My first Mac was an Atari
Some kind words from Jon made me think back to the first time I crossed over to the Mac, and put me in a nostalgic mood. I got to thinking about what I thought was my first Mac: a Mac SE that Shawn lent me. I brought that Mac with me to Hyannis, where I spent most of the summer unemployed. I did two things on that Mac: 1) played Might and Magic and 2) developed a HyperCard version of HeadCheck, a zine I used to publish. But for the first time, I remembered that it wasn't my first Mac.
My first Mac was actually an Atari Mega ST owned by Not Art. I was living with the Not Art folks at their Cleveland Street abode, pulling my weight occasionally by helping out with computer stuff. More often than not, I'd call Josh to help out with the problems. He had convinced Not Art to go with an Atari-based desktop publishing system, and when they hit the wall with that, he told them it was a simple matter of picking up a Spectre GCR. As was usually the case in computer matters, Josh was right.
This freaky little device plugged into the expansion port and contained little bits of hardware and not-so-hardware, including Apple ROMS. All you had to do was add a copy of the Mac System, and you had a Mac that could run good things like PageMaker. I can't remember if it could use the Atari printer, but probably not. The Atari laser printer was pretty brainless: all the smarts were in the computer itself. I think we had to print to a file, reboot into TOS/GEM, and print from the Atari. But it all worked. And it was my first Mac.
9:07:00 AM 
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