🚀 go-pugleaf

I dunno why I'm doing this, but I kind of felt it needed to be said
publicly :-)

After nearly 4 years continuous use, initially as a IIci 4/80 but mostly as
a Q700 20/1.6Gb I am about to retire the Mac that has been the mainstay of
the bureau businesses I've been involved with during this time, as I'm
switching careers shortly.

It's been called upon to handle >150Mb PhotoShop files, >300Mb single page
PostScript files (software RIPing), all manner of arcane procedures and
weird software.

It's had scanners, printers, film recorders, external fixed disks and
removable devices of dubious parentage thrust upon its SCSI port with
little consideration for its feelings. For nearly 2 years its SCSI chain
was over 25 feet long.

It's beta tested some horrifying stuff, being a host for dye sublimation,
color management and CD-Recordable technology experiments.

It's run System software from versions 6.04 up to 7.5 (including a brief
two day period when it was forced to run a Kanji version to cope with a
Japanese PageMaker file), been tinkered with by maverick INITs, repelled a
virus or two and been connected to the world's largest collection of
networked computers via modems that'd send grown techies cuckoo in
configuring. It's seen images from Jupiter via its serial port before the
vast majority of the world (last year, SL9 comet collision, grabbing the
new NASA pics as soon as they were publicly released).

It's been struck by lightning (telephone pole 20 yards away while online to
AppleLink), had Coca Cola poured into its keyboard by careless visitors,
survived a 40 a day habit straight into its floppy drive and had alpha
release NuBus cards from its womb untimely rip'd.

It's been the most reliable machine I've ever used.

Sure, it's had problems along the way (well do I remember that SpeedDisk
1.x incident with a newly loaded System 7.0), but the low points have been
few in number and mostly my fault.

So in these last two days before it gets to leave the office permanently,
to have its DEC DSP3160S reformatted and a clean install of the System
software applied to soothe its brow - without all those nasty but necessary
INITs - I'd just like to take this chance to say publicly to my Quadra 700
(n�e IIci) "Calvin & Hobbes", AppleColor 13" RGB, Apple Extended Keyboard
and Apple mouse - "Thanks, it's been a pleasure to use you".

Here's to a long and happy retirement, lazily playing with screen
resolution PhotoShop files and with acres of free, optimised disk space to
romp in.

And to think I was worried when it was first upgraded to a Quadra, because
there was little software around that could be used with its caches
enabled.....


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