thing to do.

It had MacChess and Tetris Max on it, too. Woo hoo! With a Global Village 14.4 K modem it also got me onto the Internet for the first time. I have to say... that was when I really started to get DEEP into computers. There is something about this little machine that just sort of invites you to sit down and play with it; so when my 80-year-old dad took it upon himself to learn how to send email to his children and grandchildren, he did it on the humble Color Classic. From son, to father, to grandfather: isn't that how things are passed on in the age of computers?

There have been some upgrades and improvements over the years, however. The original motherboard was replaced with one from a Macintosh LC550 which sports a 33MHz processor and is able to handle 36 MB of RAM instead of the maximum 10 MB on a stock Color Classic. This would technically make it a Colour Classic II which was never sold in the USA. It also has a 1.2 GIG hard drive in place of the original 80 MB disk. All of this enables it to not only run Macintosh System 7.6.1 with ease, but also NetBSD on a separate partition. A bleeding-edge UNIX-like operating system on a lowly Color Classic... that's interesting, eh?